Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Author: Brandon Donnelly

  • Drinking in the park

    There has been no shortage of prognostications about the demise of cities, offices, and a bunch of other things, as a result of this pandemic. And by now, a lot of you probably know that I think most of this is overblown. I worked in the office today, did things on my three-screen setup, and had a burrito for lunch. It was lovely. But here are a few things that I do believe will happen: Canada will continue to relax its alcohol laws in the wake of this pandemic, most if not all of these relaxations will stick after we get through this, and city life, believe it or not, will be just fine.

    Earlier this month, the City of North Vancouver council voted 6-1 in favor of allowing alcohol consumption in some parks and some public spaces this summer. The mayor believes that they are the first city in BC to pass such a bylaw and I reckon that they are among the first in Canada (Quebec is generally the most chill). One of the justifications for this change is that about 80% of residents in North Vancouver live in a multi-family dwelling. And so this is a way for people, who don’t have backyards, to have a civilized drink on some grass.

    Will our puritanical province follow suit? My bet is yes.

  • Driving, walking, and taking transit during coronavirus

    The above chart from Bloomberg City Lab shows driving, walking, and transit mobility for 12 cities during this pandemic. The data source is Apple’s mobility index, which is based on travel queries within its app. So this isn’t going to capture how everyone is moving about, but presumably it is somewhat indicative. Although I couldn’t tell you the last time I used an app to tell me where to walk. Maybe that’s just me though.

    A few things are worth point out. As we have seen before on this blog, Seattleites (do people actually use this demonym?) stopped using transit at a faster rate than most other cities in the US. And according to the above chart, they have also been slower to return to it. This has me continuing to wonder, “why is Seattle such an outlier?” Generally though, these graphs do seem to suggest that people are shying away from transit.

    Taipei looks to have fared the best out of this subset of cities, which is consistent with what has been publicly reported about its handling of the pandemic. Taipei has turned out to be an exemplar city during all of this. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that it remembers SARS and knew what to do — the least of which was to simply take it seriously at the outset.

    Image: Bloomberg City Lab

  • Guideway and Greenway

    Just northwest of the intersection of Lansdowne Avenue and Dupont Street here in Toronto, there is something known as the Davenport Diamond. It refers to the intersection of two rail lines. Going north-south is the Barrie GO corridor (regional rail service). And going east-west is a set of Canadian Pacific Railway tracks. The problem with this Diamond is that it is one of the busiest train intersections in North America and these two corridors meet at grade. So it is a problem for service levels on this corridor.

    To address this bottleneck, Metrolinx has been working on a project called the Davenport Diamond Guideway and Greenway. First and foremost, what it will do is elevate the Barrie GO corridor between Bloor Street in the south and Davenport Road in the north, allowing trains to pass over the CP tracks (rail over rail), as well as over streets like Wallace Avenue (rail over road). Metrolinx expects to have this guideway complete by spring 2023 and it will be a good thing for rail service levels across this region. Construction activity is already happening.

    But the other thing this guideway does is open up the ground (literally) for a new greenway. Metrolinx is calling this the public realm component of the project, and it expects to procure this work separately, as well as complete it only after the guideway is operational. The ETA for this is 2024. However, a design was completed for the greenway back in 2018. It was completed by gh3 — one of my favorite architecture firms in the city. And it is my understanding that this original design will be the foundation for the public realm design. Or at least, I hope it will.

    If you haven’t yet seen gh3’s design, you can check it out over here.

    Image: gh3

  • The pull toward “close-in” neighborhoods

    City Observatory has a new report out called, Youth Movement: Accelerating America’s Urban Renaissance. In it, they look at and track the number of 25 to 34-year-olds with a 4-year college degree living in “close-in neighborhoods” within the 51 largest metro areas in the United States. The first thing I asked myself when I read this was, “what’s a close-in neighborhood?” They define it as being a three mile radius centered on the CBD of each metro area. They opted for a distance-based measurement because municipal boundaries usually vary a lot and can therefore be misleading.

    So what did they discover? From 2010 to 2016, the number of young and well-educated people in central neighborhoods increased by about 32% or 1.2 million. And it happened in every single large US metro area. In 80% of these cities, the growth rate also increased compared to the period of 2000 to 2010. Overall, City Observatory believes that this demographic cohort is now about 2.5x more likely to live in a close-in neighborhood compared to other Americans. And I don’t believe that this pandemic is going to change that.

    One of the things that’s interesting about this study is that it takes you below some of the top line numbers that you might hear. For example, the above chart starts by showing you the total population living “close-in” within the top 51 metro areas — again, people living within 3 miles of a CBD. From 2000 to 2010, this population figure was more or less flat at about 9.4 million people. But the number of adults and young adults with a 4-year degree increased pretty significantly, driving up the college attainment rate. So even though the total population may not have changed, the demographic composition did.

    For a copy of the full report, click here.

  • Don’t touch that door handle

    Door handles are a funny thing these days. They are one of if not our most common point of contact with the built environment, and yet in the best of times they go largely unnoticed. And in today’s world they have flipped to become a source of anxiety. Do I really need to touch this door handle or can I maybe use my foot or elbow? Some have responded by wearing gloves. But sometimes door handles offer up clues — such as a worn finish — as to where they are most commonly touched. But then one is faced with yet another difficult dilemma: do you handle the pristine part or remain committed to the worn out part since everybody else is probably thinking what you’re thinking and searching for the unadulterated section of the handle? Who knew that opening a simple door could elicit such complexity.

    But we shouldn’t be too critical of the mighty door handle. Edwin Heathcote recently published this short history of door handles and it’s a good reminder of the design intent that has gone into them over the years and how they also came to embody our broader views about architecture. One of my favorites, of course, is the original Bauhaus door handle designed by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer c. 1922. (Pictured above, it’s currently housed on the fifth floor of the MoMA in New York.) Its lever starts out square and machine-like, but then transforms into a cylinder, exactly where you’re supposed to grip it with your hand. It is ultra minimal, but it tells you exactly what to do. It also helps us with our dilemma. Worn or not worn, the cylinder is obviously where it should be handled.

    Image: MoMA

  • Daydreaming about traveling again

    One of my favorite pastimes these days is planning out all of the places I am going to travel to once it is safe to do so and the world fully reopens. Traveling was something that I prioritized before COVID-19 and it is something that I know I will get back to sooner rather than later. But in the short-term, the travel and tourism industry is of course feeling it. According to this recent article from FT, there were 67 million fewer tourists around the world in March 2020 compared to last year. And in April, passenger demand was down even further with a 94% year-over-year decline. This is something, because globally, tourism is believed to account for about 10% of the world’s economic output. Over the last five years, 1 out of every 4 new jobs around the world was in the travel and tourism space. And for some countries, such as Cambodia, tourism accounts for over 30% of overall GDP.

    What has also happened over the last decade is that South and East Asia & Pacific has begun collecting a greater share of global tourism dollars, which is or was at about US$1.6 trillion in total. East Asia is now comparable to Europe & Central Asia — it may even be receiving a few more dollars at this point. However, there are some key differences. Tourism in Europe, more so than other region, relies on international travel. And since domestic travel is likely to recover before international travel, Europe is perhaps the most exposed in this regard. Europe also has a pretty pronounced peak. There is something magical about the Mediterranean in July and August and that is indeed when most people visit Europe (see above FT charts). Broadly speaking, the rest of the world doesn’t seem to experience this same overt seasonality. (If you think back to the start of COVID-19, you might remember that Asia’s travel “peak” usually happens in December.)

    Will international travellers feel confident enough by July and August? And if they don’t and Europe misses summer 2020, will travel plans get pushed to later in the year or will Europe need to wait for summer 2021? For me it’s feeling like a summer of road trips and local vacations. But that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about and planning for much more. My suitcase and passport are ready. What about you?

    Charts: Financial Times

  • Autonomous waste collection in Amsterdam’s canals

    Many cities around the world use underground waste containers to collect garbage. Instead of garbage being collected from individual homes and buildings, residents simply bring their waste to a nearby drop-off location, centralizing the collections process. This may not be the case in all neighborhoods, but it is being done. Ideally, and in some cases, these drop-off locations are connected through underground tubes so that the waste never actually needs to be collected.

    Amsterdam is one example of a city that has a robust network of waste bins. But access isn’t universal. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the historic city center of Amsterdam houses about 10% of the city’s population. But only a portion of these households actually have convenient access to a fixed waste receptacle. Apparently it’s because its quays along the canals aren’t all that conducive to underground waste storage. This means that garbage tends to get stored on sidewalks within the public realm.

    Researchers at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute) and MIT have been working on a solution to this problem and it involves Amsterdam’s waterways. It turns out that while most residents within the city center don’t have convenient access to a waste bin, almost all of them are within 120m of a canal. The proposed solution is called project Roboat and it involves a fleet of autonomous vessels that could serve as on-demand drop-off locations. Here’s what they might look like:

    The idea is that these garbage collectors would be dropped off and picked up by another set of autonomous “Roboats” and that the entire network could optimize itself over time as demand and usage changes. These Roboats might also serve to transport people and goods, all while they shuttle garbage around the city and perhaps even check the quality of the water in the canals. My first thought is that this sort of autonomy feels easier to execute on than autonomous cars. You have other boats to content with, but you don’t have pedestrians.

    So maybe we’ll be seeing Roboats around Amsterdam sooner rather than later.

    Image: MIT/AMS Institute

  • What’s in a street name?

    In Toronto we have a street named Avenue Road. If you’re learning about this for the first time, you might be wondering: “Well, is it an avenue or is it a road?” Then again, does that sort of distinction even matter? Does it imply certain characteristics? When I think of an avenue, I think of a broad and straight tree-lined street. And indeed, Avenue Road is connected to a street called University Avenue, which is pretty straight, broad, and has trees lining it. It’s a ceremonial kind of street that leads you toward the Ontario Legislative Building. It fits my definition. And so maybe Avenue Road is really saying, “Yeah, I know I’m not an avenue in the traditional sense, but I eventually connect into one and so I have decided to use both names.”

    It could also be the case that we haven’t always been that meticulous when naming our roads. Or perhaps we simply changed the way we designed and thought about our streets as we sprawled outward, and along with that came some name changes. In the oldest parts of Toronto, the main streets tend to be exactly that — streets. And our secondary streets are often named as avenues. This is the opposite of a place like Manhattan, where avenues are the broad north-south streets that take you downtown and uptown, and streets are the smaller east-west roads that take you across the narrower part of the island. Here there is a very clear logic. Avenues are big. Streets are small.

    Looking at this road name map of London by Giuseppe Sollazzo (click here if you can’t see it above), it’s obvious that London’s street network is pretty much the opposite of New York’s rational street grid. But you can see what appears to be a clear graduation from streets (in the center) to roads and then to some sort of melange that seems to include a bunch more avenues. They may just be street names, but they to speak to a whole host of things, including the evolution of our cities, changing attitudes toward city planning, and naturally the adoption of new kinds of mobility. They also make for nerdy maps.

  • Short Lane in Surry Hills

    Just look at these deep cantilevered balconies and this board-formed concrete. Let’s also not forget the fine-grain retail and small mid-block laneway.

    Designed by Woods Bagot for Komplete Construction, the “Short Lane” project was completed in the Surry Hills neighborhood of Sydney in 2018. It has 22 suites — each with both north and south exposure — and is about 1,900 square meters in total. So the average suite size looks to be somewhere in the range of 80 square meters.

    Here’s a peak inside:

    And here are those cantilevered balconies again:

    I have no idea what the entitlement process is in Sydney for a project like this. If you do, please share it in the comments below. But this is undoubtedly an attractive scale and type of infill housing, something that I think should be encouraged and allowed as-of-right. No multi-year rezoning process. No complicated site plan process. Just cool infill housing.

    Photos: Woods Bagot

  • Supertall drawings

    The submission documents for 1200 Bay Street — the supertall being designed by Herzog & de Meuron and Quadrangle Architects — are now publicly available through the City of Toronto’s development applications website. I went through the plans today out of curiosity. Below are the typical residential floors. The three tranches shown here are floors 19-46, 48-79, and 81-84. Note the side elevator core and the east-west shear walls — both of which I was expecting to see.

    And here are some of the main project stats:

    • Site area after laneway widening: 890.1 square meters
    • Total gross floor area (residential & non-residential): 54, 898 square meters
    • Floor space index: 61.67
    • Building height (excluding mechanical penthouse): 324 meters
    • Number of residential suites: 332
    • Vehicular parking spaces proposed: 0
    • Bicycle parking spaces proposed: 673

    As a rule and out of professional courtesy, I do not comment on other people’s projects on this blog (other than to occasionally point out awesome and ambitious projects). But I do enjoy going through drawing sets to see what others are doing and to see what I might learn. And I am similarly happy to collaborate with others who may want to learn from what we are doing.

    If you’d like to download a copy of the submission package, you can do that by entering the address over here.