There are parts of Toronto that are pedestrian only. There's the Distillery District, some small laneways in Yorkville, the Toronto Islands (though this is a bit of a unique situation), and various other pockets around the city.

There are also streets that we temporarily open up to only pedestrians, such as Market Street and King Street, and areas, such as Kensington Market, that we have been rigorously considering pedestrianizing for as long as I can remember.

What is clear is that pedestrian-only streets are controversial. Motorists fear that it will make driving in the city even more inconvenient. And businesses fear that it will limit their customer base.

While it is true that not all streets can and should be pedestrianized, there are countless examples of streets and areas that appear to be thriving because of it.

Take, for example, Montréal.

Since 2021, the city has been pedestrianizing a stretch of 30 blocks along Mont-Royal Avenue during the summer months. And according to Mayor Valérie Plante, the commercial vacancy rate for the street has dropped from 14.5% in 2018 to 5.6% in 2023:

Maybe you don't want to infer causality here, but at the very least, it seems to suggest that the street isn't dying and bereft of human activity. This year, pedestrianization is also planned to be extended further into the fall.

This won't necessarily be the outcome for all streets, but I do agree with this recent Globe and Mail article that, oftentimes, the reasons for not pedestrianizing are "a question of philosophy, not geography." Because there's lots of research and data to support doing this.

If any of you are business owners along Mont-Royal, I'd love to hear about your experiences and how you think, for better or for worse, it has changed the area. Leave a comment below or drop me a line.

I was recently asked: How do you go into a neighborhood, build new, and not erase and/or sterilize what makes that neighborhood interesting in the first place? 

Gentrification is a controversial topic in city building. Too often I think we ignore what happens when we don’t invest in communities, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be deliberate when we do make investments.

Development is filled with tensions. We are constantly trying to navigate through constraints and balance out the wants of each and every stakeholder. It becomes an art. It doesn’t always work out as planned.

To state the obvious, I would say that it starts with caring. If you’re not interested in community and city building, then the default response will be to simply replicate what worked on the last project.

But every place has a local culture. And if city builders are to have any hope of preserving and building upon what makes that place unique, we have to first understand it. What made it successful in the first place? What is its DNA?

Because then you’re in a position to think about both built form and programming in a way that is culturally sensitive.

One example that comes to mind is