If there is one constant thing in this city, one thing you can bet on, it's that this place is always changing. Only a city that is broken or dead doesn't change. It's the nature of the beast. People come and go and they're all relatively free to do their own thing, so they add and subtract their bits from the city. They build things, redecorate, sometimes tear things down, and make “city” all the time.

Change is funny though: once it happens, we quickly forget how things were before. It leads to a kind of geographic amnesia. What we see before us feels like it's been there forever. When the physical reminder, such as a construction crane, building permit or that fresh paint smell, disappears, it’s erased from our memory too.

The end of the year is a good time to look up and down your block, wherever that block may be, and think about what has changed. Maybe you altered it just by moving in, planting a tree in your yard, adding a satellite dish on your balcony or replacing your Ikea curtains with different Ikea curtains.

Everything we do that's in public view changes the city. It's a miraculously complicated machine we live in, with a few million people contributing to how it looks and functions as a whole. That it even seems to stay the same for a little while is a marvel.

Construction happens in our peripheral vision and we block it out because it's messy. We walk around construction sites to avoid the dust, noise or heavy trucks. Buildings go up, sometimes quite high, nearly unnoticed until people move in and suddenly the building becomes a human part of the neighbourhood. Soon we forget how long it has been there. It's just another part of the city.

It's good to remember how fundamental change is to the ebb and flow of the city, and how much we all are part of it. Forgetting this sometimes leads to opposing anything new, when “new” is the city's essential product: new people, new buildings, new culture, new stuff. Opposition to change is opposition to the city itself.

Not all change is good, of course. We've lost great heritage buildings, gained badly designed and inappropriate buildings, and, up at the edges of the 905, good farmland is unnecessarily being consumed by sprawl. But we've also absorbed many new Canadians and people from the rest of Canada; we've filled in ugly parking lots with condos, and made the city culturally deeper, economically stronger and architecturally thicker.

In a busy city it's hard to gauge how fast things change. Small towns and places referred to as “the old country” move much slower. People might be a newcomer there for decades (or forever) after moving in. In Toronto and the GTA, people blend in and belong the moment the moving truck rounds the corner and disappears. The ability to change is the great essential freedom of this city, and we can watch it happen whenever we remember to look.

Shawn Micallef writes every Friday about life in the GTA. Wander he streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef