City Building : In The News

Invest Toronto, the division of the City of Toronto that, among other things, advises businesses looking to set up shop in Toronto or use Toronto as a homestead to further service in the North American government, announced its new Board of Directors.

Comprised of 12 citizens, the Board is responsible for providing “input and vision to the agency’s efforts to sell the City of Toronto as an ideal location for Foreign Direct Investment,” a press release said.

 

The new citizen appointees, as selected through the City of Toronto's Public Appointments Policy, include, with descriptions from the press release:

 

Robert Howard Lane, Vice-Chair, Managing partner of Robert H. Lane and Associates Inc., business advisors.

Steve Bower, Director, Director and Chair of the Finance & Audit Committee of Parkinson Society Canada and Vice-President, Programs at Financial Executives International Canada.

Matthew Corrin, Director, Founder and CEO of Freshii.

Tyler Currie, Director, Director, International Affairs for the National Hockey League Players' Association.

Keith DeGrace, Director, Vice-President of Marketing at Red Bull Canada Ltd.

Graham Henderson, Director, President of Music Canada.

Gregory Hewitt, Director, President of DHL Express (Canada) Ltd.

Aleem Kanji, Director, Manager of Government Affairs and Stakeholder Relations with the Greater Toronto Airports Authority and joins Invest Toronto's Board of Directors for a second term.

Kim Koster, Director, Principal and Brand Strategy Consultant, Koster Consulting.

Jason Leung, Director, Business Advisor on China-based development and marketing projects. He is the former Head of Audience Marketing for Microsoft Advertising.

Patricia McQuillan, Director, President and Owner of Brand Matters Inc.

Lida Preyma, Director, Director, Capital Markets Research, Global Finance, G8/G20 Research Group, PLP Group.

 

Board members are required to server on the Board for two years, plus a renewal term of two years or until their successor is appointed. Invest Toronto is chaired by Mayor Rob Ford. 

 

"I am personally delighted that we have recruited a passionate and capable group of professionals to provide Invest Toronto with their vision and guidance as we work to attract new Foreign Direct Investment into the City of Toronto," said Renato Discenza, President and CEO of Invest Toronto, in a press release. "I am very excited to have a group of dedicated volunteers steward us on our mission to sell Toronto as a business destination of choice."

 

Full profiles of the Board can be read here. 

Original Source: Invest Toronto

Tired of construction yet? The city has announced it will spend $215-million on road work this summer, including major projects expected on the Gardiner Expressway and other major routes, 680 News reports.
 

At a news conference on Monday, Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, chair of the public works and infrastructure committee, is reported as saying more than 185 kilometres of road will be resurfaced. As per the artcle in Metro, these include:

• Markham Road from Kingston Road to Lawrence Road
• Victoria Park Avenue from Eglinton Avenue to Lawrence Avenue
• Wilson Avenue from Bathurst Street to Dufferin Street
• Finch Avenue from Kipling Avenue to Highway 27
• Kipling Avenue from Bloor Street to Dixon Road

Even with this construction, not all roads will be repaired this summer.

 

"If the backlog is somewhere around $300 million and it costs $1 million a kilometre to resurface a road, that’s 300 kilometres of road that we aren’t getting to this year," says Councillor Minnan-Wong in the article.

 

Work on the Gardiner will begin in three weeks, closing the weeking of April 26 for its annual spring maintenance. “After that, three reconstruction projects begin on the western portion of the Gardiner which will cause lane closures between the Humber River and Bathurst Street throughout the summer. Some of that work won’t end until December 2016,” the article reports.
 

"We don’t have a choice of the Gardiner Expressway. It has to be fixed," Minnan-Wong is quoted as saying in the article.

 

Some projects have been moved ahead to prepare for the 2015 Pan Am Games.

 

To read the full article and for an interactive map of the planned road work, click here. 

Original source: 680 News

 

The City of Toronto announced on Monday it is implementing a new system for determining the "equity score" of the city's 140 listed neighbourhoods. No longer will neighbourhoods with low scores be called "priority neighbourhood areas," but rather under the new system it is reframed as "neighbourhood improvement areas."

 

The new system grades neighbourhoods on 15 indicators that include health, economics, political participation, and education, the Toronto Star reports. A benchmark score has been set at 42.89. Neighbourhoods falling below the line will be designated as improvement areas. It includes aspects that were not considered before, such as socioeconomic issues. 

 

"(The new version) allows us to identify and measure how people are doing in our neighbourhoods … then we can go back, year after year, to track progress," Chris Brillinger, Toronto’s executive director of social development, finance and administration, says in the article. 

 

Under the new system, several neighbourhoods previously deemed priority neighbourhoods lost that designation, while others are now considered neighbourhood improvement areas. This means those previous priority neighbourhoods will no longer have access to funding. About $12 million in capital funding has been allocated for these improvement areas, which is on par with funding priority neighbourhoods received eight years ago, but the Toronto Star reports the actual total will be much higher. 

 

Neighbourhoods such as Thorncliffe Park are now considered neighbourhood improvement areas. "The earlier criteria failed to recognize some of the genuine challenges that a community like Thorncliffe faces,” says local councillor John Parker in the article.
 

"Instead of single-parent homes, in Thorncliffe, 'many families are crowded together in dwelling units,' Parker said. 'The new approach tries to address that reality and measure exactly what’s happening on the ground,'" the Toronoto Star reported. 

 

St. Michaels Hospital's Centre for Research on Inner City Health spent the last year developing the 15 indicators for which the listed neighbourhoods are ranked.

 

For more information, read the full story here. 

Original Source: Toronto Star

Toronto climbed to third place in the annual Scorecard on Prosperity rankings, reaching its highest score yet since the Toronto Region Board of Trade began measuring cities five years ago.

 

The report compares 24 cities on a number of detailed livability and economic performance indicators to determine global leaders in overall prosperity.  Toronto, like many of the cities benchmarked, has benefited from the poor performance of other cities, but still a number of dynamics have contributed to our rise in the rankings.  

 

"In third place, Toronto moves up from sixth in Scorecard 2013, again drawing on a strong performance in labour attractiveness, and boosted by some improved economic rankings. For the second consecutive year, Toronto ranks higher than all other U.S. metros. Overall, Toronto placed third on Labour Attractiveness and 12th on Economy. It is worth pointing out that Toronto's higher composite score on the Economy is the story of resilience and economic potential but not yet the story of continued growth and momentum in absolute terms," the report states.

 

Paris maintained its number one status in part thanks to its "labour attractiveness indicators" and its status as the "world leader on air quality and cultural occupations." Calgary followed at second overall, the report cites, as the city "continues to show strong income and employment growth, while maintaining a favourable Total Tax Index."

 

Although the city still has some work to do before we can be compared to Paris, Toronto showed great strides in several areas. 

 

"Toronto's scores and ranking improved on six of the indicators; most notably on teachers per 1,000 school-age population, population with Bachelor's degrees or higher, and homicides per 100,000 population," the report says. "Toronto has been among the world leaders in the Labour Attractiveness domain, because of the region's diversity, excellent student-teacher ratio, steady population growth, and overall solid results on water and air quality."

 

To read the full report, click here.
Original Source: Toronto Region Board of Trade

"Toronto is booming, as evidenced by its chic restaurants, innovative architecture and an epic construction project that will soon see one end of the harbour lined with new museums, bars and parkland," wrote the UK-based Sunday Express earlier this week. 

 

The article, entitled Kayaking, abseiling and exploring castles: Going on an adventure in Toronto, focuses on the attraction of our waterfront, an increasingly popular feature in international reports and travel articles. The author of the article clearly came here in the summer as he documents his experiences kayaking around and exploring our islands and major attractions, but his writing suggests a changing perspective on our city as a whole. 

 

The author found himself on "quiet, residential boulevards with immaculate flowerbeds, red-brick townhouses, vintage clothes stores and tiny street stalls selling homemade maple syrup and artisan breads." These traits, often ignored in favour of typical tourist attractions such as the CN Tower, recognize that Toronto is a city rich in history and community, one that has a lot more to offer someone from out of town than Front Street.
 

Of course, it would be impossible for someone to report on Toronto without mentioning these attractions. The author went to Casa Loma and the CN Tower, while also sampling local eateries such as Auntie and Uncles on College Street and Terroni on Queen.?
 

"However, the most jaw-dropping interior has to be Frank Gehry's makeover of the Art Gallery of Toronto with its huge expanse of billowing glass, like a ship slowly passing through the city centre," The Sunday Express said.  

 

Yes, the water and imagery of water left a significant impression on the author. 

 

"The astonishing, uninterrupted view of the city's skyline is one to savour in a city which might not hit the headlines like New York and Chicago do, but still has the ability to dazzle and delight."

 

Read the full story here. 

Original Source: Sunday Express

Earlier this year, we told you about the David Suzuki Foundation's Homegrown National Park Project, an ambitious endeavor that reimagined Toronto's green space and looked at the city as an urban park. 

 

Now, Fast Company is giving the initiative some mid-winter attention, highlighting the various "park rangers" who spent the summer completing various projects from planting flowers to turning persistent potholes into gardens. The projects took place along the path of the Garrison Creek, which Fast Company refers to as a "lost river." They continue, "Like many cities, Toronto was built along streams that were eventually filled and paved once they became polluted. The Garrison, which used to be a place where people could fish for salmon or take a trip in a canoe, is still underground, but the group wanted to remind neighbours that it exists."

 

The article outlines the project's future plans, which include introducing "a new class of volunteers" later this year, and "by 2015, the Suzuki Foundation hopes to have homegrown park rangers in each of the city’s 44 wards, helping stitch together green space that connects all 3 million residents."

 

Read the full story here. 

Original source: Fast Company

How technologically sound a city is has quickly become the new standard for which cities are judged internationally. A smart city is a connected city, one that uses technology to find efficient solutions and services for its citizens. Everyone is eager to rate these cities against one another and Fast Company is the latest to have its say. The organization has named Toronto one of the 10 smartest cities in North America.

 

In an article that ran earlier this month, Fast Company reported that "by 2050, 70% of the world's population" will live in cities. It cites solutions to growing populations as a key component of the continent's smartest cities. 

 

Six key factors helped decide this year's winners. The study looked at smart people (21st century education, inclusive society, embrace creativity), smart economy (entrepreneurship and innovation, productivity, local and global interconnectedness), smart enviro (green buildings, green energy, green urban planning), smart gov (enabling supply and demand side policy, transparency and open data, ICT and eGov), smart living (healthy, safe, culturally vibrant and happy), and finally, smart mobility (mixed-model access, prioritized clean and non-motorized options, integrated ICT).

 

Here's what they said about Toronto:

 

"…Toronto continues to be a leader in Canada across several fronts. Like other major cities on this list, Toronto has continued its commitment to smart densification with its ongoing transformation of its previously contaminated waterfront area. In collaboration with IBM, Waterfront Toronto has launched phase one of newblueedge.ca to allow residents to have real-time web and mobile access to transit info and traffic congestion reports, public transit information, local weather and news reports as well as, in the near future, energy- and water-consumption data."
 

Seattle and Boston tied this year for the title of North America's smartest city. Seattle's startup scene and Boston's numerous universities were key factors.

 

For the full list of North America's smartest cities, click here. 

Original Source: Fast Company

Toronto is the most youthful city in the world, according to a new report that compares cities globally and ranks them according to the potential for work and play.

 

The Youthful Cities Index rates cities on an annual basis and looks at economic status (high minimum wage, good annual income, affordable housing), political participation (voting age, youth voter turnout, volunteer opportunities), diversity (openness to LGBT communities, immigrants, different religions), employment (youth employment rates, employment rates post-graduation and student debt levels), encouragement of entrepreneurship (startup loans, age to register a business) and dozens more categories, as well as 112 indicators.  

 

In an article that appeared on Global News, Robert Barnard, the co-founder of Youthful Cities, said Toronto is "a city that’s amongst the most diverse in the world. It’s got a great film and music scene and it’s on the leading edge of things like digital access. On an economic standpoint, it’s a pretty good place even up against its American competition."

 

Berlin, New York City, Dallas and Paris followed Toronto in that order. Although Toronto's youth unemployment rate is at a high, when it comes to other aspects of the city Toronto is an international leader. 
 

"The excitement comes from the diversity and the playful aspects of Toronto. And there’s balance to it – overall it seemed to do pretty well in everything," Barnard said.
 

Read full story here. 

Original Source: Global News

For the second year in a row, the Intelligent Communities Forum (ICF) has named Toronto as one of the world's 21 smartest communities. ICF looks at communities around the world and grades them based on how broadband infrastructure and IT builds economies and improves the lives of local citizens. 

 

The list will be whittled down to seven finalists to be announced in January. The winner will be announced on June 6, 2014 at a ceremony in New York City.

 

Toronto secured a spot in the top seven last year, but it was Taichung, Taiwan that came out on top. 

 

"One of the major reasons for Toronto’s claim to the title is because of Waterfront Toronto, which has launched several intelligent community programs," said an article that ran on itbusiness.ca. The article cites Waterfront's various accomplishments including building a cloud-based community platform that allows businesses and residents access to data "they can use it to make decisions about daily commutes, residents' health, energy, and water use."

 

In addition to Waterfront Toronto, the City of Toronto also named digital programs such as Kids@Computers and Connected For Success, as well as the Centre for Social Innovation and the Digital Media Zone at Ryerson University in its application. 

 

Read the full story here. 

Original Source: IT Business

 

When Detroit filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, it forced many cities to reevaluate the economics of their regions. The Martin Prosperity Institute has compiled the first of many reports to come comparing Detroit, Toronto and Chicago.

The institute is "the world's leading think-tank on sub national factors—location, place and city regions—in global economic prosperity." It operates out of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. The reports will look at a variety of attributes. The first explored household incomes across the cities and was released last Friday ahead of the Toronto-Detroit symposium, an event that looked at Detroit and Toronto as Drivers for Healthy Cities. 

 

The report analyzes the three cities in terms of areas where household income falls below the national average (red) and areas where it is above the national average (green).

Here is a key finding from the report:

 

"From first glance, it is clear that fewer tracts within the Toronto metro have an average household income lower than the national average, especially when compared to Detroit and Chicago. Despite this though, there is once again a reoccurring trend, in which most of the tracts with average household incomes below the national average are found within the city itself. Outside of the City of Toronto there are almost no tracts shaded red. As in Chicago, many of the tracts with below average household incomes are in the inner suburbs, and take up a large amount of space geographically. The red tracts in Toronto make up for 36% of the total land in the city. This is a significant amount of the city, but not as large as in Chicago and nowhere near the same amount as in Detroit. As this map presents, the Toronto metro and City of Toronto are generally better off than the rest of Canada, and although income inequality in Toronto has been discussed to great lengths, this map displays that in relation to the national average, Toronto performs much better than other large cities."

We will continue to report on key findings from forthcoming insights.

 

Read the full report here. 

Original source: Martin Prosperity Institute

 

A group of Canadian architects and not-profits have teamed up to tackle the issue of the city's aging postwar highrises. "The effort dubbed Tower Renewal that is taking root in Toronto proposes fixes on many fronts, from energy efficiency to economic development. If that renewal works, much of our biggest city, and the lives of more than a million Canadians, will be transformed for the better," an article in the Globe and Mail reports.

 

This fall, the City of Toronto launches "a new program to finance green renovations and repairs in these buildings," which coincides with a recent symposium hosted by he Toronto and Dutch consulate called "Enabling Cities to Grow Green." The symposium looked at new zoning changes designed to improve neighbourhoods, "many of them needy."

 

But there are a number of challenges. For one, says Graeme Stewart of ERA Architects in Toronto, Canadians need to realize the significance of our towers. Toronto has the second largest number of apartment towers in North America housing some one million people. They're not beautiful, modeled after European-style regional planning.

 

Today, these buildings are 50 years old and in need of maintenance. The maintenance isn't the problem, the locations are. "The issue is how they were placed in the city and in the landscape. Modernist planning deliberately kept them away from sources of employment, retail hubs and decent transit, and they were surrounded by vaguely defined spaces which created an unpleasant no-man’s-land condition," the article reports.

 

Tower Renewal will look to how European cities have rebuilt and renovated their apartment towers.

 

"To renew a neighbourhood of towers… it is important to activate the street with pedestrian-friendly retail and community uses – to make these car-oriented neighbourhoods more walkable and mixed." A similar sentiment was echoed in this week's Vital Signs report. 

 

Read the full story here. 

Original source: The Globe and Mail

Have you seen the Lovebots? These child-sized concrete robots have been popping up around the city in areas where people and companies have done good deeds. You can see them at Nadège Patisserie, Atomic Toybot, and various other locations. By the time the invasion is complete, 100 Lovebots will be spread around the city and surrounding area.

 

“The whole idea was that we’re not just faceless robots who don’t talk to each other on the bus. We all have big hearts. I wanted to make a symbol that represented the people in this city," creator Matthew Del Degan told Samaritan Magazine. 

 

Del Degan is in his fifth and final year of industrial design studies at OCAD and originally created a toy version of the Lovebot for a class project. He loved it so much, and the response was so positive, he decided to make it something bigger.

 

People submit "love letters" via Lovebot.com, an interactive map-based platform that not only displays the locations of current Lovebots, but also encourages others to do good deeds in the name of kindness and love. These love letters are used to decide where to place the Lovebots, in places where people have done charitable deeds or simply been good people. 

 

Del Degan has big plans. In another article, he talks about wanting to take the Lovebot invasion global, but in Samaritan Magazine he discusses his desire to make the Lovebots more of a permanent fixture in Toronto.

 

“There’s this giant robot I want to make. I can make it a monument in Toronto,” he says. “If you had a giant robot in your city, it would be a cool thing to come and see. I want the project at the core to be from Toronto because the cement robots sprung out of the city, the ‘cement jungle."

 

Read the full story here. 

Original source: Samaritan Mag

The fifth annual TEDxToronto conference took place October 26 at the Royal Conservatory of Music. It's one of the largest independently organized TEDx events in the world and, according to a highlight report that ran in BlogTO, approximately 1,000 hand-chosen delegates attended. 

 

Among the highlights listed, a flash mob ukulele performance by the Ukulele Gangsters, which took place at the beginning of the conference.

 

Highlights that would be of particular interest to Yonge Street readers included Darrell Bricker, the former Director of Research for the Prime Ministers office. "Bricker has always tried to use numbers to tell the story behind the scenes. He spoke at length about the manner in which power is shifting from the 416 to the 905, which is redefining both our city and the GTA as a whole," BlogTO wrote. "Another key subject he discussed was the shrinking Canadian birth rate, which is going to make it extremely tough to support the aging population."

 

Also, Joel MacCharles, who has "been helping to foster the farmer's market movement in Toronto. By teaching people the benefits of preserving food and eating locally, Joel has altered kitchens around Toronto with some of his 1,700 articles on food-related topics," the article says. 

 

Also Steve Mann, considered the "father of wearable computers" for his Google Glass-like inventions dating back to the 1970s. "Mann is a believer in wearing personal cameras to ensure his own safety in what he calls sousveillance," BlogTO summarizes. "Mann combined his discussion on safety with the shooting of Sammy Yatim, stating that videos taken by people outside the streetcar were a strong factor leading to the officer being charged. He also believes everyone should be able to record their entire life, because if buildings and businesses are allowed to record us at all times, why aren't we allowed to record them in return?"

 

Not mentioned in the highlight reel was Gabrielle Scrimshaw's talk about how now, more than ever, is the time to pay attention to Aboriginal issues as more than half the Aboriginal population is under 25 and gearing up to enter the workforce. Background on Scrimshaw and her work can be found in this feature Yonge Street ran in Decemebr of last year.

 

The talks will be made available in the coming weeks. In the meantime, the introductory video explaining Toronto's history is a must watch.

 

 

Read the full story here. 

Source: BlogTO

Speaker applications are now open for women interested in channeling "the bootstrap spirit of Silicon Valley to celebrate invention in all its forms." The event is the first of its kind, designed to "provide a platform or women to share ideas, inspired new modes of understanding and be a catalyst of change," the website says.

 

The conference will focus not just on technology and objects, but "also solutions to poverty; approaches to peacemaking; expressions of art, and, at times, our own lives." More then 150 independently organized TEDx events will take place simultaneously exploring the theme of "Invented Here." 

 

"The result: A truly global conversation—from San Francisco to São Paulo to Toronto's Distillery District—celebrating inventors and designers; thinkers and makers; local problem-solvers and global leaders."

 

The event will be held on December 5th, 2013 and the deadline to apply to be a speakers is October 15th, 2013.

 

For more information, click here. 

Source: TEDxDistilleryDistrictWomen

 

The Toronto International Film Festival wrapped almost two weeks ago now, but the reviews and accounts continue to poor in. Buried among them, this story from the BBC that examines why TIFF matters.

 

"Since it was first held in 1976 the festival has grown exponentially, aided in part by its apposite positioning at what is widely considered the onset of the annual film awards season," BBC writes. 
 

The article states TIFF's position in September makes it a jumping point for film season. It continues, "A positive response in Toronto in September can get the ball rolling on an awards campaign that could result in that most coveted of accolades - an Academy Award - at the end of the following February."

"Toronto has become this extraordinary platform for many of the most serious films by some of the greatest film-makers in the world," says British actor Tom Hiddleston, who stars as Loki in the Avengers and Thor: the Dark World. 
 

That TIFF asks its "passionate," "intelligent," and "literate" audience to determine the top selection of films—and not, as is in other festivals, a jury—shows that this is a city dedicated to film, the article reports, and not the glamour and fashion of other film fests.

The "behemoth" size of the film festival both draws and dissuades its attendees. The challenge comes in making sure each film gets the proper promotion—and ensuring viewers arrive early enough to catch a screening. 

Read the full story here. 
Original Source: BBC