The province has ordered the City of Toronto to stop stonewalling in the face of freedom of information requests about allegedly illegal billboards. IllegalSigns.ca—"our hobby is destroying illegal billboards through the rule of law"—submitted a series of requests asking the City to release information about certain billboards. The City's Corporate Access and Privacy Unit balked. After receiving over 600 requests from the group in 2006—12% of all requests filed in the City—and after processing......

With Rogers' plan to move Citytv, OMNI Television, and the Fan 590 to the southeast corner of Dundas Square, those familiar with the current streetfront studios on Queen Street have wondered if the former Olympic Spirit building will be opened up in a similar way. Though merely an preliminary concept rendering, Rogers and Quadrangle Architects seem to have grand designs for the space, currently dubbed Rogers Television City, as evident in this image supplementing......

In this occasional feature, two Torontoist staffers face off to debate an issue that is important to our city. We invite our readers to join in the debate in the comments section after the post. Signs, signs, everywhere signs. The beginning of the year marked the first anniversary of a controversial and radical ban of all nearly outdoor advertising in São Paulo, Brazil. While Toronto's advertising problems are certainly not as serious as São Paulo's,......

From mid-September through year-end, all City Community Centres will be closed on Mondays. Skating rinks won't open until January. Fewer potholes will be repaired. Snow won't be cleared unless there is at least 15 cm of it (the current minimum is 8 cm). New materials from Public Health will only be available in English. Welcome to the new Toronto, where you get what you (and the provincial and federal governments) pay for—or won't get what......

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......

Howard Moscoe proposes a licensing fee or tax on temporary downtown parking lots with the revenue directed towards building more commuter parking lots at public transit hubs. Moscoe argues that this would induce more people to take transit and encourage temporary lots to be redeveloped more quickly. Iranian refugee Zahra Kamalfar and her two children arrived in Vancouver yesterday after spending 10 months stuck in an airport terminal in Moscow. Everything you ever wanted......

Somewhere, Dave Meslin is weeping with joy. Today marks the launch of Rami Tabello's IllegalSigns.ca: an incredibly ambitious project that, through its comprehensive analysis of billboard advertising in Toronto, ties together a number of the loose ends of the broader public space movement. What Tabello has found – and has the hard evidence to back up – is that "half the billboards in Toronto are illegal." They have "thus far identified 350 illegal billboards,"......