Toronto's urban street furniture collection of late has been messily schizophrenic and oft-criticized, but final prototypes from the Coordinated Street Furniture Program have just been unveiled, with installation slated for 2009. The furniture plan involved a private Request For Proposals (RFP) from three advertising conglomerates, who pitched their designs last year in the hopes of securing the lucrative 20-year monopoly with the City of Toronto. The covenant was awarded to Astral Media, much to......

One year ago today, City Council's Executive Committee approved [PDF] the awarding of the street furniture contract—for the purposes of designing, building, owning, and maintaining bus shelters, garbage bins, ad pillars, and more for a period of twenty years in exchange for advertising rights—to Astral Media Outdoor, despite the fact that the company had absolutely no experience with "street furniture" and maintains dozens of illegal billboards in defiance of City Council.......

Last week, we asked Torontoist readers to submit their ideas for a Stephen King-esque plot, for a chance to win tickets to King's first public appearance in Canada ever (Friday night!), as well as a whole pile of books. Here are the winning plots. Grand Prize Winner! Mr. Jingles (of The Green Mile) returns as a zombie mouse to terrorize the inmates of E Block at Cold Mountain Penitentiary.—CHRISTOPHER MCGREGOR Runners-Up The letters in......

The Toronto Public Space Committee last night Art Attacked every single Astral pillar in the city. Photos are here and here, with more to come. The revulsion with which Torontonians responded to last week's sudden advertising invasion got us wondering: If that's how the public reacted to forty street-level ad structures in place for two days, how will people feel about the one hundred twenty new "info pillars" that will be in place for......

Despite loud public complaints, Toronto City Council has begrudgingly approved Astral Media's street furniture bid with a few conditions: reduce the total amount of per square foot advertising, guarantee that all billboards follow city bylaws, estimate how much energy will be used illuminating advertisements, and ensure there is no loophole in the contract which would allow Astral to screw the city over. The council was more enthusiastic about endorsing a $159.5 million taxpayer-financed office......

After evaluating the privately-contracted submissions from the City of Toronto's Co-ordinated Street Furniture Program, the design jury has awarded the contract to Astral Media Outdoor. Astral gained some notorious bad press recently when they threatened to sue IllegalSigns.ca and proprietor Rami Tabello for accusations that the advertising behemoth is refusing to remove illegally-retained billboards around the city. This also upsets the Toronto Public Space Committee, who say that the street furniture program will actually......

Last summer, Clear Channel Outdoor threatened to sue the Toronto Public Space Committee; last week Astral Media Outdoor threatened to sue Rami Tabello and his IllegalSigns.ca. That left one bidder for the "street furniture" contract with a relatively fuck-up-free slate. "Some people are blessed with intelligence; some people are blessed with good looks; others, with personality," Tabello wrote on Wednesday. "Then there's Nick Arakgi of CBS Outdoor. He's blessed with having competitors that are......

In yet another show of contempt for the residents of Toronto, Transportation Services and "Clean and Beautiful City" staff have opted to put the models of the City’s proposed street furniture on display to the public for one day only; they will be visible in the City Hall rotunda from 8:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. tomorrow, Wednesday, April 4. This is a project that will determine the look and feel of all of Toronto......

Yesterday the City of Toronto unveiled the designs submitted for the "Coordinated Street Furniture Program," its plan to grant a billboard company a twenty-year monopoly on providing and maintaining bus shelters, garbage bins, benches, and other items for Toronto’s sidewalks. The "renderings" have been posted on the City website as epic PDFs, but our friend Joe Clark has also extracted the images from the PDFs and posted them to his Flickr account for convenient......

Hundreds marched around Downtown Toronto for the Stop the Violence walk on Sunday but this weekend, around Toronto, there was a different story. Police reported that three people were shot: one of them was a 13-year old boy who walked into Etobicoke General Hospital with a gunshot wound to the abdomen. The Star asks why Ontario schoolboards aren't hiring teachers from new immigrant communities? They argue that there might be a hidden apartheid that blindsides......

Apparently, the INFOTOGO pillars that are strewn across our city are getting a lot of... positive... attention. The 'first-ever interactive, stylized street-level furniture' has won a prestigious international award from The Society for Environmental Graphic Design. the Society of Environmental Graphic Designers. For those who are not in the know, "Environmental Graphic Design embraces many design disciplines including graphic, architectural, interior, landscape, and industrial design, all concerned with the visual aspects of wayfinding, communicating......

The Toronto Sun and Torontoist agree on something. That Toronto Unlimited Logo totally bites. It bites so much that a giant room of monkeys working in front of iMacs would eventually design a better logo. Instead of going this experimental route billboard company Astral Media teamed up with OCAD advertising students to come up with alternative slogans for the city. The winner was "Metropolitan Flavour" and an image of a giant ice cream cone that......