Jason Thorne
@JasonThorne_RPP
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Urbanist and City Planner (Canada)
@JasonThorne.bsky.social
Joined March 2013
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I’m excited to take on a new role as national lead for
#Stantec
’s Urban Places program. I look forward to bringing together international experts in engineering, architecture, design, planning, landscape … to create great urban places in Canadian cities!
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A micro-theatre. I love it. Every park could have one.
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Need an example of how race and class have shaped the planning and design of our cities? Robert Moses designed dozens of parkway overpasses unusually low. 9 feet at the curb. Why? So private vehicles could get to his famous Long Island beaches and parks, but buses couldn’t.
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A new “continuous sidewalk” in Kitchener. The design differs from regular sidewalks in that it doesn’t dip down to road level at intersections. It continues at an uninterrupted height. This slows cars turning onto the street + reinforces pedestrian priority thru the intersections
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The improbable town of Columbus, Indiana. A small, southern Indiana town that has more than 60 public buildings designed by a “who's who” of modern architects — Pei, Saarinen, Pelli, Meier, Weese, Venturi. (This is the 1969 local library by I.M. Pei). How did this happen? … /1
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Someone once suggested to me that the walkability of a neighbourhood could be determined based on the number of staples in the hydro poles. I always liked that idea.
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Why planning needs diverse perspectives
Touring possible commuter cycling routes
What I saw - Smooth pavement. Separate from traffic. Shade. Not too busy. Perfect.
What my female partner saw - Blind corners. No lighting. No escape routes. Too few users. Wouldn’t use this route
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For me, “depaving” is one of the most satisfying things to see happen in a city, especially in core urban areas. It ticks so many boxes. Sustainability. Livability. Resiliency. Beauty. Kudos to this hair salon (Euphoria 158) in
#HamOnt
for a great job depaving their streetfront.
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You don’t often see outward facing seats on transit vehicles, but being able to gaze out the window rather than at an ad across the aisle makes for a pretty enjoyable ride! (This is the Kuala Lumpur Monorail).
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A traffic light that only turns green if you’re driving under 30 km/hr … an intriguing experiment underway in Brossard, Quebec
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If your toilet flushed this morning. And your shower worked. It means that somewhere, city workers still went to work today
#thankthefrontlines
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Never seen anything like this before! A bike lane that continues into, and through, a shopping mall (Singapore).
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Great things are happening in
#Toronto
. This is a “before-and-after” of a beautiful streetscape transformation by Hullmark on Ossington.
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It’s amazing what great lighting can do for a streetscape.
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I think Montreal might have mastered the art of urban seating.
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Ok the Montreal one was too easy. So guess what city I’m in now, based just on this concrete waffle slab.
Just by looking at this one house, tell me what city I’m in.
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Keeping watch over his city. One of the best and most iconic murals in Canada.
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“How to use architecture to solve a problem that has nothing to do with architecture”
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Planners call it the "Popsicle Test" for a walkable, child-friendly neighbourhood. Can a child safely walk to a store, buy a popsicle, and get home before it melts?
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#Tokyo
had different architects from across the country design its new public toilets. And they’re fabulous.
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An interesting way to help people visualize what a ruin used to be.
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Triple sustainability. Wind power + cycling + recycling. A wind turbine blade re-purposed as a bike shed in Aalborg, Denmark (via
@WindEurope
)
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Vancouver ... demonstrating that you can put housing on top of just about anything.
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🎵 We’ve unpaved paradise and ripped up a parking lot 🎵
Our new downtown park is now open!
#HamOnt
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Just by looking at this one house, tell me what city I’m in.
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From highway off-ramp to urban oasis. The new Love Park in Toronto.
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It’s here! Reduced height. Reduced length. Narrower wheelbase. Tighter turning. Hamilton’s new “urban pumper” is right-sized 4 urban streets. Scaling infrastructure to the street rather than the street to the infrastructure ... thx
@HamiltonFireDep
for adding this to your fleet!
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The newest addition to the NYC waterfront … the East Midtown Greenway. I got a guided tour from my
@Stantec
colleague landscape architect Gentry Lock who was one of the project’s lead designers. She shared some of the “design-thinking" that went into the project. /1
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Tokyo bike lane … I guess some things are universal.
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It's hard to sit in Grand-Place in Brussels and even fathom that 50 years ago it was used as a parking lot.
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When you bury an expressway, you get to have swings
#Boston
#RoseKennedyGreenway
#landscapearchitecture
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“Your Place at the Table” ... one of the many public space “Oasis” on the streets of Montreal (by ADHOC Architects).
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Nice to see that Montreal is still building contemporary versions of the classic three-storey walk-up.
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A new canvas for public art? Kudos to Hamilton’s traffic operations staff for developing a new policy and guideline to allow for decorative crosswalks that was approved this week by City Council.
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“Left-Turn Calming”. New intersection curbs “harden” the centerline so drivers have to approach the opposite crosswalk at a wider angle instead of cutting across the intersection diagonally. Goal is slower turning speeds and better visibility of pedestrians.
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Imagine … taking a train from Brantford to Goderich … or from Glencoe to Strathroy … or from Palmerston to Elora … or, well, to just about anywhere.
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Cycling “The 606” in Chicago … one of the best urban walking/cycling trails in North America.
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This is great! A map that shows the grades of the streets in order to help pedestrians and cyclists plan their routes (from Queenstown, New Zealand)
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Space efficient urban waste collection. Small garbage receptacles on-street, with most of the storage underground.
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Traffic calming and climate resilience. Montréal’s famous planted boulevard bump-outs. They’re everywhere.
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“If you do not shop local there will be no local shops”
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Urban-scale working vehicles on the streets of
#Tokyo
. This is the pick-up truck of a landscape crew. And a tow truck. /1
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Crossed another one off my “urbanist bucket list.” Today I walked the Cheonggyecheon River in
#Seoul
, former site of a 12-lane expressway that was torn down in 2003 in order to daylight and restore the stream and create an urban park right through the heart of the city.
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Now THAT’S “mixed use!”
50 affordable apartments and a 1500 sq. ft. library. The new Hamilton Public
#Library
Parkdale Branch almost ready to open, integrated with the new McQuesten Lofts affordable housing project.
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Leave it to Montréal to build protective barricades in a way that still creates a pretty functional and inviting public space.
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"The mark of a grt city isn't how it treats its special places ... but how it treats its ordinary ones" Aaron Renn
#publicspace
#placemaking
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I’m very pleased to announce that Dr. Lynda Lukasik will be joining the City of Hamilton as our first Director of Climate Change Initiatives. Welcome Lynda!
#HamOnt
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Starting in the 1950s, local philanthropist J. Irwin Miller launched a program to subsidize public buildings in Columbus … he’d pay the architect’s fees as long as they were selected from his list of global architects. (This is the 1957 elementary school by Harry Weese) /2
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Not all heroes wear capes. A big shoutout to my neighbours Paul and Micah for this outstanding restoration of one of Hamilton’s 1879 “Painted Ladies”.
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The show must go on! Hamilton has approved allowing the top level of our downtown parking garage to be turned into a temporary, open air performance venue, in order to support our music and performing arts industry
#musiccity
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The local hockey rink, designed in 1958 by Harry Weese /4
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So
#cityplanners
, what’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve done when supposedly on vacation? I just paced out the public plaza at the Xunantunich Mayan ruins to see if it meets
#JanGehl
’s ideal human-scale dimensions for a
#publicspace
(it does)
#cityplannersonvacation
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Bus shelters can be beautiful. “Shelter Shift” in Athens, Georgia by architects Somewhere Studio.
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Same at all the driveways. The sidewalk and bike path continue at an uninterrupted height, so you don’t get the up-down “roller coaster effect” when you’re walking/cycling.
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Hamilton’s famous Art Crawl. Best thing about this monthly “event” is that nobody organizes it. Nobody curates the vendors. Nobody hires the performers. Nobody selects the artists. The street gets closed. And people just show up and start doing stuff.
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For the next time you hear “but we could never fit LRT on this street”
I’ve been hopping on trams, the metro & busses, and I have to say that Milan’s public transit system is great. Traveling in the city center is seamless and affordable, and that’s really how a good transit system should work.
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A “sponge park” in the heart of central Bangkok. The 102-acre Benjakitti Forest Park is capable of holding a million cubic meters of storm water.
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“Closing” as a city parking lot this week. “Re-opening” soon as a 55-unit affordable housing development
#hamont
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The result is a fascinating mix of modern architecture and high quality civic buildings that you'd normally expect to see in a major city, not a town of just 50,000 people. (This is the 1967 fire station by Robert Venturi) /3
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3 yrs ago we created a special free, temporary business licence so businesses could try out a new location, or test a new concept, with minimal risk. Great to see
@DonutMonster
use this program for their new downtown pop-up location
#hamont
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When you narrow the roadway from 3 lanes to 2, and expand the sidewalk, you get to have more patios (St. Paul Street in
#StCatharines
)
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Is it weird that this is one of my favourite things in my neighbourhood? A new traffic calming bumpout that is also a rainwater garden. Sometimes it’s the small touches!
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Hamilton’s new truck route plan will no longer allow large transport trucks to drive through the downtown, or through other parts of the lower city. New signage is going up around the city this spring. More details at
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Hey Siri, what is the opposite of hostile design?
One of my favorite works of Montreal municipal design, to aid people who collect beer cans in parks for the refundable deposits
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“Emergent Tokyo” … one of the best urban planning books I’ve read in a very long time (editorial team
@McReynoldsJoe
,
@J_Almazan_Arch
and
@saitonaoki_ug
)
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Curved corridors to limit a shooter’s sight lines. Bullet-proof glass. Concrete “bump outs” in hallways to provide hiding places. This is the new
#architecture
of American high schools
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Question for planners. Whats the most confusing planning concept to explain to ppl? One for me is that, often, infill development really only makes up for population that’s been lost due to declining household sizes, i.e. new housing is needed just to maintain current pop. level
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Beautiful! Your Place at the Table by ADHOC architectes is one of three new “TULIPs” (les Terrasses Urbaines LIbres au Public) built this fall in downtown Montreal (Photos by Raphael Thibodeau)
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Just in time for
#RemembranceDay
... a new mural in
#HamOnt
featuring the Lancaster Bomber by legendary local
#streetartist
Scott McDonald with
@burnttoastcre8v
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Got a small sliver of a lot leftover at the end of the block? A very skinny housing infill in downtown Kitchener.
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Sidewalk repair. No fancy colours. No murals. No embedded “smart technology.” This is just unsexy (but very important) urbanism that no-one usually tweets about, so I thought I would.
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Proud dad. My 16 year old daughter has done this amazing sketch of my favourite building in downtown Guelph
#futurearchitect
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A community group in
#Buffalo
has been placing these homemade “bus boxes” at bus stops around the city so
#transit
riders have a place to sit
#tacticalurbanism
#sitto
#diyurbanism
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Meet your next international “starchitect”. My youngest daughter has been accepted to
@UWaterloo
School of Architecture!
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Testing a prototype for providing simple seating at local bus stops where space is constrained. A pretty simple design. Tell us what you think
@hsr
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A Seattle twist on the Little Free Library. It’s a “Little Free Art Gallery” with mini art works by local artists (by artist Stacy Milrany)
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I like this. Real-time next-train arrival screens OUTSIDE the subway station at street level. So you know if you have to hurry or not BEFORE you start into the station!
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Abandoned as a rail corridor in the 1980s, the Dequindre Cut almost become an expressway to a new riverfront casino in the 1990s. Instead, it became one of the more impressive greenways/
#cycling
corridors of any city in North America.
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Our football stadium … nestled in a neighbourhood … rather than in the typical sea of parking.
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I’m happy to announce the creation of a new Section in my department. The small but mighty new “Placemaking, Public Art and Projects” team will be working at the interface between
#art
, public realm and
#placemaking
... and they’ve got some exciting plans for 2019!
#hamont
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Council has approved funding for our first dedicated cycle track up/down the Niagara Escarpment. It will be one of most significant pieces of cycling infrastructure ever built in
#HamOnt
. Will be named in honour of teacher Jay Keddy who was tragically killed cycling here in 2015.
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When you no longer need a second car you can turn half your driveway into a garden.
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Every planning school should have this posted over the front door
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Gentle density. Hamilton has approved new zoning to allow >75,000 low-density residential properties in the so-called “yellow belt” (approx. 2/3 of all low density properties in the city) to be converted up to a fourplex.
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Just being able to go out my front door and pop on the GO train with my bike, any time of day, any day of the week, to go for a bike ride anywhere in the Greater Toronto Area, and actually be able to get home again, is something that still blows my mind.
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Libraries today are about
#morethanjustbooks
. This is a short thread on how
#libraries
have become the new and essential urban commons of contemporary cities
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The changing face of a two block stretch of downtown Hamilton over just the last 2 years ... breathing new life into old buildings
#HamOnt
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Easy to forget how much of a departure the TD Centre was when it was built (Toronto circa 1969).
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Our parking space “pop-up patio” program has been running for a few years now. This year, some are changing to a “sidewalk bypass” design. The parking spot is used for the “bypass” so the patio can go on the sidewalk adjacent to the restaurant. Thoughts on this design?
#hamont
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It’s a go! With $3.4 billion in funding from the federal and provincial governments, Hamilton City Council has voted to proceed with construction of a new 14-km LRT line
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Artists should design all the street furniture. That's it. That's the tweet.
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Cycling the Indianapolis Cultural Trail … one of the most impressive urban
#cycling
facilities in North America.
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If you’re walking around the streets of
#Toronto
, the street might be watching you back. The
#Googlyeyes
Project by local artist
@joderoberts
has returned
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