Earlier this week, I tweeted that Toronto needs a Haussmann moment where we make some bold and uncomfortable changes in order to set ourselves up to be a dominant 21st-century global city. I mentioned Haussmann because his work is perhaps the most notable, but that is just one example.

In addition to Haussmann's renovation of Paris (1853-1870), I was also thinking about the Commissioners' Plan for New York City (1811), and Ildefons Cerdà's grid system of octagonal blocks for Barcelona (1859), as well as some more contemporary examples.

In recent years, Barcelona has revisited its grid system and pioneered a new set of "superblocks" that focus traffic along the periphery and create pedestrian-focused spaces on their interior.

The common thread among these examples is that they all represent a grand master plan. In the case of Barcelona and New York, it was a plan that served to guide development as the city grew. And in the case of Paris, it was a destructive plan that went back and redid what was deemed to have not been working. (In thinking about this now, it's probably best that I used Haussmann as the example in my tweet).

Toronto has never had such a plan. We flirted with the City Beautiful movement at the beginning of the 20th century — a movement intent on beautifying and introducing monumental grandeur to our cities — but, not surprisingly, we ultimately saw it as a superfluous and frivolous spending exercise.

Instead, Toronto has grown incrementally, becoming what I see as an accidental global city. We are no longer the ultra-conservative, deeply Protestant city that we once were, but at the same time, it's hard not to feel like we have a grid and public realm that doesn't reflect the city we have become today.

Toronto needs a bold master plan. And over the coming weeks, I'll put some of my ideas to paper. In the meantime, if you have any of your own, please feel free to share them in the comment section below.

The writing is always on the wall when aggressive lobbying starts. Here's the situation. A proposed bill has been put forward that would allow autonomous vehicles to operate in Washington, D.C., updating a prior Autonomous Vehicle Act from 2012. Uber is opposing the bill, arguing that it would displace for-hire human drivers and hand Waymo a de facto monopoly in the District, according to TechCrunch.

Instead, the company is lobbying for a system that would require robotaxis, like Waymo, to operate on a ride-hailing network that also uses human drivers. This would give consumers the ability to access both. Do I want to make small talk or not?

Now, Uber's position in the face of autonomous vehicles has always been that human drivers aren't going anywhere because it's simply too expensive to own and operate a fleet of AVs based on peak demand times. The only option is to top up the supply base with human drivers, and this is why the Uber marketplace will always remain essential.

This narrative was initially supported by a series of announced partnerships, but now there seems to be a growing divide between the companies, and it's not so clear that Waymo needs Uber as much as Uber would like. Because if Waymo were truly concerned about having human drivers, then the two companies wouldn't be on opposite sides of the table with this bill. Uber knows this could be existential.

At the end of the day, Uber disrupted traditional taxis and changed how our cities operate. Autonomous vehicles are set to do the same. Should we feel bad? Monopolies are, of course, bad. But creative destruction is not.

Cover photo by Dan Gold

Home is not where you live, but where they understand you. — Christian Morgenstern

One of the things that I like to be annoying about on this blog is the fact that "home" is not a building type. I say this because "home" is often shorthand for ground-oriented, single-family housing. For example, someone might say to me, "Do you think you'll one day buy a home?" And I will be pedantic and say, "But I already own a home."

The words we choose, often because of cultural convention, show our biases. When people associate home with low-rise housing, I can only assume it's because many cities have had a long history of thinking of apartments as disease-breeding tenements. So we oftentimes see low-rise housing as homes, and apartments as something more utilitarian, like a unit.

But in the end, a home is not a building type; it is a psychological state of belonging. It is where comfort, safety, belonging, and identity hopefully all intersect.

One of the interesting things that Bianca and I have both noticed since bringing home our daughter, Vivienne, is that our feeling of home has been heightened. There's additional life within these four walls, and now it is also a place where she is kept safe and protected from the outside world.

I'm not sure if any of you have experienced this, but we both felt it immediately, and it has us saying to each other on a regular basis, "I love our home." And you know what? The view looks pretty great from up here.