What is the 'Toronto look'? Glass skyscrapers rise beside Victorian homes, and Brutalist apartment buildings often mark the edge of leafy ravines, creating a city of contrasts whose architectural look can only be defined by telling the story of how it came together and how it works, today, as an imperfect machine.

Shawn Micallef has been examining Toronto’s streetscapes for a decade. His psychogeographic reportages, some of which have been featured in EYE WEEKLY and Spacing magazine, situate Toronto's buildings and streets in living, breathing detail, and tell us about the people who use them; the ways, intended or otherwise, that they are being used; and how they are evolving.

Stroll celebrates Toronto's details – some subtle, others grand – at the speed of walking and, in so doing, helps us to better get to know its many neighbourhoods, taking us from well-known spots like the CN Tower and Pearson Airport to the overlooked corners of Scarborough and all the way to the end of the Leslie Street Spit in Lake Ontario.

Stroll features thirty-two walks, a flâneur manifesto, a foreword by architecture critic John Bentley Mays and dozens of hand-drawn maps by Marlena Zuber.

'Shawn Micallef looks at the city in a way we all should more often – he sees it as a living book thatis alive with stories just waiting to be told to the attentive observer. In Stroll, he gives us an introduction to just how interesting and surprisingly dramatic those stories are, and how exciting our city is when we hear them.'

– David Crombie, former mayor of Toronto

'A smart and intimate guide to the city that makes you feel like an insider from start to finish.'

– Douglas Coupland

Stroll is co-published with EYE WEEKLY.

Shawan Micallef is the author of Frontier City: Toronto on the Verge of Greatness (McClelland & Steward, 2016), Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto (Coach House, 2010), and The Trouble with Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure (Coach House, 2014). He is a weekly columnistat the Toronto Star and a senior editor and co-owner of the independent,Jane Jacobs Prize–winning magazine Spacing. Shawn teaches at the Universityof Toronto and was a 2011–12 Canadian Journalism Fellow at Massey College.In 2002, while a resident at the Canadian Film Centre’s Media Lab, heco-founded [murmur], the location-based mobile phone documentary projectthat spread to over twenty-five cities globally.

Shawn Micallef's profile page

Marlena Zuber lives and works in Toronto. She makes maps, illustrates books and magazines, produces drawings and paintings and is a member of the glam-pop indie band, Tomboyfriend. She also assists in running the non-profit art program, Creative Works Studio. In 2008, Marlena partnered with writer Stacey May Fowles to produce the illustrated novel Fear of Fighting, published by Invisible Publishing. In 2010 she completed a large series of maps and drawings for Stroll, a monograph of Toronto from a flaneur’s perspective, by Shawn Micallef, published by Coach House Books.

Marlena Zuber's profile page