Toronto Public Space Committee
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Toronto Public Space Committee
The Toronto Public Space Committee (TPSC) is a Volunteering, volunteer-run, non-profit organization located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada that defends the city’s public space from corporate and private forces, including automobiles, cars and outdoor advertising. The TPSC argues that public property, such as sidewalks, bike paths, parks, and Town square, squares, should be the independent and cultural “counterbalance” to the Profit (economics), profit-driven private sector. As a grassroots organization, the TPSC is financed almost entirely on donations, as well as various contributions in kind from its members, such as seeds and gardening tools. The TPSC uses a model of consensus decision-making at its monthly open meetings. The structure of the organization is currently undergoing a re-evaluation by its members. In 2005, TPSC was called Toronto's Best Activist Group by the local ''Now (newspaper), Now'' magazine. Campaigns The TPSC is consistently involved in local Toronto ...
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Volunteering
Volunteering is a voluntary act of an individual or group wikt:gratis, freely giving time and labor for community service. Many volunteers are specifically trained in the areas they work, such as medicine, education, or emergency rescue. Others serve on an as-needed basis, such as in response to a natural disaster. Etymology and history The verb was first recorded in 1755. It was derived from the noun ''volunteer'', in 1600, "one who offers himself for military service," from the Middle French ''voluntaire''. In the non-military sense, the word was first recorded during the 1630s. The word ''volunteering'' has more recent usage—still predominantly military—coinciding with the phrase ''community service''. In a military context, a volunteer military, volunteer army is a military body whose soldiers chose to enter service, as opposed to having been conscripted. Such volunteers do not work "for free" and are given regular pay. 19th century During this time, America expe ...
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Now (newspaper)
''Now'' (styled as ''NOW''), also known as ''NOW Magazine'' is an online publication based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Throughout most of its existence, ''Now'' was a free alternative weekly newspaper. Physical publication of ''Now'' was suspended in August 2022, and there are no current plans to resume printed publication. Publication history ''Now'' was first published on September 10, 1981, by Michael Hollett and Alice Klein."Publisher of Toronto's iconic NOW Magazine files for bankruptcy."
''blogTO'', April 1, 2022.
''NOW'' is an alternative weekly that covers news, culture, arts, and entertainment. In its printed incarnation, ''NOW'' was published 52 times a year and could be picked up in Toronto subway stations, cafes, variety st ...
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Culture Of Toronto
Toronto is the largest city of Canada and one of the most multiculturalism, multicultural cities in the world. Many immigrant cultures have brought their traditions Heritage Languages in Toronto, languages and music to Toronto. Toronto is a business-minded, conscientious, socially progressive, and pluralistic city. It is a city of many museums, theatres, festival events and sports activities. The city features many distinctive neighbourhoods bustling with activity and vitality. Many of these neighbourhoods were originally built as streetcar suburbs in the past and are still vibrant today. This is partially because of an influx of residents in the downtown caused by a large amount of new condominium construction in the city since the mid 2000s. Toronto is one of the few cities in North America to retain its historic streetcar lines. These streetcars are not touristic streetcars, but are an integral part of the transit system. This Toronto streetcar system, streetcar network crisscr ...
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Spacing (magazine)
''Spacing'' is a magazine published in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Focusing on issues affecting the public realm in Toronto and nationally (four issues each per year), ''Spacing'' was originally published by the Toronto Public Space Committee in house until it was spun off as a wholly independent magazine after the first issue. History and profile Launched in December 2003, the magazine has been critically acclaimed by ''Toronto Star'', ''The Globe and Mail'', the ''National Post'' and ''Utne Reader'' magazine, the latter of which nominated ''Spacing'' the best new title at its annual independent magazine awards in 2004, and nominated the magazine again in 2006 for Best Local Coverage and Best Design. The magazine is published three times a year. In 2006, ''Spacing'' won a Canadian National Magazine Award for "Best Editorial Package" for the 'History of our Future' issue. Noteworthy Toronto photographers Matt O'Sullivan, Rannie Turingan, Miles Storey and Sam Javanrouh, are known for ...
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Guerrilla Gardening
Guerrilla gardening is the act of gardening – raising food, plants, or flowers – on land that the gardeners do not have the legal rights to cultivate, such as abandoned sites, areas that are not being cared for, or private property. It encompasses a diverse range of people and motivations, ranging from gardeners who spill over their legal boundaries to gardeners with a political purpose, who seek to provoke change by using guerrilla gardening as a form of protest or direct action. This practice has implications for land rights and land reform; aiming to promote re-consideration of land ownership in order to assign a new purpose or reclaim land that is perceived to be in neglect or misused. Some gardeners work at night, in relative secrecy, in an effort to make the area more useful or attractive, while others garden during the day for publicity. History Two of the earliest celebrated guerrilla gardeners were Gerrard Winstanley, of the Diggers in Surrey, England (1649), ...
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Critical Mass (cycling)
Critical Mass is a form of direct action in which people meet at a set location and time and travel as a group through their neighbourhoods on bikes. The idea is for people to group together to make it safe for each other to ride bicycles through their streets, based on the old adage: ''there's safety in numbers''. Critical Mass events highlight the numbers of people who want to use their bike on the streets, but are usually unable to do so without risking their safety. They are a call to action to councils, governments and road planners to properly and thoughtfully design in the safety of all road users, including those who would prefer to walk and cycle, instead of prioritising motor traffic above all else. The event originated in 1992 in San Francisco (typically held on the last Friday of every month); by the end of 2003, the event was being held in over 300 cities around the world. Critical Mass has been described as "monthly political-protest rides", and characterized as be ...
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Culture Jamming
Culture jamming (sometimes also guerrilla communication) is a form of protest used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert media culture and its mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. It attempts to "expose the methods of domination" of mass society. Culture jamming employs techniques originally associated with Letterist International, and later Situationist International known as '' détournement.'' It uses the language and rhetoric of mainstream culture to subversively critique the social institutions that produce that culture. Tactics include editing company logos to critique the respective companies, products, or concepts they represent, or wearing fashion statements that criticize the current fashion trends by deliberately clashing with them.Boden, Sharon and Williams, Simon J. (2002) "Consumption and Emotion: The Romantic Ethic Revisited", Sociology 36(3):493–512 Culture jamming often entails using mass media to pro ...
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Billboards
A billboard (also called a hoarding in the UK and many other parts of the world) is a large outdoor advertising structure (a billing board), typically found in high-traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Billboards present large advertisements to passing pedestrians and drivers. Typically brands use billboards to build their brands or to push for their new products. The largest ordinary-sized billboards are located primarily on major highways, expressways or principal arterials, and command high-density consumer exposure (mostly to vehicular traffic). These afford greatest visibility due not only to their size, but because they allow creative "customizing" through extensions and embellishments. Posters are the other common form of billboard advertising, located mostly along primary and secondary arterial roads. Posters are a smaller format and are viewed principally by residents and commuter traffic, with some pedestrian exposure. Advertising style Billboard advertisemen ...
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Public Space
A public space is a place that is open and accessible to the general public. Roads (including the pavement), public squares, parks, and beaches are typically considered public space. To a limited extent, government buildings which are open to the public, such as public libraries, are public spaces, although they tend to have restricted areas and greater limits upon use. Although not considered public space, privately owned buildings or property visible from sidewalks and public thoroughfares may affect the public visual landscape, for example, by outdoor advertising. Recently, the concept of shared space has been advanced to enhance the experience of pedestrians in public space jointly used by automobiles and other vehicles. Public space has also become something of a touchstone for critical theory in relation to philosophy, urban geography, visual art, cultural studies, social studies and urban design. The term 'public space' is also often misconstrued to mean other things s ...
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Flowers
A flower, sometimes known as a bloom or blossom, is the reproductive structure found in flowering plants (plants of the division Angiospermae). The biological function of a flower is to facilitate reproduction, usually by providing a mechanism for the union of sperm with eggs. Flowers may facilitate outcrossing (fusion of sperm and eggs from different individuals in a population) resulting from cross-pollination or allow selfing (fusion of sperm and egg from the same flower) when self-pollination occurs. There are two types of pollination: self-pollination and cross-pollination. Self-pollination occurs when the pollen from the anther is deposited on the stigma of the same flower, or another flower on the same plant. Cross-pollination is when pollen is transferred from the anther of one flower to the stigma of another flower on a different individual of the same species. Self-pollination happens in flowers where the stamen and carpel mature at the same time, and are positione ...
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Native Plants
In biogeography, a native species is indigenous to a given region or ecosystem if its presence in that region is the result of only local natural evolution (though often popularised as "with no human intervention") during history. The term is equivalent to the concept of indigenous or autochthonous species. Every wild organism (as opposed to a domesticated organism) is known as an introduced species within the regions where it was anthropogenically introduced. If an introduced species causes substantial ecological, environmental, and/or economic damage, it may be regarded more specifically as an invasive species. The notion of nativity is often a blurred concept, as it is a function of both time and political boundaries. Over long periods of time, local conditions and migratory patterns are constantly changing as tectonic plates move, join, and split. Natural climate change (which is much slower than human-caused climate change) changes sea level, ice cover, temperature, and rai ...
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