Lunchtime brings Bangkok’s street vendors out in force, especially in the business districts like Asoke Road. That’s where I spotted this woman selling dried fish with some stale-looking limes. When she was approached by a customer, she would sit down on the plastic stool she carried around and handle the fish.

Kohei Yoshiyuki was walking through a Tokyo park one night in the early 1970s when he noticed people having sex in the bushes. Then he noticed people spying on the people having sex. That must have been when he decided to get his camera. Using infrared film and flash, Yoshiyuki followed and surreptitiously photographed the [...]

To earn their hackney license, London’s taxi drivers must all famously master “The Knowledge,” a vast compilation of raw data about the best routes through the city’s streets. The memorization process takes an average of 34 months to study — and 12 attempts to pass. That means it’s a safe bet few licensed London cabbies [...]

It’s easy to spot Mary Ann O’Donnell in a Shenzhen crowd. She’s the one wearing a pink-and-orange linen scarf and flowing dress. She’s also white — a rather rare sight in a wealthy city that is still off the radar of the roving crowd of expatriates that have settled in Shanghai and Beijing. Don’t let [...]

“La Mona” by Armando Muñoz García, Tijuana An alley off Avenue Revolution, Tijuana

In 2008, Carmine Starnino, poet and now editor of Maisonneuve magazine, asked me to write an essay on the future of Canadian cities for an issue of Canadian Notes and Queries he was guest-editing. Here’s what I came up with. Some days, on the corner of Clark and de la Gauchetière in Montreal, you’ll find a [...]

DCORBEIL | Rose sur Azur DCORBEIL | Bloody morning DCORBEIL | The bodyguard DCORBEIL | Mercato della fiera DCORBEIL | Bongiornio ! DCORBEIL | Bored DCORBEIL | Africa sulla Piazza Stesicoro DCORBEIL | Pendus par les pieds DCORBEIL | Olio e olive ALL PICTURES TAKEN IN CATANIA, SICILY, 2007-2008 Daniel Corbeil is a planner and designer who lives in Montreal.

Nothing embodies the way India is modernising like the Delhi Metro. Opened in 2002, the system’s clean, marble floored stations and smooth, linked-carriage trains rival those of the most developed cities across the road. The network has changed city life. Destinations that once took hours to get to on the traffic clogged roads can now be [...]

The bridge where Summer Street crosses over A is literally the bowels of Fort Point, the shadowy bottom of a neighborhood where buildings reach different heights depending where they meet the grade of the street. In October, the underside of the bridge was covered in rainbow-colored, neon slinkys. Closer to the holiday season, it was [...]

Last October I moved to a new apartment — and with a new apartment comes to a new roof to explore. Unfortunately, my new building’s rooftop is far from spacious, with just two narrow platforms accessible through the fire stairs. Ladders lead up to two higher platforms, one atop the elevator shaft and another on [...]

In a winter marked by rallies and protests, young people unhappy with Hong Kong’s government are taking to the streets in more ways than one. Over the past year, Hong Kong’s street artists have left their mark with posters, stickers and stencil graffiti that attack some of the city’s most prominent politicians and business leaders. [...]

Photo by Vyacheslav Argenberg / VascoPlanet It’s two in the morning on Talaat Harb Street, the heart of downtown Cairo, and the sidewalks are sclerotic. People shuffle slowly past shop windows exploding with merchandise. An intense white light beams across the thoroughfare. Avoiding hawkers thrusting t-shirts in their faces, trying to lure them to clothes and [...]

New York is yellow, London black, Hong Kong red (and green and blue, but let’s not complicate things). What colour will Montreal be? After years of wrangling with the taxi commission, Montreal’s government has finally reached an agreement that will see all of the city’s taxis adopt a uniform livery. The transition could be complete [...]

Last year, after returning from Montreal, I posted about a Mile End alley with a strange name that doesn’t appear anywhere in the city’s official toponymical records. Nobody has yet come forward with an answer as to how Swiss Lane got its name, but one Flickr user, DubyDub2009, did a bit of extra research and [...]

Photographed a couple years ago while en route to Calgary from Pearson International Airport in Toronto. I love how the pilot’s silhouette is so well defined and yet the idea of multiple existences in time and space is very much alive. If you’re viewing with a calibrated display you’ll enjoy subtleties like aqua pastel [...]

It’s a drizzly, damp 10 degrees in Hong Kong right now. Not ideal for going to the beach. By mid-May, though, when the variable weather of spring gives way to the muggy heat of summer, places like Shek O will beckon once again.

Theatre patrons, Toronto, 2004

With the Olympics industry a-churning and global media attention now devoted to Vancouver, at least for the next two weeks, this tilt-shift time-lapse video might make a good introduction to the city for those who know nothing about it. Unfortunately, it lacks the wit and narrative drive of Keith Loutit’s similar videos of Sydney, and [...]

I’ve never seen anyone get so angry over flowers. It’s tradition to buy flowers in advance of the Chinese New Year, a festival that celebrates renewal as one lunar year gives way to another. Last year, when I was living in the Mongkok Flower Market, I watched as traffic became more and more snarled as [...]