Hi Spacing readers. I'm pleased to announced that while continuing write and edit Spacing things, I've just started a new weekly column over at the Toronto Star exploring how and where we live in the GTA. I'll wander from downtown to wherever the farm fields start (and maybe, once in a while, hang out there too). The first one went up today, looking at Mississauga City Centre. Thanks for coming along for the walk all these years.

The ongoing Contact photography festival across Toronto includes video installations. This one, called Rituals of the Slaves by Toronto filmmaker James Leahy, is made up of Super 8 and 8mm film Leahy took in Toronto between 1988 and 1992. It's part of the It's the end of the world as we know it exhibition at the Toronto School of Art.  

The Folks at ERA Architects and the TSA are hosting a lecture tomorrow that you're all invited to. ERA Architects and the Toronto Society of Architects present the 2012 Modern Heritage Visiting Lecture, Miles Glendinning: The Hundred Years War: A Century of Mass Housing ‘Campaigns’ Across the Word. Join us May 3rd at the Art and Letters Club at 6:00pm for cocktails and lecture at 6:30. For more information and to RSVP, click here. Miles Glendinning is the director of the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies, University of Edinburgh, and chair of Docomomo International Committee on Urbanism. ...

WHAT: Discussion of Here is Berlin book WHEN Monday, April 16, 2012 at 5:30 pm WHERE: German Consulate General Toronto — 2 Bloor St. E. 25th floor HOW MUCH: Free We hear a lot about Berlin for many reasons: its history, certainly, but also its city building and cultural scene. On Monday at the German Consulate high above Yonge and Bloor there will be a discussion about a new book called Here is Berlin. It's a chance to hear about what's been going on there in the last 20 years since reunification. The German Consulate has great views also, and regularly hosts cultural events, so it's worth stopping by. More on the book: Due to its great success in Europe, an English edition of the highly praised "Here is Berlin" by New York-based writer JM Stim has been published with an introducution by acclaimed Brooklyn writer and translator Tim Mohr. Critics have commented on the book effusively. "The definitive essay about the world's most buzzed about city", "Highly erudite, but always comprehensive", "A must-read when it comes to anything contemporary Berlin."

EDITOR: This is a post in our series looking at the laneway housing projects created in a University of Toronto Architecture Faculty's Laneway Housing studio led by Brigitte Shim & Don Chong. This work and text is by  Sophia Radev a graduate of the University of Waterloo School of Architecture in 2009 and  currently completing her Master in Architecture at University of Toronto. She has lived and studied in Rome and lived and worked in New York and Toronto. The site location for this project is at Queen Street West and Manning Avenue with commercial and residential street frontages, and backyards that form one large space accessed from three laneways all around the site.

What: Free public lecture hosted by the City Institute of York University Where: York University, Room 140, HNES Building When: Friday, March 30th 2:30PM - 4PM Our Senior Editor Shawn Micallef will be giving a free public lecture this Friday called "How to fall in love with your city, while avoiding a culture war," exploring ways and strategies we can avoid the politically motivated wedges being thrown between Torontonians and how we all can come around to falling in love with the whole city because, yes Virgina, we're still allowed to love Toronto. Shawn may ...

As a Canadian Journalism Fellow at U of T's Massey College this year, I was able to sit in on a laneway studio led by Toronto architects Brigitte Shim, of Shim - Sutcliffe Architects, and Donald Chong of Williamson Chong Architects. The studio consisted of numerous site visits to laneway and small-site residential homes across Toronto, (including the award-winning home pictured above in Summerhill by Superkül) and in-studio design and critique sessions. It's one thing to write about architecture and the ...

Over the weekend the National Post ran a story collecting the thoughts of nine different architects and planners (including me, a pretend architect/planner). You can read that story here. Below is the longer text of what I proposed. What are you thoughts on what should be done at the site? The centrepiece of a revitalized Ontario Place would be the Cinesphere and the five interconnected pods suspended over the lake. These buildings, designed by Toronto architect Eberhard Zeidler, are absolutely unique modern heritage buildings, unlike anything in the world. Toronto would be ...

I was in Berlin in December for a few weeks wandering around. It's a good walking city. East. West. Amazing differences and amazing activity going on there right now. Walking up one of the central avenues (see map here, and the picture below, for context) I had a brief feeling that I was still in Toronto when I saw the remnants of an Andrew poster pasted to a wall. Torontonians noticed 1000 of these posters put up around the city in 2010. Everybody wondered who was responsible, until BlogTO broke the story that it was artist Shaan Syed's project, a memorial to his late partner Andrew Hull who was killed while cycling in London. He has continued the project in the last year, putting 1000 posters up around Berlin. Check out Syed's website to see photos of the posters, and the alterations people have done to them -- ephemeral public art can take on a life of its own.

With the news that John Tory will be heading up the revitalization of Ontario Place, let's revisit a piece I wrote 1.5 years ago, exploring the faded-glory of Ontario Place. Revitalize yes, but just save those hot-pants pods. 1973 vintage photo via the wonderful Not My Father's Slides. In one of the photo albums I grew up with, one that contained snapshots of my parents’ lives before I was born, there were a handful of pics taken in 1971 at Ontario Place, the year it opened. They’ve all got the golden tint that photos from that era have acquired — the troubles of the day seem far away as everything is muted by that gilded patina. One that always stood out is of a polyester-clad choir singing what I imagine is the old Expo ’67 Ontario anthem “A Place to Stand.” It all looked so optimistic and young, the brilliant future of Ontario and Canada. The future is old now — nearly 40 years old — and it’s easy to drift into nostalgia about a place like Ontario Place, one of those civic spaces that are nostalgia machines. Everybody of a certain not-too-old age has a memory of either romping or working around here or heard stories passed down from a baby-boomer parent of working here in the early 1970s. Yet as the Ontario government — it doesn’t seem like it, but this is a public space — is planning a major redevelopment of the area, this is no time for nostalgia. Some of the best buildings in Toronto are at risk of being swept away because the bureaucrats in charge have let Ontario Place slide into irrelevance. No offence to bureaucrats intended, but they may not be good at running things that are, well, supposed to be fun. Anybody who’s visited Ontario Place in the past decade or more knows it needs a major overhaul. It’s boring, neglected and tired. The future isn’t what it once was.