Last week’s Creative Places + Spaces conference was but one example of the kind of event this new media age hath wrought: so much to talk about, if just because everybody privileged enough to pay attention can end up feeling like they run this town. No wonder the mayor who presided over the city as such events emerged figures his work is just about done. Cp+S brought together gregarious culture guru Sir Ken Robinson, mass nude photographer Spencer Tunick and Cirque du Soleil executive producer Lyn Heward — plus local neighbourhood watcher Richard Florida — to collectively say what sounded like nothing anyone would disagree with. And you know this because, if nothing else comes out of these events, there will be meticulously detailed reports scattered online.

Announced from the Carlu stage of CP+S: HIGHRISE, a long-term National Film Board documentary project about vertical suburbs, overseen by senior producer Gerry Flahive. This global endeavour is fittingly based in this town, where mostly negative notions of inner city living have been transposed to concrete stacks in the outskirts — althouh, by the time they’re done sampling stories from around the world, those waterfront CityPlace condos may have reached their full potential as a seedy slum.

“Building a city that thinks like the web” was the credo of the Toronto Innovation Showcase earlier this week at City Hall. Feeding into the post-Web 2.0 feeling that even the most basic municipal data has gotta serve somebody, a familiar clique of contract-seeking developers assembled to hash out ideas of what to do with it, making the initiative’s champion Mayor David Miller feel a little more hip. This is, after all, the same bureaucracy not five months removed from its turn as an internet laughing stock for Photoshopping a black guy on the cover of their Fun Guide in the name of diversity. But, for all the information they’ve been given the opportunity to figure out applications for, the freelance web monkeys still have yet to successfully wrestle much data away from the TTC.