2003/2004 was roughly the time period when I started to become interested in development as a career. My good friend Rick Sole and I used to talk about it all the time in architecture school. How do we break into this space? There are no… Read More
This past summer, an IGA store in Montreal’s Saint-Laurent borough erected “the largest organic green roof garden in the country.” It is about 25,000 square feet and it has a soil depth of only 150mm. They also claim that it’s the first supermarket in Canada to sell… Read More
The Gehl Institute has just launched (in beta) something called the Public Life Data Protocol. It was developed by the Institute, as well as by Gehl (the practice), the Municipality of Copenhagen, the City of San Francisco, and Seattle’s Department of Transportation. The goal of… Read More
Twitter is currently experimenting with longer tweets: 280 characters instead of its famous 140. One of the reasons they are doing this (besides the obvious goal of getting people to tweet more) is because different languages require a different number of characters in order to… Read More
With Mirik Milan (Night Mayor of Amsterdam) speaking at the upcoming NXT City Symposium here in Toronto, I figured it was time to revisit the topic of night mayors. If you’re new to this topic and/or the blog, you can get yourself up to speed… Read More
Recently I’ve been seeing a number of posts/articles talking about the dot-com bubble. It seems to be driven by talk of a pending crypto bubble. Whatever the case may be, the recounts are interesting. In this one by venture capitalist Fred Wilson, he talks about… Read More
I somehow stumbled upon this transcript from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), covering a talk that architect Rem Koolhaas did at the school back in, I think, 2014. The title: “Preservation is overtaking us.” It’s all about how his firm… Read More
Houston doesn’t often get a lot of love in urbanist circles. Though since Ed Glaeser published Triumph of the City and declared Houston’s unfettered sprawl the secret sauce for housing affordability, it is now frequently held up as the shining example of why housing supply… Read More
One of the small things that I liked about living in Philadelphia was the rational way in which street addresses tended to work. Here’s an example. Let’s say you wanted to go to Brooks Brothers in Center City and you discovered that the address was… Read More
One of the things that I have been wondering lately with all of the devastation caused by hurricanes Harvey and Irma is if we need to be viewing these catastrophic incidents as the result of climate change or if we’re being too quick to apply… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 