This might seem like a fairly benign tweet by Clive Doucet, a former Ottawa City Councillor. I mean, Paris is wonderful. It is livable, walkable, and my favorite city in the world after Toronto. But as I have argued many times before on the blog,… Read More
In 1956, a large 57 acre urban renewal project was completed in St. Louis. It consisted of 33 apartment buildings, each 11 storeys tall. The entire complex was known as Pruitt-Igoe. Early residents seemed to really like the buildings. The first tenant, Frankie Mae Raglin, called… Read More
Gangi, Palermo – Sicily by Claudio Siragusa on 500px https://500px.com/embed.js Buy real estate. It always goes up. That’s the mantra, right? Few things in life are that black and white. A small town in Sicily called Gangi is in the midst of a novel urban… Read More
As Architect This City continues to grow in readership, I’m starting to get pitched more and more. People email me with something they want promoted and they try and convince me to write about it. Everybody is looking for distribution. I get it. I have… Read More
Yesterday Adam Radwanski of the Globe and Mail published an interesting article called, Rust Belt revival: Lessons for southwest Ontario from America’s industrial heartland. The article talks about some of the things that the Rust Belt is doing to revitalize their cities and the lessons… Read More
Built in the late 1940s, Regent Park was Canada’s first and largest social (public) housing project. Like many housing projects of this era, it was modeled after Le Corbusier’s “towers in a park” ideology, though in this case most of the buildings were only a… Read More
After yesterday’s post on Belval in Luxembourg, I started thinking more about authenticity. I ended the post by talking about some of the industrial elements – blast furnaces and so on – that will be preserved in the neighborhood and argued that those types of… Read More
Early this morning, before the sun even came up here in Toronto, I had a video conference call with a sharp and talented entrepreneur in Luxembourg. His name is Fräntz Miccoli and he’s working on an interesting startup called KonnectR. The idea is to create a… Read More
Yesterday morning I went for a swim at the new Regent Park Aquatic Centre. I used to swim regularly when I was in grad school in the US, but it fell off when I moved back to Toronto and there wasn’t a convenient place for… Read More
The New York Times published an interesting and popular article last Friday called The Post-Post-Apocalyptic Detroit. It of course talks all about the efforts of billionaire Dan Gilbert, but it also talks about the initiatives of many small and local entrepreneurs who are doing their… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 