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How Unique is UrbanToronto?

T

TrickyRicky

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I wanted to start a thread regarding the UrbanToronto forum itself. I've been using this site on and off for a long time and was curious how common or populated urban issue and development forums are in other cities? Do we particularly geek out on this stuff in Toronto or is it a common thing throughout North America and the world?

There certainly is a healthy interest in these subjects here backed up by a particular concentration of business and expertise in related fields of Finance, Asset Management, Real Estate, as well as consulting firms and Academics. So what do you think are we super urban and development geeks or is this normal?
 
UT is a much better place than antisocial media (such as the white lowercase sixth letter of the alphabet on a dark blue square, the cyan canary, or the white alien with red eyes).

It would be great if UT had a wiki listing every development in Toronto and UT members would be able to edit the wiki with mods having to approve each edit.
 
Also is the traffic and popularity of the site and subject matter cyclical or cultural? Regardless of how much we complain about poor design or implementation of projects the last 15 years or so has been an embarrassment of riches of developments to talk about. If we had a huge cyclical downturn the number of projects and interest could dry up considerably. I remember in the early 2000’s a proposed 30 storey condo was a substantial subject. Now I rarely even look at condo threads of any size or significance outside certain areas that are personally relevant to me.
 
I find that UrbanToronto is fairly unique in that it covers aspects of urban issues that most other Canadian forums don't cover. Usually the other forums are heavily focused on transportation and transit vehicles and not so much the infrastructure . For example there's Canadians Public Transit Board of Discussion (CPTBD) that only covers transit and transportation vehicles.

There's of course Skyscrapercity that deals with buildings, urban planning, infrastructure and transportation but that is mainly focused on an international level though there are subsections that are dedicated to local affairs. I find that the Toronto thread is usually behind the ball game on discussion and updates compared to here. In terms of forums that cater to a specific city. The only forum that I've found that is similar to UrbanToronto would be archBOSTON.org. It's almost like a mirror of UrbanToronto but for Beantown.

Other sites that cater to a specific city but not focusing on urban issues:
Chicago transit:
Chitransit.org

New York:
nyctransitforums.com

In terms of blogs that UrbanToronto produces, the only one that I've found would be dna.info which is kind of a synthesis of this forum, BlogTO and Torontoist and Spacing. Dna.info mainly covers the large American cities.

P.S. If anyone knows of a forum that covers Chicago please share! Been searching for one for a while but Google makes it hard when you combine these "Chicago, buildings, transit, architecture, and urban planning" as they are all famously synonymous with that city.
 
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I know of a few similar sites -- off the top of my head, Vibrant Victoria, Waterloo Region Connected, and Urban Melbourne (which I believe was actually inspired by Urban Toronto). I'd love to see someone put together a list of similar sites for other cities.
 
smably said:
I know of a few similar sites -- off the top of my head, Vibrant Victoria, Waterloo Region Connected, and Urban Melbourne (which I believe was actually inspired by Urban Toronto). I'd love to see someone put together a list of similar sites for other cities.
Click to expand...

Speak to @tayser - he may be able to provide you with some additional info!

AoD
 
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NYYimby.com and some similar YIMBY offshoots in other cities cover similar issues, though are typically more development- and housing-focused than UT is.
 
smably said:
I know of a few similar sites -- off the top of my head, Vibrant Victoria, Waterloo Region Connected, and Urban Melbourne (which I believe was actually inspired by Urban Toronto). I'd love to see someone put together a list of similar sites for other cities.
Click to expand...

Can confirm, UM was most definitely inspired by UT!

My late good friend/bus. partner was a walking-talking encyclopedia of dev/planning knowledge and I said to him - have a look at Urban Toronto, I need that info out of your head and put into a similar database. For us to cover the entire metropolitan area, we have to deal with 25 different councils (and their planning systems) plus the state government for the big stuff - we only started adding other cities at the start of this year (and subsequently changed the name to urban.com.au).
 
I've always thought that Urban Toronto would be a perfect site for urban community/advocacy groups to organize on, since it already has such an intense amount of knowledge on it, along with an active userbase.

As of now, it observes keenly on, but rarely partakes in the shaping of Toronto.
 
For the development news portion of UT - much of the US is covered by curbed.com. I believe they tried to enter the Toronto development news market a few years ago and eventually pulled out - UT continued to dominate. they don't have a forum section though, I don't think, and they take more of a real estate lense than Urban Toronto does.

And yes, there are often a lot of local forums that follow development. UT is one of, if not, the biggest one I know of though for a specific city.
 
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