The Parallel City: Rethinking the Urban Laneway
Cities tend to describe themselves through their most visible parts. Main streets, centres, and corridors carry the language of growth, while neighbourhood interiors are framed through stability and protection. Between these categories lies a quieter set of spaces that do not fit easily within either frame. Mixed-use laneways are one such condition.
The Parallel City examines what happens when planning systems encounter these spaces directly. For decades, laneways have functioned primarily as service infrastructure — spaces for access, utilities, storage, and the routine maintenance that allows front streets to operate as places. Yet small-scale economic and operational uses have gradually accumulated within them: workshops, studios, storage, and localized commercial activity.
Rather than proposing a universal framework for laneway activation, the book documents a recurring pattern: spaces that function in practice but remain institutionally unsettled.
The aim is not to resolve those tensions, but to make them easier to see.