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1 week ago | 
spacing.ca | John Lorinc |Peter MacCallum
There’s nothing even the least bit surprising about the fact that cities, or urban affairs more generally, have had so little play in the federal election. Yes, all three major parties talk about housing and housing affordability. Both the Conservative and the Liberals have unveiled crime agendas.
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3 weeks ago | 
spacing.ca | John Lorinc |Peter MacCallum |Ian Darragh
Though it seems like an eternity ago, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives circa 2023 and 2024 desperately wanted this election to be about the ruinous cost of housing (and Justin Trudeau, of course). Poilievre starred in numerous extended and compelling effective videos — e.g., “Housing hell: how we got there and how we get out”‘ — dramatizing the myriad ways in which the housing approvals system had gone off the rails.
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4 weeks ago | 
spacing.ca | Peter MacCallum |John Lorinc |Jessie Ye
Canada is acting quickly to reposition our trade economy to become more resilient, diverse and self-reliant. We need a similar re-calibration of Canada’s housing system to address our deepening affordability problem. Housing is foundational for a strong Canada, and we must focus on housing that is more affordable, cost-effective to construct, energy efficient and climate resilient. We can start by growing Canada’s non-profit housing sector.
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1 month ago | 
spacing.ca | Albert Koehl |John Lorinc |Dylan Reid |Peter MacCallum
It’s a good time to re-think our imports from the U.S., but not just because of tariffs. We can certainly do without the tactics increasingly common in politics and exploited by Donald Trump: bullying adversaries; making outrageous claims; scapegoating the vulnerable; dismissing research as fake news, and using the courts to intimidate rivals.
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1 month ago | 
spacing.ca | John Lorinc |Shiri Yeung |Peter MacCallum
As part of a set of four posts with Spacing, Artmap.ca / AccessArt is sharing sixteen short videos that feature some of our favourite public art pieces in the Toronto and Hamilton area. The creators describe their videos as a reflection of their love of public art and desire for more people to enjoy it. The videos were created in collaboration with Deaf / Disabled and Neurodivergent Artist-Researchers after a consultation and testing process with experts.
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2 months ago | 
spacing.ca | Peter MacCallum |John Lorinc
Once they had been declared functionally obsolete, most of the monumental industrial structures that figured on the skylines of North American cities throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were promptly demolished, with no consideration being given to their historical significance. This was certainly the fate of thousands of manufactured gas plants that had distributed “town gas” to urban customers in North America between 1816 and the mid-1960s.
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2 months ago | 
spacing.ca | Dylan Reid |Peter MacCallum |John Lorinc |Trent Weston
Yonge street is very much the spine of Toronto. The city has grown up along and from it, with successive arterial roads radiating outwards like ribs. It’s a line that both divides the city, and its streets, into east and west – marking the beginning of address numbering in each direction – and that ties the city together.
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
spacing.ca | Steven Evans |Sarah B. Hood |Peter MacCallum |Ian Darragh
Like Toronto’s winding ravine system, the Toronto waterfront is a significant and defining geographical feature. Before the arrival of Europeans, Indigenous peoples flourished on the land that would much later become the City of Toronto.
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Jan 16, 2025 | 
spacing.ca | Anna Artyushina |Trent Weston |Dylan Reid |Peter MacCallum
Digital data is an important component of transportation management, used by City officials both as a planning tool and to measure the success of implemented policies. Yet, as the case of Toronto indicates, no amount of data can fix a policy designed to exclude from transportation governance those who don’t drive. In recent months, Toronto has made international headlines as the battleground for competing policies around cycling infrastructure.
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Jan 10, 2025 | 
spacing.ca | Michel Nayrouz |Ian Darragh |Dylan Reid |Peter MacCallum
Whether it is the scouring of Ontario Place or the war against bikers, it seems the Ford government is getting away with just about everything it sets out to do, and that is no coincidence. In 2023, the Ontario government and the City of Toronto trumpeted an intergovernmental effort, dubbed the New Deal, and the enabling legislation, Bill 154, which received Royal Assent just over a year ago.
