toronto

Toronto, as in Portland?

Flooding the job market with graduates without helping steer them to opportunities is no recipe for success. In and of itself, retaining talent fixes nothing. The Talent Dividend is a boondoggle.[read more]

urban forestry

Toronto has one of the most ambitious urban forestry plans in North America, having set a goal of increasing the overall tree canopy from 17 percent to 40 percent.[read more]

A few weeks ago, non-profit American Forests released their list of the 10 Best Cities for Urban Forests.[read more]

Yonge Street - which starts in downtown Toronto, cuts across suburban municipalities, rural areas (including Ontario's Greenbelt conservation area) to end up in Barrie, Ontario - had been named the longest street in the world by Guiness. The length of Yonge Street tells the story of urban growth and change, the move from density to sprawl over the post-WWII period, and back again.[read more]

Toronto's suburbs are a textbook case of sprawl, a vast expanse of industrial parks, generic box stores and strip malls, and bland subdivisions with identical-looking tract homes. The landscape is spread out and car dependent, with imposing multi-lane thoroughfares that discourage walking.[read more]

In some cities, these mall and strip mall districts are being re-developed into walkable downtown-like neighborhoods, with parking lots replaced by walkable and bike-able street-scapes with more aesthetically pleasing environments. These are worthy projects. However, they involve a lot of investment of time and attention and, while providing much needed down-towns and community centres, still leave out the majority of sprawling city-scapes.[read more]

The many organizers of the new Green Line international design competition seek visionary proposals from landscape architects, architects, designers, planners, artists that will revamp the public green space and bicycle and pedestrian access of Toronto’s 3-mile-long transmission line corridor (a.k.a. hydro corridor). The goal is to “...[read more]

Photo by joiseyshowaa via Flickr

A feature of Creative Class migration is the agglomeration of talent in a few cities... High rent be damned. You must live in New York City or even Austin, Texas.[read more]

Man, those Torontonians! They continue to impress us with their aggressive green infrastructure policies. Back in January of 2010, Toronto became the first North American city to make installing green roofs on new commercial, institutional, and multifamily residential developments compulsory – now that requirements will apply to...[read more]

  In January of 2010, Toronto became the first city in North America to require the installation of green roofs on new commercial, institutional, and multifamily residential developments across the city.  Next week, the requirement will expand to apply to new industrial development as well.Simply put, a “green roof” is a...[read more]

Recently browsing through the website of Canadian magazine The Walrus, I cam upon this article entitled How Toronto Lost Its Groove by John Lorinc. It touches on many of the themes I discussed in my Toronto case study, in particular the city's lack of vision towards its future structure and the lack of investment in public transit. Mr....[read more]

As the needs of cities change, older buildings can find themselves a bit redundant. The challenge for urban areas is to find a new purpose for these buildings, one which is historically respectful but at the same time creates a space that meets the modern needs of a city. This is exactly what has happened in Toronto, where a former...[read more]