The Great Resegregation in housing www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/r...

Many of our land use / building codes are rooted in exclusion + prejudice, even if they are facially anodyne and widely accepted as common sense today Case in point: early 1900 fire safety reforms were primarily designed to ⬆️ the cost of tenements / MF apts (old and new) to reduce immigration

Dense apartment buildings were a key ingredient of Toronto urban *and* suburban affordability. Today, 1 million people live in more than 2,000 mid-century towers throughout the Greater Toronto Area, more than any other city in North America. Toronto is unique for this reason.

For better or worse, architecture media (like housing photography) shape our understanding of shelter—of who gets it and who doesn’t, how space and aesthetics figure, and why wealth and power matter.

Assembled in 17 days using panelized mass timber, sourced from Ontario. Shaped around the church to create a courtyard at the back. Twenty-five new homes.

"Although the homes are configured as compact micro-units, the lack of double-loaded interior corridors allows every suite to be a dual aspect unit — a rarity, unfortunately, for North American apartments — with natural light coming in from two sides."

check out our recent project mapping street space allocation in Toronto we find that more than 80% of transportation infrastructure in Toronto is designed for cars, far more than how people actually travel w/ @lanrickbennett.bsky.social & Mia Wang schoolofcities.github.io/who-are-stre...

Forget the puns: public toilets matter. Toronto is getting them wrong. The city could miss a huge opportunity to boost its own design culture. www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic...

. @novakovicto.bsky.social rounds up the Aga Khan Awards: www.azuremagazine.com/article/the-...

Dally in the Alley in #Detroit was awesome! A sea of people of all ages, colors, genders. So much diversity and creativity! Loved it. Detroit is wonderful. Don’t let ANYONE tell you any different.

This is possible. Also Rail Deck, in retrospect, was vaporware and a distraction from the actual public works that the city should’ve been building in boom times.

Funnily enough this class (which I took on a lark) got me into urbanism. For the final paper I wrote about establishing a Canadian ministry of cities, after reading a @brenttoderian.bsky.social editorial on the issue. Doing research, I got into @urbantoronto.bsky.social, which became my first job!

I was never a big hockey fan, but I had Ken Dryden as a professor at McGill in Canadian Studies. We talked about citizenship and patriotism, and what all of that means. One day, I put up my hand in class. I told him I was Canadian, voted in every election, and considered myself civically engaged. 1/

Such a responsible + humble critique: @hawthorne.bsky.social engages with the V&A Storehouse, which has won nearly universally glowing reviews from architecture critics, by engaging with *curators'* reservations — a great example of the value of *rdg outside your immediate field*! :)

Honoured to share the stage with Toronto's hottest urbanist tonight.

Tonight: Tony Price aka MAXIMUM EXPOSURE is throwing a little listening party in celebration of his sonic eulogy for the Ontario Science Centre. Yours truly will be in conversation with people far more qualified and interesting to talk about the space’s history and future(s).

Fascinated to learn (via Richard Harris, "Unplanned Suburbs") that Jewish people were the largest non-British-Isles-origin population in Toronto in the first half of the 20th century (about 7%).

“Just outside the Bosnian town of Gradačac, the House for Five Women is immediately distinguished by the vividly textured patchwork of bold colours that adorns its second-storey facade,” writes @novakovicto.bsky.social.

Architecture critics “increasingly write about places we never experience, and I wonder how much good it does. After speaking to Zimonjić, Burkhart and Smajlović, I realize I’ve only scratched the surface.” — @novakovicto.bsky.social

We praise “culturally responsive” design, even when we know almost nothing about the cultures it’s responding to. Lately, I’ve started to think of architectural criticism as its own type of diaspora. In @azuremagazine.bsky.social, one of my more intimate pieces: www.azuremagazine.com/article/hous...

I’ll be moderating a panel of very smart people on the past, present, and future(s) of Raymond Moriyama’s Ontario Science Centre on September 4th. The impetus for the event is Tony Price’s recently released “Requiem for the Science Centre” album—gonna be fun.

Smallness as in human scale and velocity should be a goal in mobility and urban design.

Tokyo. The world’s biggest city is profoundly shaped by smallness.

Just want to point out this picture shows I think about 500 feet of street. That also happens be only about 75 less than the frontage the former Midway Walmart takes up.

single stair intensifies

Tall buildings, tiny lots. Asakusa, Tokyo.

I don’t really care what you do for work or who your employer is It should be unconstitutional for the government to threaten state violence to compel you to perform your job functions in service of a private company If labour is that crucial it should be compensated accordingly

This piece is getting a bit of a second wind, so I'll share it again. Japan is not an otherworldly magical wonderland; it's just a place where the barriers to small business are very, very low. That feels "magical" because we don't allow it here. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/backyard-c...

really nice stuff 👌

In @azuremagazine.bsky.social, I talk to RDHA's Tyler Sharp about architectural adaptation and moving beyond the language of polite, contextually deferential Canadian modernism.

This is the framing. There's an inherent weakness to these guys. The tough country guy scared of downtown Ottawa. It's tricky tho because being some kinds of weak is fine, some people are for a variety of reasons, not bad ones. But when their performance/belligerence is a strongman's, this is it.

My latest: Canada needs a strong advocacy voice for architecture. Boosting to @katewagner.wehwalt.net @alexbozikovic.bsky.social @novakovicto.bsky.social www.archpaper.com/2025/08/roya...

This is happening in Toronto. Crime of many kinds is down but if you live in a place where CP24 is on constantly, you'd never know. So there's fear of the city in the suburbs, falsely, and you see certain politicians harping on this. More as next year's election approaches.

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

dawg how has it gotten WORSE

thanks to @novakovicto.bsky.social & @azuremagazine.bsky.social for a great conversation

AI isn't magic. AI is land, real estate, and energy.

In a conversation with @novakovicto.bsky.social, Yale professor and critic @hawthorne.bsky.social reflects on three decades of practice — and his high-profile stint as Los Angeles’ Chief Design Officer.

In @azuremagazine.bsky.social, I talk to @hawthorne.bsky.social about the "urbanist turn" in architectural criticism, a decaying media ecosystem, and design as a part of municipal bureaucracy. (I know this is a 2015-sounding post, but it's a 2015 kind of topic).

As I argued a couple weeks ago, why would anyone trust the process, people or institution? Someone needs to correct this.

"Part of the school’s philosophy is about risk-taking as a fundamental part of creating confidence." Principal Richard Messina | In @novakovicto.bsky.social 's article on the outdoor play space at Toronto's Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study www.designlinesmagazine.com/sara-jackman...

And it's almost certainly an undercount www.bbc.com/news/live/cd...

Toronto has long been the immigrant hub of the country, with its foreign-born population consistently exceeding the national average. But immigrants used to gravitate to the city’s downtown – now, it’s the suburbs. schoolofcities.githu...

Downtown Mississauga really distills the GTA’s deeply weird melange of urban conditions. A giant suburban shopping mall, surrounded by surface parking, surrounded by a huge cluster of new-build towers, surrounded by single-family suburbia. The Toronto turducken.

“The apparently frivolous work around play and joy is really critical right now, so that we can start coming together again.” Great profile of the public space innovators at Daily tous les jours in @azuremagazine.bsky.social www.azuremagazine.com/article/ever...

In many US cities, Walmarts are often some of the busiest transit destinations. Here is the typical relationship between a Walmart (far right) and its nearest bus stop (far left). Note the details of the pedestrian experience between one and the other. 1/🧵

This is the kind of research we need to build a better city. Kudos to the teams at Giaimo and Ha/f for digging into this important topic. Now let's make the changes that need to happen so we can both add density and keep all those main street small businesses that make Toronto so special.

Humbled and grateful for this article by @novakovicto.bsky.social of Make Good's small but mighty Little Blue House. 💙🩵 It might be a modest build in both scale and budget, but it's packed with all the values of our young practice. www.azuremagazine.com/article/a-li...

Lovely project well deserving of this writeup by @novakovicto.bsky.social @azuremagazine.bsky.social. Having looked at a lot of bad floor plans for small spaces, it's incredible what this project does with a real kitchen and the constraints of an angular plane!