This morning Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang published an op-ed in Fast Company detailing how her architecture and urban design practice closed the gender wage gap. 

It is also a call to action and an example of something the firm calls “actionable idealism.” Here is an excerpt from the article:

What we discovered was that, despite our ideological commitment to equality (and though our numbers were significantly better than all the U.K. architecture firms reporting, in all categories), a small pay gap nevertheless existed between the women and men in my office. We fixed that with this year’s raises and now have no wage gap as an organization.

To learn more about how they accomplished this, check out the full article. And if you’d like to meet Jeanne Gang in Toronto this week and learn more about what we’re up to at Yonge + St. Clair, click here.

On Thursday, July 5th, Slate Asset Management, Studio Gang, and the rest of the project team will be hosting a community open house where we will introduce designs for a new block plan and mixed-use building at Yonge + St. Clair. This will be Studio Gang’s first project in Canada. We’re pretty excited.

It’s important to note that while the proposed design has been influenced by some of the early discussions we had with city staff and the local Councillor, we are still very much at the beginning of this process. Which is why alongside this community open house, we are also launching yongedelisle.ca.

This will be our “neighbourhood engagement” website as we go through the planning process. You’ll find updates from the project team as they become available, and you’ll also have a direct way to get in touch. We’re also testing out this interactive page where you can vote on the city building principles that matter most to you.

So hopefully we’ll see you on Thursday, July 5th. Invite details above. Please RSVP, here, if you can. But if you forget to do that, don’t worry, you can still just show up. For more on Jeanne Gang, click here.

This morning I was at 55 St. Clair Avenue West for IBI Group’s annual general meeting. And at this meeting their CEO, Scott Stewart, officially launched a new accelerator called the Smart City Sandbox. 

Here is a description of what that is taken from a press release that was also published this morning:

The Sandbox is a smart city-themed accelerator, focused on bringing innovative new products and systems to urban environments that improve the quality of life for residents. A technology hub that supports small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), as well as entrepreneurs and start-ups, the Smart City Sandbox will operate out of a designated space at IBI Group’s Toronto headquarters, be open to global applications, and officially open doors with its first smart city-themed cohort in September 2018.

And here is a photo from this morning:

Slate Asset Management is proud to be a founding partner of the Smart City Sandbox and we’re thrilled that it will live at Yonge + St. Clair in midtown Toronto. 

Our role is to provide our domain expertise as asset managers and developers, and to offer participants in the program access to real-world building systems and data from our holdings in the area.

For more info, go here.

And if you were at (or listening to) the meeting this morning, I’m sure you noticed something that we talk a lot about on this blog. To thrive today, virtually every company now has to think and act like a technology company. IBI Group is doing precisely that.