This weekend was Jane’s Walk weekend. Jane’s walks are free walking tours led by locals, on the first weekend of May each year. They are meant to celebrate the legacy of Jane Jacobs, the famed urbanist writer who lived in Toronto for 38 years. I took part in one on Saturday and lead my own on Sunday where a group […]
Planners in Toronto are going to have an interesting May. Council is debating whether to approve a new casino on the 21st and will also likely debate revenue tools to fund 50 years of transit expansion. While both important issues are being debated, the most significant change in Toronto’s planning system since amalgamation will quietly […]
One of the best things to happen to cities and societies in the last 20 years is the dramatic decline of crime. Canada has reported one of the lowest crime rates since the 1970s. New York City, North America’s second largest city, reported the lowest homicide rate since police began tracking in 1963. The decline […]
In my last post I explored the idea that “apartments are just as lucrative in the US as Canada, but the US did not experience the same kind of suburban apartment boom.” In trying to understand why, I pointed to planning culture and the nature of each countries development industry. One area I didn’t explore was the difference […]
Doug Saunders wrote about the uniquely Canadian phenomena, in North America at least, of having so many people live in suburban apartment buildings: Forget the U.S.-generated image of suburban lawns versus downtown density: We’re a nation of peri-urban apartment dwellers. Ottawa has more apartment buildings than Dallas, and most are midtown; Edmonton has more than Boston. Toronto’s […]
Do you live in the slurbs? Work in an Exit Ramp Economy? These is are only a few of the concepts identified by Taylor and Lang in a list published in the The Shock Of The New: 100 concepts describing recent urban change. It is a pretty amazing list. I’ve provided the 50 concepts below that […]
As a follow up to the previous post, Toronto did have expressway plans in the 1950s as ambitious as most American cities, it just didn’t implement them. Get Moving Toronto has a good overview of the various plans, as does Transit Toronto. The most famous unbuilt expressway is the Spadina Expressway, which was partially built. […]
This week, Statistics Canada announced that Toronto’s population is 2,791,140, which also happens to be about 84,000 more than the City of Chicago’s population. This now makes the City of Toronto the fourth largest municipal government in North America. However, as can be seen in the chart below, Toronto has not so much overtaken Chicago, rather Chicago has […]
Planetzine is reporting that Tallinn’s experiment with free public transit is proving to be a success. The City of Tallinn decided to make transit free to reduce the number of cars in the centre. Council examined imposing a congestion charge or building more roads, however it was decided that making transit free would benefit the […]
Stipo, an Amsterdam based team of urban designers and planners, have released a book “The City at Eye Level: Lessons for Street Plinths.” The book is completely free and available online. I’ll be honest when I first took a look at it I had no idea what a “plinth” was. I now know it means ”the base or socle upon […]
