For all of us who are involved in the building of cities, it is important to remember that cities emerge and thrive as a result of economic purpose. Take, for example, Sao Paulo. Once one of the poorest of Portuguese colonies, it is today the… Read More
We all know the story: Much of the world is becoming increasingly less equal thanks to the new knowledge economy. Using data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the NY Times (Emily Badger and Kevin Quealy) recently published this interesting piece on “4… Read More
New rental housing measures were approved by Vancouver City Council this week. I haven’t gone through the policies in the detail (you can do that here), but they aim to increase rental housing supply by doing things such as “pre-zoning” for 6-storeys on main streets… Read More
The Wall Street Journal estimates that, from now until about 2037, roughly 21 million homes in the United States will be vacated by seniors. To put this number into perspective, it’s about 25% of the US for-sale housing stock and more than double the amount… Read More
Earlier this year, the University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute (UTTRI) published this report on the impacts of ride hailing services in the City of Toronto. And then today, the Ryerson City Building Institute leveraged it to opine on how “on-demand tech” might improve transit… Read More
Toronto’s Chief Planner, Gregg Lintern, posted this on Twitter a few days (if you can’t see it below, click here): A couple things came to mind when I saw this. First, it’s a reminder that census data is painfully slow. Five years is a long… Read More
Since 2005, LSE Cities (London School of Economics) has been collecting comparative data on how global cities perform in terms of key spatial, socioeconomic, and environmental indicators. This is their latest data matrix: To be clear, it is not a ranking of cities. It is… Read More
Urban environments can be dense in many different ways. This is a topic that we have discussed on several occasions here on the blog. But this working paper by Solly Angel, Patrick Lamson-Hall, and Zeltia Gonzales Blanco — called The Anatomy of Density — is… Read More
Yonge Street divides Toronto between east and west. It’s an iconic street (though it has its ups and downs). Since 2018, the City has been studying ways to redesign and improve the stretch that cuts through the middle of downtown. It is a story that… Read More
In June of this year, Sidewalk Labs released its draft Master Innovation and Development Plan (MIDP) for Toronto’s eastern waterfront. I wrote about it here. It was a draft document that was subject to further discussion and refinement, with October 31, 2019 being an important… Read More
