Toronto's street food scene is reduced to hot dogs and sausages -- it seems the most variety you'll find here is bacon bits at one vendor versus diced onions at another. The Toronto Star had an article yesterday on how provincial regulations limit street food vending, and the growing interest in changing these regulations. There are a number of people who have ideas about how Toronto's street food scene could be changed in order to allow for healthier and more diverse food choices. The article suggests that if they were allowed ...

The 7th annual Planet in Focus International Environmental Film and Video Festival will be taking place November 1 to November 5. Planet in Focus has just announced this year's line-up of "documentaries, animation, dramatic features, shorts, and experimental works that celebrate, question, and establish varied ways of viewing the state of our world". The spotlight theme of this year's festival is “Toronto in the Moving Image from the Dawn of Cinema to the Present”, and it looks like there will be a diverse line-up of films exploring Toronto's politics, history, and mythologies. This Toronto ...

From September 21 to 30, The Theatre Centre (1087 Queen Street West) will be hosting condo BOOM!, an exhibit that aims to explore "the marketing, production, and development of condominiums, and their impacts on neighbourhoods." The condo BOOM! program will feature panel discussions, workshops, walking tours, theatre, film, and will also be participating in Nuit Blanche on September 30. For more information on the project and events, click here.

A helpful stencil artist is making it easier for you to get your bearings after leaving the subway -- someone has been spray painting directional arrows on the sidewalk just outside TTC exits. I noticed one today at King Station on my way home from work, and just now at two of the Spadina Station exits.

With Art Attack! just a couple of days away, here's another example (albeit a top-down one) of the reclamation of spaces typically reserved for commercial advertising. The Worldchanging blog has an article about Philadelphia's Autobiography Project -- a city-wide writing project that asked residents to write their own memoirs, and then posted these autobiographies on bus shelter billboards around the city.

Detroit is one of the most striking and well known examples of urban blight and "white flight" in North America. Many, many buildings are abandoned and decaying, and neighbourhood blocks cleared of houses by arson or demolished by the city have become sort of "urban prairies". Starting last winter, before the Super Bowl landed in Detroit, an anonymous group called the D.D.D. (Detroit Demolition Disneyland) Project, began to paint the facades of some abandoned and decaying homes with bright orange paint, calling attention to the process of decay in the city. To me, as a long-time Torontonian with ...

As a tribute to the UN Habitat World Urban Forum taking place in Vancouver this week, Vancouver weekly The Georgia Straight dedicated many of its pages to articles related to cities, urban planning, and sustainability. There is an excellent article on the role streetcars played in Vancouver's urban development, and the potential benefits that re-introducing the "streetcar city" concept could have for the city. There is also a piece comparing the 2006 World Urban Forum to Habitat '76 (also in Vancouver and the first time the UN hosted a conference on urban issues) and Jericho Beach ...

With the proposed new Toronto Act stating the City of Toronto must implement a lobbyist registry, and with the Bellamy Inquiry reccommending that the city carefully monitor and control lobbying practices, the City of Toronto is now developing a new framework for controlling lobbying activities. The city's current lobby registry is voluntary, and only a minority of councillors have stepped up to participate. Participating councillors keep a register in their office and ask all lobbyists to sign in, and this list is then made available for the public to review. "Clarifying the relationship between lobbyists and the City, and ...

Multistory Complex and The Theatre Centre are in the process of putting together an exhibit that explores the marketing, development and impact of condominiums in Toronto, and they are looking for submissions from a variety of disciplines: condo BOOM! The rise of presentation centres and other outposts of lifestyle September 14-October 1, 2006 at The Theatre Centre Call for submissions: Condo presentation centres have cropped up all over the Toronto landscape. These temporary model suites are the contemporary pioneer outposts, pushing the frontier of gentrification. They are used to sell condos not as homes but as lifestyles. This project aims to appropriate the ...

As part of their Environment Week, the University of Toronto is hosting   [A]lternative [R] [T]ransportation: Art on the Move, an art exhibit and party celebrating sustainable transportation:  Transportation isn't just about getting from A to B. Especially if we are talking about sustainable transportation. There is a certain art to it, a certain aesthetic pleasure that such healthy transportation affords, and a certain art to the very objects that take us from one place to the other.   [A]lternative [R] Transportation celebrates the art of transportation that doesn't just consume energy, but generates energy, healthy energy that inspires and creates, that celebrates a much larger ...