Kudos to Urban Toronto

For the first in a weekly spotlight on foreign projects, we're going to actually feature an entire site that has high relevance to Urban.com.au, and that site is Urban Toronto.

Urban Toronto was the first of the splinter sites that was borne out of large-scale forums like SkyscraperCity (where the owners and editors of Urban.com.au first met, developed and further expanded their interests in urbanism) or SkyscraperPage.

Whether it was frustration about not getting enough exposure to attract more of the city's residents or the lack of detailed and integrated information relating to a specific geographic region, splinter sites like Urban Toronto and Urban.com.au exist for the following reasons:

• An untapped critical mass of people who are interested in the same thing: the urban expansion of their city and the need to focus and nurture that discussion.
• Technological & financial willingness, know-how and sheer drive by the owners of these sites who seek to focus discussion & provide raw data on urbanism for their city to consume.
• Provide a platform for the whole community of that city to come together and discuss, debate, critique and ultimately project an image of how they want their city to develop over time.

This isn't a cheap shot to the aforementioned global forums, quite the contrary - without these sites Urban Toronto or Urban.com.au wouldn't exist, it's just that myself, Mark Baljak and Chris Peska, like Ed Skira on Urban Toronto sought to do what I listed in the three points above.

Urban Toronto in its current form has been live for three years and I've been lurking over there for near six-seven years - even back in its previous incarnation on the now defunct EZBoard forum structure.

You might notice that it has a similar structure to Urban.com.au - a primary editorial / news main page, a project database and a forum - that's because UT was my direct inspiration for going to Mark and Chris and saying: let's do this.

So here's to Toronto, and Urban Toronto.

I don't really need to highlight any specific project, just have a browse through the Urban Toronto Database: http://urbantoronto.ca/database

Highly recommend the forum thread that image came from and especially photos by UT members Empty_Quarter (above) and lucci.