Toronto Looks West

"In a world obsessed with starchitects and celebrity designers, Vancouver is one of few cities to have grasped that the important issue isn't architecture, but planning. It's not so much buildings as the space between them that differentiates one city from another, that makes one city attractive, another unappealing."

"In what other city would a condo be named for a planner? Certainly not in Toronto, where planning is conspicuous largely by its absence. It's easy for Torontonians to be unaware that planning can and should play a major role, that it can provide the logic, rationale and vision of a city and its future. Done properly, planning liberates architecture; done poorly, it traps design in a prison of contextual isolation and mediocrity."

"This remains a place where developers and their hired guns routinely run roughshod over planning regulations. Aided and abetted by the Ontario Municipal Board, which has no equivalent in British Columbia, they are free to ignore the city and carry on regardless. The results can be seen at every turn; thus Toronto has become a place where things rarely add up. It is less than the sum of its parts."