History
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Book Review – Planning the Future of Abu Dhabi: A Canadian-Emirati Collaboration for Sustainable Urbanism
Edited by Larry Beasley and Michael White (UBC Press/On Point Press, 2026) There is a version of city-building that planners often imagine, if not quietly...
By Erick Villagomez -
The rise and fall of National Rubber
In February, 2026 a friend who lives in the Junction emailed me to report that demolition had begun at the site of the former National Rubber factory on...
By Peter MacCallum -
UCS: The First 100 (Video)
The Urban Cartoon Syndicate launched in May 2024 and reached the hundredth cartoon last week. We mark this milestone by packing them all into a one-minute...
By Urban Cartoon Syndicate -
I’m Voting for Neighbourhoods. Are You?
I believe that Vancouver is, first and foremost, a “City of Distinguished Neighbourhoods”, and that Vancouver neighbourhoods are poised to...
By scothein -
Time and the City
The city was there before you were born. It will be there after you die. And it is always changing, adapting, absorbing, and transforming, whether we plan...
By Yuval Fogelson -
Dufferin street studios, 2017-2018
Give or take a few months, the productive life of the former industrial complex at 390-440 Dufferin Street spanned 115 years. What had been a single...
By Peter MacCallum -
Book Review – American Bridge: Reinventing Building, Making History
Author: Gregory Dreicer (MIT Press, 2026) We tend to think of infrastructure as something we build. Concrete, steel, timber—assembled into roads, towers...
By Erick Villagomez -
Caste, Cities, and the Hidden Architecture of Inequality
Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents offers one of the most compelling reframings of inequality in recent public discourse. Rather...
By Erick Villagomez -
Jimmy Cliff and the roots of Toronto’s reggae scene, Part 2
“A variety of things went wrong.” The Globe’s unflattering verdict noted that Cliff was not as enthralling to watch as Marley, whose two-hour show...
By Cheryl Thompson -
Jimmy Cliff and the roots of Toronto’s reggae scene, Part 1
On November 24, 2025, Jamaican reggae legend Jimmy Cliff (né James Chambers) died at age 81. Twenty years prior, Cliff became only the fourth reggae...
By Cheryl Thompson -
Why the Trillium should find new life on the waterfront
By Toronto standards, it is a borderline miracle that the Trillium ferry is still operational. Built in 1910, two years before the Titanic, the city’s...
By Oliver Hierlihy -
Rethinking Housing Economics
“The edifice of economic theory constructed over the last two centuries, to an extent in the shadow of physics, has been refuted time and again.” �...
By Erick Villagomez