DEADLINE EXTENDED TO MAY 31st Spacing magazine presents the CREATIVE MAPPING CONTEST Do you love maps? Are you an illustrator, graphic designer, or visual storyteller? Spacing wants you to submit your original creative maps inspired by a Canadian city. To date we have received an amazing assortment of submissions. But we also had a whack-load of requests for late submissions. In the spirit of openness, we've extended the deadline until the end of May. DEADLINE EXTENDED: Thursday, May 31st, 2012 COST: Free! WHAT MAKES A MAP CREATIVE (see examples at bottom of page)? The art of map-making has taken tremendous strides in the digital age. In the last decade, there has been an explosion of maps that are not necessarily meant to be used for directions, but instead are considered works of art and inspired imagination. We want you to create an illustrative map that reflects a Canadian city (or a neighbourhood, community) or is inspired by the urban elements that make up a city (examples: waterfront, transit, cycling, walking, graffiti, parks, architecture, laneways/alleys, streets, traffic, taxis, weather, sewers, infrastructure, etc....)

Guest contribution by Michael O'Shea, adapted from Parks and Excavation blog. Last month, I spent a couple of hours in an alley with three circus performers, an accordionist, and a hundred other Montréal residents. I stood around around talking, watching children play with hula hoops, and viewing slide projections of a German Bauhaus artist. Where was I? Well not in just in any ordinary alley.  I was in the Rue Jaune created by the Museum of Fine Arts, in collaboration with Sun Life Financial, and one of Montréal’s leading environmental organizations, Éco-quartier. The “yellow street” was illuminated for two ...

A note to our readers: We've recently decided to publish the Urban Planet column once a week rather than on a daily basis. This column links to blogs from around the world that deal with urban issues. If you miss the feature, you are welcome to follow any of the other Spacing Network blogs, which will continue to run the daily Urban Planet posts. At Spacing Montreal, our objective is to focus on publishing original content about Montreal's urban experience, and to become increasingly bilingual. Thanks for your understanding! Note à nos lecteurs: Nous avons récemment pris la décision de ne publier ...

Special report by Steve Charters. On Tuesday May 1, the Plateau borough held an open house in the Mile End to launch their redevelopment plan Secteur Saint-Viateur Est, the enclaved industrial buildings located between rues Saint-Laurent, MacGuire and Henri-Julien, abutting the railroad tracks.  Plans for redeveloping this area have been in the works since 2005, and are publically available on the City website (PDF). Several Borough representatives and members of the design team were on hand to discuss their proposals for the next phase of construction with ...

This week, Spacing presents five excerpts from Straphanger, the new book by Montreal-based author Taras Grescoe. The book examines the success stories, challenges, and future hurdles of 14 transit systems from across the world, including Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.   TODAY: Toronto (last excerpt) I’d always planned to end up in Toronto. After all, it was the city where I started. I was born at the old Women’s College Hospital, near Queen’s Park station on the Yonge-University line, in 1966. At the time, my parents were renting a top-floor flat in a house on Lytton Boulevard, a short stroller’s push from Yonge Street; an auspicious first address for a newborn, it turned out, as it had belonged to one of the inventors of Pablum (his widow spoon-fed me the vitamin-rich baby mush, which may explain why I never developed rickets). When I was only four years old, my parents joined the exodus to suburbia, and we moved to a cookie-cutter bungalow on a curvy street in Burlington, twenty-five miles west along the shore of Lake Ontario from Union Station. I used to wonder if this early exile from the city was the foundational trauma that led to my lifelong bias against subdivisions, but my Kodachrome-hued memories of Riverside Drive—of netting crayfish in the nearby creek, of walking to Frontenac Elementary School, and of pretending I was Bobby Orr in street hockey games—are for the most part fond, and at worst emotionally neutral. My parents tell me they bought the house as a short-term investment, but if they were hoping the suburbs would be a healthier setting than the city, they seriously misjudged Southern Ontario. Less than a mile from our carport were the multimillion-gallon storage tanks of the Oakville refinery, where British Petroleum was busy making jet fuel, and beyond a tiny stand of oaks known as Sherwood Forest Park lay the Queen Elizabeth Way—six lanes of rushing traffic that, in the days before emissions controls, must have created a formidable cancer corridor of leaded gas exhaust. My parents lasted two years in Burlington, before giving up on the land of loops-and-lollipops and bundling my sister and me onto a westbound train.