....cities are the resistance....

Sweet piece by Spacing Magazine about our community bench made out of a salvaged bridge and reused pallets. Thanks for sharing the story of our neigbourhood’s infrastructure! @spacing.bsky.social spacing.ca/toronto/2025...

I've been quietly working on the Bloor West Village Urban Design Guidelines for a few years and it was finally approved at Toronto and East York Council yesterday. Sharing more detail details via LinkedIn, a few spreads that stood out for me, here. www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis...

Happy Thanksgiving

New dream job just dropped

Huzzah! The Toronto Star building will live on. Long live brutalism at the foot of Yonge street. And thanks goodness all of this carbon won’t go to the dump! www.blogto.com/real-estate-...

Let’s hear it for the office conversions! Just noting that I don’t generally support all office conversions (some might be short-sighted), but makes sense in this location. Congrats to the team!

Swedish Deputy PM: Sweden needs to pick its friends wisely, and we are choosing Canada… So when we come to America, we come to Canada now.

Randall Munroe, welcome to The War on Cars.

Parents, grandparents, those in charge of small people, you're allowed to be selfish. Send this note to your elected municipal representative. If they aren't on board to priortize the safety of vulnerable road users, you know what to do during the next election. #TOpoli Monday, Oct 26, 2026

Thanks for the spotlight @lanrickbennett.bsky.social 🙌

Pro-housing voices from the right of center are increasingly focused on a "we need housing For Families" framing. In a new column I explain why broad-based liberalization, especially for inexpensive types of housing, is important for helping people start families: www.governing.com/urban/to-sup...

Ohhhhkay? 🤔🧐

For @shawnmicallef.bsky.social from Guildhall (City Hall) at the City of London. A toilet map, how dignified! Innit?

Hello from London! Here this week with a small delegation from Toronto to attend the Urban 95 Academy at the London School of Economics. We are deepening our understanding of how to plan for children in cities. Find me on other social platforms if you’d like to learn more in long form ;)

What a great news story! LRT canopy is salvaged for reuse in the community and currently stored at the zoo! 🎉🎉🎉

Introducing our new East Chinatown bench made entirely from salvaged materials! (bridge and wood pallets) Launched at our community block party, and baptized by teenager garbage, I’m so pleased this came together.

Highly recommend getting a permit to open up your block to cars. That’s a wrap on another sometimes-biennial block party! Thanks to those who joined us to celebrate our village and the super fun closure of the street for First Fest.

Congratulations to all the 2025 TUDA winners. It was a wonderful event put on by Urban Design staff to recognize design excellence in the city. Browse the Jury Report for an inspiring collection of projects. www.toronto.ca/city-governm...

The Toronto Star’s City Report Card survey suggests six in 10 Torontonians believe that the city’s best days are in the past. Given the challenges Toronto faces right now, it’s an understandable position, but it’s wrong. My column on teenage Toronto. The future is bright if we….(pls read n share).

Holy moly. This is impressive NYC!

Thx Lanrick! Always a pleasure to do the grunt work to host this block party. Also, my 6 yo asks about this all year: "are we doing a First Fest this year?". It's fun to radicalize small children and show them that streets are for people. The street dance floor is my favorite part :) See you there!

Are you a residential developer in Toronto? Have you delivered new indoor or outdoor amenity spaces for children? We are looking to learn from great examples that have been informed by the Growing Up Guidelines. Please show off your work here!

Thanks for the spotlight Lanrick! Nice to be sandwiched among some inspiring folks here….✌️

As Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo put it: "A city where you can get let go of your child's hand"

Ahoy Toronto! Biidaagie Park at the new mouth of the Don River is now open. The trees are babies, bring your own shade. The most incredible Park to open in a generation. Congrats to all involved in reaching this milestone, over the last 30 years. The best example of ambitious city building ❤️.

Sweet afternoon hosting city planners here for OPPI conference. Colleagues shared collective decades of experience shaping the connective tissue that knits the waterfront. It was a privilege to describe the 2.5km long narrative and take it in within one 3 hour gulp. Full thread on LinkedIn….

I’m curious to hear what local designers think of this article. I provided a few perspective in Kelly’s thread. This hits close to home for me in my work in development review: I often see pragmatic considerations overtake the ground floor, and the retail space suffers.

Interesting research paper by Hamed Naseri et al about identifying opponents to pedestrianization in Montréal & how certain opponents' concerns could be addressed. Pedestrianization supporters everywhere should read this. #BikeTO #VeloMTL #WalkTO #TOpoli www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This isn’t the parade (yet) it’s just hundreds of people casually enjoying a non-eventful Thursday night on Toronto’s most vibrant corridor. Why can’t we keep the streets open to pedestrians all summer? We’ve seen how well it works in Montréal. Happy Pride friends♥️🌈

What an incredible gathering of inspiring pacemakers from around the world. Thank you @placemakingx.bsky.social for hosting this year’s conference in Toronto. I shared a presentation on the Don River restoration and speculated about potential Meanwhile Uses in the Port Lands.

🌻 Greta Thunberg being released... the internetWorld is gunna explode on this one c'mon lets make this interview statement Famous!!

The City of Toronto’s planning department is now posting on BlueSky! Give us a follow and stay on top of what’s happening across the city (and please re-post and spread the word … and maybe we’ll get a few more planning departments on here!).

Thankfully, the village was evacuated already, but one person is missing and everyone else’s homes are destroyed. Make no mistake: this is a climate disaster.

Congestion pricing was designed to finance more than $15 billion in critical transit upgrades in New York City. Those investments will take years. But the parallel changes at street level are already apparent. Here’s what we know so far. nyti.ms/4mbuGg0

Apparently before the St. Lawrence Seaway opened when they wanted to get large ships into the Great Lakes they just brought them up the Mississippi and shoved them through the Chicago River

💁🏼‍♀️

Meet Ookwemin Minising! We gathered for a Jane’s Walk last Saturday and said this name together. Fred Martin led the group through the pronunciation, and it was moving for the island to hear its name spoken by over 200 people - half of whom were first time visitors (Oh-kway-min Min-nih-sing).

A spotlight on King Spadina and all the great new projects built here over the years. My manager Nasim Adab hosted a walk and talk with our new Chief Planner @jasonthorne.bsky.social who was eager to see what we’ve been up to. Nasim worked on the KS Secondary Plan which set the tone for the area.

It's Jane's Walks season! Join us for a walk and talk about Toronto's newest island! We'll be walking alongside the park that will begin to open this year. And we'll be talking about the new development that will be taking shape over the coming decades. www.janeswalkfestivalto.com/saturday-may...

Maybe it’s ok to believe the hype. But we’d need a politician with the #PoliticalWill to actually think more about the future of our city and less about the block of people that may not vote for them in the next election #TOpoli Cc: @progresstoronto.bsky.social @planningtoronto.bsky.social

The best way to remake a city is through transport. By changing how people move, Strasbourg is changing the spaces they use; transitioning from hostile, car-dominated places to ones more vibrant, welcoming, and resilient to today’s challenges. Rue du 22 Novembre: 2018 vs 2025 (Top 📷: B. Poussard).

Part 2 of my science fiction story explaining why we need a society based on #sufficiency rather than #abundance. lloydalter.substack.com/p/sufficienc...

Yeah, this checks out. Planning New York. www.tiktok.com/@nbcsnl/vide...

Funny story: I highlighted to our school/City that bike parking is awkwardly jammed up with strollers. Big thanks @TO_Cycling_Ped staff responded in record time and we got a new rack within a week. Turns out strollers slot efficiently into the new racks with room to spare! 🤣

I usually push my latest, Stroll, but Frontier City is a book about Canadian politics. Why the Ford’s found purchase in Toronto. Book was largely ignored cuz it’s Toronto but it’s a Cdn populism story (Ford’s don’t stop). Grateful if you considered it. 2.5yrs work. spacingstore.ca/products/fro...

Hear, hear. Make bottles great again.

New: my story on the just-completed 1.3-kilometre Don River extension, a billion-dollar project that restores the river's long-lost natural connection with Lake Ontario in Toronto. It's an amazing thing. canadiangeographic.ca/articles/don...

Did you know that the old Cherry Street was recently renamed Ookwemin Street? On the heels of Villiers Island being renamed Ookwemin Minising, which roughly translates to "place of the black cherry trees" in the Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) language.

was talking w/ some planners about low-cost kiosks like this... it turns out there are just way too many hurdles for them to take this on... including liability? good god. these are gorgeous. imagine if we closed streets, made plazas, and incorporated these. $200k 👀 www.baunetz.de/meldungen/Me...