City Space

Burning hours in an ER waiting room has long been a fact of Canada’s public health care system, but that wait time is starting to spike. Now, in Ontario it hovers at around 20 hours on average. And our cities, home to more people and more various determinants of health than anywhere else in the country, bear the brunt of it. In this episode, we’re looking at some issues that impact the growing hospital emergency room wait times: Wh...

The smart city movement — driven by the idea that we can leverage data and technology to optimize life in our cities — is attractive for many reasons. But critics say that smart cities may not be so wise, and in some cases, they’ve proven to be dangerous for democracy. In the first episode of season three, we’re doing a deep dive into this very concept: What are smart cities, and who are they for? Where has smart-city technology he...

Canadian cities are evolving – and quickly. City Space, The Globe and Mail’s future of cities podcast, is back for another season to make sense of it all. Join host Adrian Lee over the course of six episodes as he speaks with global experts and those close to home as we learn what our cities are doing right and what can be improved. Up this season: the pros and cons of a smart city, what we can do about our overwhelmed ER departmen...

If we want great cities, people from all walks of life need to be able to live in them. But even with experts predicting that rising interest rates will drive national housing prices down by as much as 23 per cent by the end of this year, most of us would still consider those adjusted prices totally unaffordable. While most of the housing crisis  conversation has centered on supply — just build build build — there’s a lot more goin...

With e-commerce largely replacing brick-and-mortar stores, how we shop is having real, physical effects on how our cities work. So in this episode, we’re looking at all things retail: As consumers, have we become addicted to convenience? How are businesses able to offer us even quicker delivery times than ever before, sometimes within even 15 minutes – and what is that doing to our main streets? What is the “last mile,” and why is ...

If you’re a white-collar worker, chances are your office setup looks different than it did before the pandemic. After our two-year-long  global experiment with remote work, many employees say there’s lots to like about it, with a number of companies now  offering hybrid workplaces. All that empty office space is going to have an effect on the rest of our cities.  In this episode, Jennifer Barrett, a senior planner with The Canadian...

Climate change isn’t just coming, it’s here. And cities are uniquely susceptible to its  effects because of their population density and infrastructure. So how can they better prepare for the increasingly  devastating impacts of the climate crisis? In this episode, we explore the concept of climate resilience — how prepared are cities to anticipate, prepare for and respond to natural disasters? We hear from Thaddeus Pawlowski,  an ...

From late January, when the first protesters’ trucks and cars piled into downtown Ottawa, to mid-February, when the Canadian government enacted emergency laws to remove them from the streets, Canada’s capital city of Ottawa was locked down. But it turns out, the reasons why the protests proved uniquely disruptive to the people who actually lived there were actually baked into the city’s very design. In the first episode of City Spa...

Soaring rent costs is a global phenomenon — and the problem is officially in Canadian cities. In 2020, the average price of rental housing in Toronto was more expensive than it was in San Francisco, London and New York. How did we get here? In this episode of City Space, we explore how the crisis in rental housing happened, how it’s affecting the people we really need in our cities, and what we can do about it.  
Adrian speaks to Ra...

A generation ago, a middle-class income could buy you a detached home in a big city. Now? Folks are finding they need to set their sights further and further away from any downtown centre if they want to hold fast to that dream. But as populations and climate emergencies rise, experts tell us that urban densification is the necessary path forward. So what do cities have to do to retain the middle-class? And how, exactly, does the m...

The 15-minute city is an urban planning concept that would see neighbourhoods designed so that day-to-day amenities are always just a short walk or bike ride away. And after living 18+ months of pandemic life, where most of us were forced to stay in our own neighbourhoods, it seems like implementing this idea in as many cities as possible will pay nothing but dividends. But while it’s popular in other parts of the world like many E...