This past week I received 2 separate invitations to talk at events about blogging as a form of city building.
The first is a Pecha Kucha talk being held here in Toronto on Tuesday, October 20th, 2015. If you’ve never heard of the Pecha Kucha movement, it’s basically all about rapid fire presentations. Each person gets 20 slides and 20 seconds for each one.
Here are the details for the upcoming Toronto event:

The second event is being held in Ottawa in the new year. I’ll write more on that closer to the date when I have more information to share.
I haven’t yet figured out exactly what I’m going to talk about at each event, but I am starting to think about a few things.
When I started writing this blog, it was intended simply as an outlet for my own city-related – and also personal – thoughts. Ultimately, the blog evolved into having its own mission, which is to promote the building of beautiful, sustainable, and globally competitive cities. And so clearly in my mind blogging was and is in fact a form of city building.
But writing is vastly different than the kind of city building I do for a living. During the day I worry about things like rental rates, building setbacks, bulkhead locations, parking counts, and a bunch of other fun stuff.
The two are certainly related, but the latter feels a lot more tangible. The result is spaces that people will occupy and buildings that will have some sort of impact on the overall built environment.
But as you all know, city building is a lot more than just bricks-and-mortar. It is political. It is emotional. It is subjective. It is ego-driven. And it is so many other things. Because of this, words do have a role to play in shaping the cities we live in. And hopefully my words are having some kind of positive impact.
At the same time, I see myself as simply part of a larger set of trends that are happening in both city building, as well as in many other sectors. Trends around transparency, decentralization, and the democratization of information.
Technology today allows us to connect at zero marginal cost. And that is empowering people like me to self-publish, people to crowdfund real estate development projects, people to crowdsource community feedback for projects, and to do many other exciting things that weren’t possible before. Without this blog, most of you reading this right now would have absolutely no idea who I am.
So I guess I kind of do know what I’m going to talk about.
The October issue of The New Yorker has an interesting piece called: Naked Cities – The death and life of urban America.
I find the article ends up rambling a bit, but I like the idea presented right at the beginning. The idea that cities can never really find equilibrium. They’re either dying, or victims of their own success.
Here’s that paragraph:
Cities can’t win. When they do well, people resent them as citadels of inequality; when they do badly, they are cesspools of hopelessness. In the seventies and eighties, the seemingly permanent urban crisis became the verdict that American civilization had passed on itself. Forty years later, cities mostly thrive, crime has been in vertiginous decline, the young cluster together in old neighborhoods, drinking more espresso per capita in Seattle than in Naples, while in San Francisco the demand for inner-city housing is so keen that one-bedroom apartments become scenes of civic conflict—and so big cities turn into hateful centers of self-absorbed privilege. We oscillate between “Taxi Driver” and “The Bonfire of the Vanities” without arriving at a stable picture of something in between.
I like this because there’s truth to it. But at the end of day, this is just one of the many challenges facing great city building.
To solve the problem of affordable housing you could just be a city in decline. But that’s not much fun. So the better option, however difficult it may be, is to figure out how to manage the negative externalities associated with winning.
On Monday evening I gave a 45 minute talk at the Rotman School to a delegation of about 70 people from Portland. The talk was about Toronto housing, but more specifically about the history and possible future of high-rise housing in this city.
Thanks to everyone who commented on my lead-up post over the weekend. It was really helpful to hear what other people in this city (as well as people not from this city) are thinking. Many of the comments also echoed my own beliefs.
The narrative I told in my presentation was about two significant, yet very different, periods of time when Toronto built more high-rise than low-rise housing. The first was our post-war suburban slab tower boom. And the second, which we are currently living through, is really the outcome of the Places to Grow Act (2005).
But as I mentioned over the weekend, the really interesting question is: what’s next?
In my view, what we are seeing today is fundamentally different than what we saw in the post-war years. Despite the fact that we were building towers then and we are also building towers now (albeit much taller ones), the ideology behind them has changed. It has gone from suburban to urban.
Toronto’s post-war towers were built upon a particular dream. The dream of getting in your car, escaping the decay of the city, whisking up the Don Valley Parkway (nobody whisks on the DVP), and being rejuvenated by all the light, air, and green space afforded to you in your Ville Radieuse.
But it turns out that people of means didn’t want that back then. They wanted a suburban house. That was the dream.
Today, however, cities are back in vogue.
Companies are moving into city centers to compete for the best talent. Retailers are moving downtown to capture disposable income. And the most pressing problems are no longer about decay and urban blight, they are about housing affordability, gentrification, and too many rich people pushing out the poor.
The narrative has changed.
So in the context of Toronto, I feel as if we are at an inflection point when it comes to housing. The multi-family dream may not have stuck decades ago, but I believe it will stick for many, though not all, today. And this will happen for a variety of reasons ranging from sheer preference to sheer necessity. The alternative is no longer an affordable bungalow on a 50′ x 150′ lot that happens to be 10 minutes from the subway.
But as a result of this shift, I also think a number of other things will happen.
Eventually, Toronto will look to loosen some of the land use restrictions on its single family neighborhoods. This could mean “gentle” low-rise intensification (new planning buzzword, take note), as well as the acceptance of laneway or accessory dwelling housing. This won’t be popular, as one person said in the comments over the weekend, but eventually the pressures will become too great.
At the same time, I think we’ll be brought full circle with respect to our suburban towers. The suburban ideals in place at the time means that many of these tower communities have relatively low densities. That represents a tremendous opportunity for this city and it’s only a matter of time before we truly figure out how to unlock them.
But for all the change and disruption that’s happening in Toronto, I think it’s also worth saying that those of us who live here should consider ourselves a lucky bunch.
One of the things I actually asked the delegation from Portland was, what struck you the most when you arrived in Toronto? The response I got was: its vibrancy.
Everywhere you walk downtown, they said, people are on the streets – walking, cycling, and hanging out. In fact, some said it’s almost hard to remember which street is which because every street seems to be so full of activity. Most North American cities do not have this kind of sustained vibrancy in the core, I was told. And so that makes us a pretty special place. We must be doing something right.
It’s easy to take those sorts of things for granted when you live somewhere. So today I’m trying to do the exact opposite of that. I’m trying to stop and appreciate the place I call home.
This past week I received 2 separate invitations to talk at events about blogging as a form of city building.
The first is a Pecha Kucha talk being held here in Toronto on Tuesday, October 20th, 2015. If you’ve never heard of the Pecha Kucha movement, it’s basically all about rapid fire presentations. Each person gets 20 slides and 20 seconds for each one.
Here are the details for the upcoming Toronto event:

The second event is being held in Ottawa in the new year. I’ll write more on that closer to the date when I have more information to share.
I haven’t yet figured out exactly what I’m going to talk about at each event, but I am starting to think about a few things.
When I started writing this blog, it was intended simply as an outlet for my own city-related – and also personal – thoughts. Ultimately, the blog evolved into having its own mission, which is to promote the building of beautiful, sustainable, and globally competitive cities. And so clearly in my mind blogging was and is in fact a form of city building.
But writing is vastly different than the kind of city building I do for a living. During the day I worry about things like rental rates, building setbacks, bulkhead locations, parking counts, and a bunch of other fun stuff.
The two are certainly related, but the latter feels a lot more tangible. The result is spaces that people will occupy and buildings that will have some sort of impact on the overall built environment.
But as you all know, city building is a lot more than just bricks-and-mortar. It is political. It is emotional. It is subjective. It is ego-driven. And it is so many other things. Because of this, words do have a role to play in shaping the cities we live in. And hopefully my words are having some kind of positive impact.
At the same time, I see myself as simply part of a larger set of trends that are happening in both city building, as well as in many other sectors. Trends around transparency, decentralization, and the democratization of information.
Technology today allows us to connect at zero marginal cost. And that is empowering people like me to self-publish, people to crowdfund real estate development projects, people to crowdsource community feedback for projects, and to do many other exciting things that weren’t possible before. Without this blog, most of you reading this right now would have absolutely no idea who I am.
So I guess I kind of do know what I’m going to talk about.
The October issue of The New Yorker has an interesting piece called: Naked Cities – The death and life of urban America.
I find the article ends up rambling a bit, but I like the idea presented right at the beginning. The idea that cities can never really find equilibrium. They’re either dying, or victims of their own success.
Here’s that paragraph:
Cities can’t win. When they do well, people resent them as citadels of inequality; when they do badly, they are cesspools of hopelessness. In the seventies and eighties, the seemingly permanent urban crisis became the verdict that American civilization had passed on itself. Forty years later, cities mostly thrive, crime has been in vertiginous decline, the young cluster together in old neighborhoods, drinking more espresso per capita in Seattle than in Naples, while in San Francisco the demand for inner-city housing is so keen that one-bedroom apartments become scenes of civic conflict—and so big cities turn into hateful centers of self-absorbed privilege. We oscillate between “Taxi Driver” and “The Bonfire of the Vanities” without arriving at a stable picture of something in between.
I like this because there’s truth to it. But at the end of day, this is just one of the many challenges facing great city building.
To solve the problem of affordable housing you could just be a city in decline. But that’s not much fun. So the better option, however difficult it may be, is to figure out how to manage the negative externalities associated with winning.
On Monday evening I gave a 45 minute talk at the Rotman School to a delegation of about 70 people from Portland. The talk was about Toronto housing, but more specifically about the history and possible future of high-rise housing in this city.
Thanks to everyone who commented on my lead-up post over the weekend. It was really helpful to hear what other people in this city (as well as people not from this city) are thinking. Many of the comments also echoed my own beliefs.
The narrative I told in my presentation was about two significant, yet very different, periods of time when Toronto built more high-rise than low-rise housing. The first was our post-war suburban slab tower boom. And the second, which we are currently living through, is really the outcome of the Places to Grow Act (2005).
But as I mentioned over the weekend, the really interesting question is: what’s next?
In my view, what we are seeing today is fundamentally different than what we saw in the post-war years. Despite the fact that we were building towers then and we are also building towers now (albeit much taller ones), the ideology behind them has changed. It has gone from suburban to urban.
Toronto’s post-war towers were built upon a particular dream. The dream of getting in your car, escaping the decay of the city, whisking up the Don Valley Parkway (nobody whisks on the DVP), and being rejuvenated by all the light, air, and green space afforded to you in your Ville Radieuse.
But it turns out that people of means didn’t want that back then. They wanted a suburban house. That was the dream.
Today, however, cities are back in vogue.
Companies are moving into city centers to compete for the best talent. Retailers are moving downtown to capture disposable income. And the most pressing problems are no longer about decay and urban blight, they are about housing affordability, gentrification, and too many rich people pushing out the poor.
The narrative has changed.
So in the context of Toronto, I feel as if we are at an inflection point when it comes to housing. The multi-family dream may not have stuck decades ago, but I believe it will stick for many, though not all, today. And this will happen for a variety of reasons ranging from sheer preference to sheer necessity. The alternative is no longer an affordable bungalow on a 50′ x 150′ lot that happens to be 10 minutes from the subway.
But as a result of this shift, I also think a number of other things will happen.
Eventually, Toronto will look to loosen some of the land use restrictions on its single family neighborhoods. This could mean “gentle” low-rise intensification (new planning buzzword, take note), as well as the acceptance of laneway or accessory dwelling housing. This won’t be popular, as one person said in the comments over the weekend, but eventually the pressures will become too great.
At the same time, I think we’ll be brought full circle with respect to our suburban towers. The suburban ideals in place at the time means that many of these tower communities have relatively low densities. That represents a tremendous opportunity for this city and it’s only a matter of time before we truly figure out how to unlock them.
But for all the change and disruption that’s happening in Toronto, I think it’s also worth saying that those of us who live here should consider ourselves a lucky bunch.
One of the things I actually asked the delegation from Portland was, what struck you the most when you arrived in Toronto? The response I got was: its vibrancy.
Everywhere you walk downtown, they said, people are on the streets – walking, cycling, and hanging out. In fact, some said it’s almost hard to remember which street is which because every street seems to be so full of activity. Most North American cities do not have this kind of sustained vibrancy in the core, I was told. And so that makes us a pretty special place. We must be doing something right.
It’s easy to take those sorts of things for granted when you live somewhere. So today I’m trying to do the exact opposite of that. I’m trying to stop and appreciate the place I call home.
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