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Feb 5, 2025 | 
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 31, 2025 | 
spacing.ca | Brigitte Pellerin |Trent Weston
Brigitte Pellerin is a writer and newspaper columnist living in Ottawa. This memoir introduces the new issue of Spacing focused on Yonge Street, available shortly at the Spacing Store and other outlets, and in the mail to subscribers. No way was I going to take the subway. The train from Montreal spat me out at Union Station on a beautiful summer afternoon in 1998. It was my first visit to Toronto. I was going to walk.
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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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Nov 21, 2024 | 
spacing.ca | Peter MacCallum |Trent Weston |John Lorinc
As an architectural photographer, I am always keen to record surviving fragments of older streetscapes in areas of downtown Toronto that have been subject to intensive redevelopment. From experience, I know that this type of documentation can serve as a mnemonic device, reinforcing viewers’ personal experiences of the city. I photographed the commercial block at 648-656 Spadina in October 2020 expressly to show its unusual, and partially accidental massing of architectural forms.
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Nov 18, 2024 | 
spacing.ca | Cheryl Thompson |Trent Weston
Excerpted with permission from Canada and the Blackface Atlantic, published in April 2025 by Wilfrid Laurier Press. Thompson, a Toronto Metropolitan University associate professor in Performance and a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair, specializes in 19th century Black history, visual and performance culture. Canada and the Blackface Atlantic traces the rise of Canadian blackface, including the country’s first stages.
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Oct 1, 2024 | 
spacing.ca | Peter MacCallum |Jesse Carliner |Tys Klumpenhouwer |Trent Weston
In the spring of 1984, the social historian and curator Rosemary Donegan commissioned me to take contemporary architectural photos and panoramic views of Spadina Avenue for a planned exhibition. The exhibition, Spadina Avenue: A Photohistory took place later that year at A Space, an artist-run gallery located at 204 Spadina – an appropriate venue for an up to the moment account of the street’s historical evolution. A book based on the exhibition, entitled Spadina Avenue, was published in 1985.
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Sep 3, 2024 | 
spacing.ca | Trent Weston |John Lorinc
We discovered new avenues of the city we would have never found unless we had a reason to be there. Many places were sitting right under my nose, not far at all from my apartment, that I never would have known existed. Now, thanks to First Story, we had a reason to explore and to learn. And you could, too. First Story, an app that provides information about the Indigenous history of Toronto locations, gave us a destination, and that’s often all it takes to start exploring – an end.
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Aug 27, 2024 | 
spacing.ca | Dominique Russell |Trent Weston |Peter MacCallum |John Lorinc
Like a lot of Kensington residents, when I walk by the metal hoarding around the collapsed buildings at 606-614 Dundas West, I feel a mixture of grief and rage. The sight of the roof torn off, the disconcerting intimacy of the view into our neighbours’ homes, the boarded up corner store where I used to grab milk … it all breaks my heart, and I can only imagine what it means for my neighbours who have lost their homes and their belongings.
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
spacing.ca | Trent Weston |Lorraine Johnson |Ian Darragh
When Douglas Counter heads out the front door of his Etobicoke home to appreciate the day’s new blooms, he doesn’t have to go far. The flowers are waiting for him right in his yard, including the city-owned boulevard beside the road. Like many in Etobicoke, his boulevard is a drainage ditch. But in his, native wildflowers, sedges, and grasses have replaced the traditional sloped turf lawn. They’re not there by happenstance.
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Jul 25, 2024 | 
spacing.ca | Trent Weston |Nathan Abraha |John Lorinc
This isn’t your typical house slated for demolition. The lawn isn’t wildly overgrown, and the structure isn’t dilapidated. Instead, 91 Barton Ave. is bustling with activity, a sense of rebirth fills the air, and with it the promise of creative freedom . It’s not the situation that is typically found when a changing of the guard takes place – when old homes become new ones.
