I was listening to The Urbanist (Monocle Radio) last night while I was making dinner and there was a segment on Moscow’s “illegal retail kiosks.” These are small scale retail structures that were built without formal planning permissions and so the city decided to demolish them. … Read More
Toronto-based heritage architect Michael McClelland recently published a piece in Spacing called: Misuse of Heritage Conservation Districts can deaden both past and future. Here are a couple of snippets: The City of Toronto believes it has found a silver bullet to control development pressure in… Read More
PitchBook recently published a report looking at which universities produce the most funded founders. What they did was track founders of companies that received a first round of venture funding between January 1, 2006 and August 15, 2016. They then looked at which school they… Read More
I just backed the following project on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/991195979/n-o-r-t-h-simple-timeless-and-refined-watches/widget/card.html?v=2 It is a new watch line from two Montreal designers. The brand is called Forest Time Co. There’s so much creative talent in that city. I was immediately drawn to the focus on minimalism and on… Read More
It was just announced that the full floor 8,255 square foot penthouse in the Rafael Viñoly-designed 432 Park Avenue (New York) has closed at a sale price of USD$87.7 million. That works out to be just over $10,600 per square foot. It was purchased by Fawaz… Read More
Yesterday Andreessen Horowitz announced an investment in the startup Point. They led an $8.4 million Series A round. Point is an alternative to traditional home equity loans and HELOCs. The way it works is that you actually sell a portion of your property. Here’s an example:… Read More
In 1974, at the age of 13, Michael J. Cooper won his first sailing championship in Toronto. And at this very young age he quickly learned that if you’re good at something, people treat you better. You become influential. But the real lesson came when… Read More
I generally dislike derivative city monikers – such as the title of this blog post. But I appreciate that it quickly gets the point across. Fusion recently published an interesting article talking about how Shenzhen, China is quickly rising as the hardware innovation capital of… Read More
This past weekend was the first weekend of the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival. It’s a great time to be in the city – regardless of whether you’re into film or not. It felt as if the entire city decided not to sleep this past… Read More
The truism is that both people and companies are moving back to downtowns. We are living in an urban era. But when you really look at the data, it is clear that the suburbs are far from dead. And when it comes to companies, the way… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 