Toronto, by and large, does not like car-free urban streets. I mean, we have very few of them. Let's try and name them. The most notable would be the Distillery District. Next to this would perhaps be the intersection of Gould Street & Victoria Street on TMU's campus. Then there's Willcocks Commons at the University of Toronto, though it's not the prettiest.
After this, I can only think of small, unremarkable or temporary ones. I'm not counting seasonal closures. Technically, the Toronto Islands are the largest car-free community in North America, but I wouldn't call this urban. So I'm now at a loss. If I've missed any noteworthy ones, I would be happy to be corrected.
This concise list makes the recently revealed masterplan for the island formerly known as Villiers — now called Ookwemin Minising (or OM) — all the more exciting. The 16-block plan now includes a 760-metre-long, fully pedestrianized public space called Centre Commons. It runs east-west in the site plan below, and is intersected by a north-south street called The Sandbar Trail.
As designed, Centre Commons is expected to be the longest car-free street in the city and look something like this:
This is the space in between the buildings. Equally important is the fact that the new masterplan unlocks a 27% increase in finer-grained density, without compromising on the quality or quantity of public space on the island. This is a major improvement over the previous masterplan, which had all the hallmarks of bland pseudo-urbanism. Meaning, it was supposed to be urban, but it wasn't actually.
I love the above massing diagram because it feels like a real, organic city, as opposed to just a series of repeating towers on podiums. It has a variety of scales and a more fine-grained urban pattern. This, as we have talked about, is notoriously difficult to achieve in new master-planned communities. But it is possible: loop transit through the island, lower the parking requirements, and give developers the freedom to build.
The design team includes SLA of Copenhagen (landscape architects), Trophic (Indigenous-owned landscape architects), GHD (prime consultant and technical lead) and Allies and Morrison of London (architectural lead). And when built out, OM is expected to support approximately 12,000 new homes (including 3,000 affordable homes) and 2,900 new jobs.
I say we build it.
Cover photo by Allies and Morrison
Aerial image from Waterfront Toronto
Centre Commons rendering by Norm Li via SLA
Area plan and massing diagram by SLA
The Missing Middle Initiative just released its latest Greater Toronto Area and Greater Golden Horseshoe Housing Report Card. If you'd like to download a copy and see the generally abysmal grades, there's a link at the bottom of this page. But here are the high-level findings (based on Q4-2025 data):
Housing starts are down 34% year-over-year across the 34 municipalities covered in the report.
Condominium starts, in particular, are down over 50% year-over-year.
Pre-construction sales, which are a precursor to housing starts, are down 89% for condominiums and 58% for ground-oriented houses.
The only exception to the above is purpose-built rental starts, which increased 39% year-over-year. But this increase doesn't come close to offsetting the declines seen in both condominiums and low-rise housing.
Once again, we are reminded of the looming housing shortage that, I think, could be felt as soon as next year. New construction is inherently slow to respond to market changes, and, as of right now, the ship is clearly headed toward almost no new supply. For that to change, we will almost certainly need to see pre-construction sales return.
Cover photo by Dmitry Gerasimenko on Unsplash
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has just published a comprehensive report on the nexus between AI and energy consumption. I would encourage you all to give it a read, or, you know, use AI to summarize it for you. It represents our reality today.
The largest tech companies in the world spent over US$400 billion on data centres in 2025, and this number is expected to jump by 75% in 2026! The total capital expenditure of just five tech companies is right now larger than the entire global investment in oil and natural gas production.
This is the new fuel for the world economy, and we're going to need to figure out how to supply enough energy.
According to the report, an individual server rack within an advanced data centre might only be the size of a refrigerator. But by 2027, it is not inconceivable that it could have a peak power demand equivalent to that of 65 households.
The good news is that much of this demand is being met by renewables. Renewables are the fastest-growing source of electricity for data centres. The report estimates total generating capacity increasing at an average of 22% per year between 2024 and 2030, which will meet nearly 50% of the growth in data centre demand.
If you'd like to download a copy of the full report, go here.
Cover photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash