Massive Investment in Urban Communication

Toronto is investing $1 billion dollars over the next twenty years in street furniture. Street furniture include a variety of things:

We're talking bus shelters, benches, bicycle posts, garbage bins, information kiosks, newspaper boxes, and a self-cleaning, wheelchair-accessible public toilet system that rings in at $300,000 a pop.

This investment will create a huge number of sites of informal communication, as people pause, ponder, and converse. An investment on this scale will undoubtedly improve the image of the city as well.

A flickr collection provides access to a number of renderings and public documents.