Results tagged “ideas”

Bright and early this past Monday morning, Mayor David Miller launched the third Toronto Forum for Global Cities conference, dedicated to harnessing the economic power of large urban centres. Put on by the International Economic Forum of the Americas, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (or OECD, whose scope encompasses thirty of the world's wealthiest nations), the two-day conference at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre welcomed some of the world’s leading economists, city planners, CEOs, politicians, and economic policy makers to discuss how to restore growth in the post-bailout era. The overarching message was clear: cities have a huge role to play in leading the economic recovery, and the best way to do so is through innovation.

On Monday, Torontoist spent the day at the Toronto Innovation Showcase at City Hall, learning about data sets, queues, and civic engagement. At the top of the agenda was the unveiling of toronto.ca/open, Toronto’s new open catalogue of city data, ranging from—as Mayor Miller explained in a press release on Monday morning—"apartment inspection data to child care availability to dozens of GIS mapping data that will enable a broad range of location-based applications. And yes," he added, "our initial data offering also includes the TTC’s scheduling data."

After street artist (and Torontoist contributor) Posterchild finished philosopher flâneur Mark Kingwell's recent book, Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City, the Vandalist curator and street art advocate noticed that Kingwell's celebration of concrete and the cities built out of it missed one reverie in particular: graffiti.

What is TEDxTO? TEDxTO is what happens when you pack the Theatre Passe Muraille from wall to wall with a hand-selected group of Toronto's most eager social media types, ply them with free quinoa salad and chocolate truffles, and then give them a packed day full of presentations from noted local artists, performers, and professionals to watch, then discuss. Essentially, it's one part performance appreciation, and one part networking bacchanal. We've seen plenty of rooms worked in our day, but none of them so thoroughly, or so well. Even noted Twittermeister Mayor Miller made an appearance, and spent one of the event's two designated "conversation breaks" encircled by his followers.

Late on Tuesday afternoon, cyclists took to the stretch of Bloor Street West between Avenue Road and Bay Street (above), an impromptu mourning of Darcy Allan Sheppard, the bike courier killed along the stretch the night before. A much larger pack is expected to descend on the area on Wednesday at 5 p.m. to do it again. For a community whose more enthusiastic members took over the Gardiner on a whim last year, that stretch of Bloor should be an easy temporary conquest; activists have long wanted bike lanes there, going so far as to create the lanes there themselves.

Derek Jensen, a longtime Torontoist reader and commenter, started slowly plotting out his fantasy TTC map in the summer of 2007, while living in Seoul. In the two years since, we've featured one fantasy map from U of T architecture professor Dieter Janssen, set in 2030, and another from reader Ryan Felix, set in 2050. Jensen staked out 2040 for his, taking inspiration from not only Felix and Janssen's maps, but also other fantasy TTC maps, Transit City's real plans, and other transit systems from around the world, all to create an extraordinarily well-thought out look at the possible geography and logic of Toronto's future transit system.

TEDxTO, the independently organized TED conference focussed on "What's Next," which we previewed in July, has spent the better part of today periodically announcing their thirteen speakers and those speakers' topics for their September 10 event via—like you couldn't guess—Twitter. And while it's far too early and the topics far too broad to make anything better than make an educated guess as to how good it'll be, it's, well, looking rather good.

Well, kind of.

Just weeks after City Hall's executive committee approved yet another lengthy analysis of the future of the Gardiner Expressway, a notable design firm has introduced a fresh concept into the twenty-plus-year-old debate. At last week's tenth annual ideaCity, Les Klein, founding partner of Quadrangle Architects, called for building a green roof on top of the roadway, complete with parkland, cafés, and bike paths stretching from Dufferin Street to the Don Valley Parkway. His proposal for the Gardiner, which was met with a standing ovation, demonstrated that thinking way outside the box might be the best way to move forward from this highly cyclical discussion.

Despite all that Toronto has to offer, it is not a perfect city. Operating under the assumption that Toronto is “unfinished and full of possibility,” consulting firm OpenCity Projects uses bold design in order to create more meaningful experiences for people in the city. Its most recent endeavour, fittingly titled “Icebreakers,” tackles the communication gap between people who live in, work in, and visit Toronto.

              

Back in April, we posted about a bridge design charrette hosted by the Urban Toronto forums, and, in response to Concord's indifferent proposal to connect CityPlace and Front Street with a box truss bridge, there are now sixteen bridge designs to consider as alternatives. All of the entries adhere to the rigid guidelines outlined by GO Transit and Canadian National Railway [PDF], and most have even addressed technical feasibility, cost, safety, and ecological requirements in addition to aesthetics. Votes and comments have been pouring in, and polls will remain open until June 12, when one submission wins the "Design of Distinction" title.

Last night's Pug Awards for the city's best and worst new architecture had it all: Big buildings! Big winners! Big ideas! Big plans! And—thanks to Councillor Adam Vaughan—big awkwardness!

May is a good month to follow European football soccer, not so good to follow the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Each year, the executive committee of the Pug Awards looks to expand the scope of their initiative to further influence design in Toronto. Last week marked the introduction of PIMBY (Pug In My Backyard), an interactive and ever-evolving blueprint for growth that aims to cover as much of the city as possible. The intention of this project is to provide the general public, landowners, and city decision-makers with a framework for planning future development in the region, while promoting an ongoing dialogue about the importance of good design.

According to Anand Agarawala, computer interfaces “don’t go as deep or [aren’t] as emotionally engaging as they possibly could be.” To some, this statement may seem far-fetched and unrealistic—but ask users of Apple products how they feel about their iPhones and MacBooks, and you won’t have difficulty finding some who profess a love for these gadgets.

"Philosophers tend to focus on the 'why' of that question 'why are you here'—I wanna focus on how the here relates to the why, which is to say, why are you here, why are you some place in particular?"

When Adil Dhalla and Adam Ben-Aron think about the future, they envision a world that heralds the creativity they believe will end this recession. Inspired by a grassroots, bottom-up mentality, both men are tired of hearing about what the government can do to save people from the crisis and about how quickly the economy is deteriorating. "We're constantly hearing about banks and layoffs; there's a sense that the recession is taking a toll on us,” Dhalla said. “I like the idea of turning it around [and saying], 'Look, we can kill it.'"

            

"When I saw the January Adult [Metro]pass," artist Valentine Makhouleen wrote on his blog on Monday, "it reminded me of everything that is miserable about January in Toronto—gray skies, traffic on St. Clair, packed streetcars, unbearable cold and hospital pajamas. This mood is further reinforced by TTC through inconsistent type, bold borders, hideous out-of-place patterns, lack of a balanced grid and inconsistent spelling." The current passes, he wrote, lack "personality."

Last night, hours after the budget was announced and the day before a confidence vote could throw Canadians back into an election, over a dozen people gathered at Idée in the city's east end to change the way citizens communicated with their government, whether it be at a municipal, provincial, or federal level. Frustrated by the slow adoption of technology in collecting and tracking street-level issues, the group of developers, entrepreneurs, and communicators set out to develop an easy-to-use site for citizens to alert needs to the government and to each other. Inspired by the British site Fix My Street.com, the project, code-named Shamen, could help report problems that often get shoved to the backburner, such as a growing pothole in a decaying road or an unclear or misdirecting sign that confuses elderly citizens. (While small, these everyday problems accumulate and can create a nagging perception that the government is unable to—or unwilling to—respond to immediate issues.)

Putting together a concise biography for Severn Cullis-Suzuki is something of a daunting task. Not due to a lack of achievements, but rather because the Vancouver-born environmental and social-justice activist has an incredibly long resumé for someone not yet three decades old. There's so much there, it's hard to whittle down to size.

Photo by Jenna Marie Wakani from the NDP's Flickr photostream.

Torontoist's European bureau decamped this past weekend to the French Riviera. And you can rest assured that—between enjoying the beaches and drinking on sunny patios—we took time to consider the public transportation system.

Drivers idle their cars at the drive-thru picking up grub, at curbsides waiting to pick someone up, and on their driveways warming up their cars. (Contrary to popular belief, it's better to warm up a car by driving it slowly rather than letting it sit idle.) While idle, a car releases twice as much exhaust compared to when it is moving and wastes gas, since just ten seconds of idling uses more fuel than re-starting the engine. The impact of idling a few minutes here and there quickly accumulates to affect the environment, our wallets, and our health.

How many brands does it take to get you through the day? Jane, a pseudonymous Torontonian ad executive, sought to discover just that. She posted the results on her blog, Dear Jane Sample, in what Ad Broad later dubbed a “Brand Timeline Portrait.”

Photo of Shamez Amlani by Yvonne Bambrick.

In our inbox yesterday appeared a link to a TTC tender for consultant services, sent to us by Joe Clark (as these things tend to be). They're looking to hire someone to (emphasis ours) "provide professional architectural, engineering/design services and specialized transit services to perform the study concerning the installation of platform screen doors at 75 locations in 69 subway stations and in the six stations that will be constructed within the Spadina subway extension, as well as the documentation to allow the Commission to install a test installation in an agreed upon location."

Remember when the town crier would stand on Yonge Street and shout his hear-say and hear-ye, passing out copies of the daily news for a penny a pop? Yeah, us neither. The fast-spreading news of today is a far cry from days of old (take us for example), and we'll bet you didn't see what was coming next. But tomorrow at the corner of Queen and John, you just might.

Photo of NinjaX, by NinjaX, courtesy of NinjaX.

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