This weekend was the 8 year anniversary of writing this daily blog. It's hard to imagine that it has been this long. Perhaps because COVID has accelerated the last little while and made it difficult to remember what day or year it is sometimes.

I am often asked what the end game is for this blog. What am I hoping to get out of it? The truth is there is no real end game. I like reading and writing. I like being constantly curious about the world. I like discipline. I like meeting and connecting with new people. And I like having my own little place on the internet, however small it may be.

I get dozens of emails each week from people and companies wanting to pay for sponsored posts on this blog. I'm not sure how legitimate these inbounds are, but I ignore all of them. That's not what this blog is for or about.

In the early days of writing this blog it was called Architect This City and the focus was a bit narrower: real estate, design, planning and all things cities. That is still more or less the case, but I do often stray from these topics. Sometimes into personal topics. Sometimes into my photography. And more recently into the world of crypto and blockchains. This is one of the reasons why I decided to move to just blogging under my own name. There's more flexibility.

Sidebar: I recently bought my first NFT -- a CryptoBabyPunk. I'm not at all suggesting that you should do the same. It could be worthless in the future. But I continue to be fascinated by what's happening in this space and I've committed myself to experimenting and learning a lot more.

Writing something each day is extremely difficult. Some days it only takes 15-20 minutes. And other days, when I'm not in the mood or I'm exhausted from doing too many other things, it can take over an hour. It's a big time commitment and on more than one occasion I've questioned whether my time was better spent elsewhere. But then I think about all of the benefits that I derive from this daily practice.

They say that the definition of a habit is that you don't feel normal until you've done it. And this blog has certainly become a habit of mine. It forces me to wake up every morning and consider at least one interesting thing that may be happening in our cities and our world. I don't intend to stop anytime soon. So thank you all for reading over the years.

The City of Toronto is currently reviewing its Official Plan, which is a city planning document that acts as a kind of master guide for land user matters. It is a pretty important document in that it dictates, among other things, what kind of development should go where. One way that it is often explained is that our OP is the "vision", whereas our zoning by-laws are the "precision."

This update will be completed by next summer. Why? Because the Province of Ontario said so. (That's how things work around here. I think cities should have more power.)

Toronto is expected to grow by more than 700,000 people and add some 450,000 jobs by 2051. Where these people and jobs will be accommodated is a big part of the exercise here.

As part of this review, the City of Toronto published this Story Map. It is pretty neat. It looks at how the city has grown over the years (the above image is Toronto's 1943 Master Plan). It explains a little bit about how planning works. And it has a bunch of stats on how people live and work in the city. I just used it to confirm my hunch that there are exactly zero single-family homes in my neighborhood.

Looking at the above map from 1943, it is, of course, interesting to see how much the city has grown. But it also interesting to note that many of the neighborhoods that now form part of the city were just "New Residential Areas with Prospective Populations." They were colors and numbers on a map in areas that had yet to be built out by developers.

When I see this, I can't help but wonder what the narrative was like at the time with respect to these new developments. Were people upset? Were people happy? Did people even notice what was happening on the edges of their city? Because sprawl, and that's what this was, is quite different from intensification.

Our focus today is on the latter. It is about building up as opposed to out. There's no more room for yellow shaded areas with numbers. This means that we will end up using our land and other resources more efficiently, but it also presents a whole host of issues. Change is hard. Intensification is hard. Part of the job of this document is to navigate some of these challenges.

If you'd like to get engaged with the city's Official Plan review, head over here.

My realtor friend Mark Savel tagged me in this earlier today.

Pine Hill Homes has recently completed a laneway suite here in Toronto and they have now put out a call for artists to come up with something creative for its front facade. I think this is a great / fun idea and so I'm sharing it today on the blog.

I think it also speaks to one of the differences between laneway suites and the main houses that now host them. Could you imagine a builder doing a call to artists for the front facade of a house not on a laneway? It seems less likely to me. But I think that the laneway side is viewed as a little less precious, and that creates an opportunity for playfulness.

This, in my mind, is a great thing.

If you decide to participate and your work is selected, you'll have all of your materials paid for and you'll also get an honorarium. I don't know how much the honorarium is, or where this house is actually located, but I'm sure you can find these things out by contacting Pine Hill.

I'm looking forward to seeing what ultimately gets selected and put up.