Earlier this week, I tweeted that Toronto needs a Haussmann moment where we make some bold and uncomfortable changes in order to set ourselves up to be a dominant 21st-century global city. I mentioned Haussmann because his work is perhaps the most notable, but that is just one example.

In addition to Haussmann's renovation of Paris (1853-1870), I was also thinking about the Commissioners' Plan for New York City (1811), and Ildefons Cerdà's grid system of octagonal blocks for Barcelona (1859), as well as some more contemporary examples.

In recent years, Barcelona has revisited its grid system and pioneered a new set of "superblocks" that focus traffic along the periphery and create pedestrian-focused spaces on their interior.

The common thread among these examples is that they all represent a grand master plan. In the case of Barcelona and New York, it was a plan that served to guide development as the city grew. And in the case of Paris, it was a destructive plan that went back and redid what was deemed to have not been working. (In thinking about this now, it's probably best that I used Haussmann as the example in my tweet).

Toronto has never had such a plan. We flirted with the City Beautiful movement at the beginning of the 20th century — a movement intent on beautifying and introducing monumental grandeur to our cities — but, not surprisingly, we ultimately saw it as a superfluous and frivolous spending exercise.

Instead, Toronto has grown incrementally, becoming what I see as an accidental global city. We are no longer the ultra-conservative, deeply Protestant city that we once were, but at the same time, it's hard not to feel like we have a grid and public realm that doesn't reflect the city we have become today.

Toronto needs a bold master plan. And over the coming weeks, I'll put some of my ideas to paper. In the meantime, if you have any of your own, please feel free to share them in the comment section below.