Toronto’s elevated Gardiner Expressway is a topic that pops up periodically on this blog. We have talked about taking down a portion, realigning a portion, adding a congestion charge, lighting it like they have done in Shanghai, and of course we have talked about the… Read More
This is an intriguing idea: Many cities around the world practice some form of participatory budgeting, but even among those that do, Cascais [Portugal] is an outlier. It spends prodigiously through the system: in Paris, five per cent of the city’s annual investment budget has… Read More
Boy, time sure does melt away when you’re writing a daily blog and trying to build buildings. It’s hard to believe that it has already been 7-8 years since I was writing incessantly about the merits of Toronto removing the eastern portion of its elevated… Read More
Back when Toronto was debating the future of the eastern portion of the elevated Gardiner Expressway, I was an annoying and vocal supporter of tearing it down and replacing it with an at-grade boulevard. I was blogging about it ad nauseam. I participated in Jane’s… Read More
This past summer, the Bentway (in collaboration with the City of Toronto, the Waterfront BIA, and the Toronto Downtown West BIA) issued a call for expressions of interest to re-imagine two key intersections under downtown Toronto’s elevated Gardiner Expressway. The York Street intersection and the… Read More
For a very long time, there was a great debate in Toronto about whether or not the elevated Gardiner Expressway should be removed from downtown and replaced with something else. As recently as five years ago, that debate was centered around removing the eastern portion… Read More
A few weeks ago, Canadian developer Tridel unveiled its first “smart condominium” at Ten York – a recently completed 69 storey building in the South Core neighborhood of Toronto. Above is an archive photo of the building under construction. I chose this one because its siting… Read More
I promise that this post won’t be all about laneways. This afternoon Erin Davis of Torontoist published a post called: Are Laneway Suites a Solution to Toronto’s Housing Crisis? There’s a quote in it from yours truly: Brandon Donnelly, a 34-year-old real estate developer, has… Read More
When I wrote yesterday’s post about road tolls, it hadn’t been announced that Toronto Mayor John Tory was going to call for road tolls on both of the highways coming into downtown. That didn’t leak until late in the evening. So I was just writing another… Read More
In yesterday’s post about the city as an egg, I received a comment basically saying that I use this blog to carefully curate my own image and that I would never argue against “dumb Toronto planning” because, after all, I’m a developer. I am going to… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 