Spacing Magazine

In May 2026, as part of the Contact Photography Festival, the City of Toronto Archives opened a new didactic exhibition entitled “Subseries 58: Department of Public Works Roadway photographs.” For this exhibition, which runs until April 31, 2027, curator Paul Sharkey has taken a conceptual approach to a photo series created between 1910 and 1957 by City Photographer Arthur Goss and his successor Howard MacDonald.

See our Launch and Introduction about the launch of the © Urban Cartoon Syndicate and the announcement by CityHallWatch.

In today’s city, information and experiences find you and appear on your screens, yet the human craving for physical presence still pulls us out into the city. Words like ‘reel’, ‘short’, and ‘feed’ are very much of this moment. If they date this article about the present, that is only fitting. The Reel is Real A fifteen-second reel of a trending cube croissant from the raved about deli off Piccadilly, London hits your feed.

At this week’s City Council meeting, Mayor Olivia Chow will move a motion to develop a plan for commemorating the veteran North York city councillor Howard Moscoe, who died in late May at the age of 88. A similar motion emerged from the TTC board. All the official process notwithstanding, it seems likely and appropriate that his name and memory will be attached to the transit agency which he helmed for several years and whose operations he profoundly influenced.

Walk through a neighbourhood with someone who grew up there, and the stories start. The diner that used to be on that corner. The whole block that looked completely different. There is nostalgia in it, something close to loss, even when what is being mourned is a supermarket surrounded by a parking lot. The city changed; it is not the city they grew up in. The gap between what a place was and what it became is the past as most people carry it: personal, and real.

See our Launch and Introduction about the launch of the © Urban Cartoon Syndicate and the announcement by CityHallWatch.

As the World Cup rolls into town, Toronto is bracing for a centre-stage summer welcoming thousands of fans, players, and staff arriving to enjoy the festivals, the food, the patios, and to endure the city’s other seasonal pastime: construction Toronto is one of the most congested cities in North America, largely due to the sheer amount of ongoing construction. The city has over 750 active sites at any given time and regularly holds the North American record for most cranes.

The past feels like a caricature of itself, compressed, simplified, stripped of everything that made it complicated. The future feels like a caricature of something that exists only in our imagination or on paper. The present is the only tense we actually inhabit. It feels permanent, while it is in fact a snapshot of moving time. The past we can access through archives and photographs, through documents and memory, but it is always filtered through who we are now.

If you’ve heard people talking about Vancouver’s proposed Villages Plan and wondered what all the fuss is about, you’re not alone. The idea sounds simple enough. The City wants to create 17 “village” areas across Vancouver—small neighbourhood hubs where people can live close to shops, services, restaurants, parks, and other everyday amenities. The goal is to make it easier for people to meet many of their daily needs within a short walk, bike ride, or roll from home.

See our Launch and Introduction about the launch of the © Urban Cartoon Syndicate and the announcement by CityHallWatch. *** Related Readings: Vancouver mayor’s MLB motion: field of dreams or reality?