It used to be the case that cities had a habit of catching fire and burning down. Toronto had the Great Fires of 1849 and 1904. Chicago had the Great Fire of 1871. And the same can be said about many other cities. In fact, you probably weren't considered a real city until you had some sort of "Great Fire." But as Derek Thompson points out in this recent Atlantic article about urban comebacks, disasters have a way of forcing positive change:

The 21st-century city is the child of catastrophe. The comforts and infrastructure we take for granted were born of age-old afflictions: fire, flood, pestilence. Our tall buildings, our subways, our subterranean conduits, our systems for bringing water in and taking it away, our building codes and public-health regulations—all were forged in the aftermath of urban disasters by civic leaders and citizen visionaries.

As Charles Dickens famously described, British cities in the early years of the Industrial Revolution were grim and pestilential. London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds—they didn’t suffer from individual epidemics so much as from overlapping, never-ending waves of disease: influenza, typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis.

It's somewhat unfortunate, but oftentimes we need something to break before any action is taken. There's a bias toward the status quo. Otherwise, it becomes a question of, "what did we do last time? Well that worked just fine. Let's do it again." But hopefully all of this makes you at least a little optimistic about the future. Because history has taught us that when faced with adversity, we don't typically turn our back on our cities. Rather we turn around and make them better.

Photo by Tomek Baginski on Unsplash

There's an interesting debate happening online right now. A recent article by Derek Thompson (of the Atlantic) made the claim that today's urban renaissance is great for young college graduates, but not so good for kids.

Here’s a quick synopsis:

Cities have effectively traded away their children, swapping capital for kids. College graduates descend into cities, inhale fast-casual meals, emit the fumes of overwork, get washed, and bounce to smaller cities or the suburbs by the time their kids are old enough to spell.

Raising a family in the city [New York City] is just too hard. And the same could be said of pretty much every other dense and expensive urban area in the country.

Michael Lewyn (of the Touro Law Center) responded to this argument with a post titled "the myth of the childless city." While it is true that the US fertility rate is at an all-time low, the numbers -- at least some of them -- suggest that cities aren't all that childless:

Furthermore, not all urban cores are doing poorly in retaining children. Washington, D.C. had just under 32,000 children under 5 in 2010, and has over 45,000 today. In Philadelphia, the number of children under 5 increased from just over 101,000 in 2010 to 104,152 in 2018. Even in San Francisco (which, according to The Atlantic article, “has the lowest share of children of any of the largest 100 cities in the U.S.”), the number of under-5 children increased from 35,203 in 2010 to 39,722 in 2018.

What I would be curious to see is a more granular look at where children are being raised within specific cities, and how that may, or may not, be changing over time. City boundaries can be broad.

I would like to pull out one more idea from Derek Thompson’s article, What in the World Is Causing the Retail Meltdown of 2017? It is this prediction that self-driving cars could maybe become the new retail store:

“Once autonomous vehicles are cheap, safe, and plentiful, retail and logistics companies could buy up millions, seeing that cars can be stores and streets are the ultimate real estate. In fact, self-driving cars could make shopping space nearly obsolete in some areas. CVS could have hundreds of self-driving minivans stocked with merchandise roving the suburbs all day and night, ready to be summoned to somebody’s home by smartphone. A new luxury-watch brand in 2025 might not spring for an Upper East Side storefront, but maybe its autonomous showroom vehicle could circle the neighborhood, waiting to be summoned to the doorstep of a tony apartment building. Autonomous retail will create new conveniences and traffic headaches, require new regulations, and inspire new business strategies that could take even more businesses out of commercial real estate. The future of retail could be even weirder yet.”

It’s an interesting idea. And perhaps not as far fetched as it may seem. Delivery timelines are constantly being compressed. And as the purchasing data gets better, it may be possible to anticipate sales before they even happen such that you’re minimizing the amount of unsold product being hauled around.

I’m going to end here because it’s now time for some Raptors playoff basketball. But what are your thoughts?

It used to be the case that cities had a habit of catching fire and burning down. Toronto had the Great Fires of 1849 and 1904. Chicago had the Great Fire of 1871. And the same can be said about many other cities. In fact, you probably weren't considered a real city until you had some sort of "Great Fire." But as Derek Thompson points out in this recent Atlantic article about urban comebacks, disasters have a way of forcing positive change:

The 21st-century city is the child of catastrophe. The comforts and infrastructure we take for granted were born of age-old afflictions: fire, flood, pestilence. Our tall buildings, our subways, our subterranean conduits, our systems for bringing water in and taking it away, our building codes and public-health regulations—all were forged in the aftermath of urban disasters by civic leaders and citizen visionaries.

As Charles Dickens famously described, British cities in the early years of the Industrial Revolution were grim and pestilential. London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds—they didn’t suffer from individual epidemics so much as from overlapping, never-ending waves of disease: influenza, typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis.

It's somewhat unfortunate, but oftentimes we need something to break before any action is taken. There's a bias toward the status quo. Otherwise, it becomes a question of, "what did we do last time? Well that worked just fine. Let's do it again." But hopefully all of this makes you at least a little optimistic about the future. Because history has taught us that when faced with adversity, we don't typically turn our back on our cities. Rather we turn around and make them better.

Photo by Tomek Baginski on Unsplash

There's an interesting debate happening online right now. A recent article by Derek Thompson (of the Atlantic) made the claim that today's urban renaissance is great for young college graduates, but not so good for kids.

Here’s a quick synopsis:

Cities have effectively traded away their children, swapping capital for kids. College graduates descend into cities, inhale fast-casual meals, emit the fumes of overwork, get washed, and bounce to smaller cities or the suburbs by the time their kids are old enough to spell.

Raising a family in the city [New York City] is just too hard. And the same could be said of pretty much every other dense and expensive urban area in the country.

Michael Lewyn (of the Touro Law Center) responded to this argument with a post titled "the myth of the childless city." While it is true that the US fertility rate is at an all-time low, the numbers -- at least some of them -- suggest that cities aren't all that childless:

Furthermore, not all urban cores are doing poorly in retaining children. Washington, D.C. had just under 32,000 children under 5 in 2010, and has over 45,000 today. In Philadelphia, the number of children under 5 increased from just over 101,000 in 2010 to 104,152 in 2018. Even in San Francisco (which, according to The Atlantic article, “has the lowest share of children of any of the largest 100 cities in the U.S.”), the number of under-5 children increased from 35,203 in 2010 to 39,722 in 2018.

What I would be curious to see is a more granular look at where children are being raised within specific cities, and how that may, or may not, be changing over time. City boundaries can be broad.

I would like to pull out one more idea from Derek Thompson’s article, What in the World Is Causing the Retail Meltdown of 2017? It is this prediction that self-driving cars could maybe become the new retail store:

“Once autonomous vehicles are cheap, safe, and plentiful, retail and logistics companies could buy up millions, seeing that cars can be stores and streets are the ultimate real estate. In fact, self-driving cars could make shopping space nearly obsolete in some areas. CVS could have hundreds of self-driving minivans stocked with merchandise roving the suburbs all day and night, ready to be summoned to somebody’s home by smartphone. A new luxury-watch brand in 2025 might not spring for an Upper East Side storefront, but maybe its autonomous showroom vehicle could circle the neighborhood, waiting to be summoned to the doorstep of a tony apartment building. Autonomous retail will create new conveniences and traffic headaches, require new regulations, and inspire new business strategies that could take even more businesses out of commercial real estate. The future of retail could be even weirder yet.”

It’s an interesting idea. And perhaps not as far fetched as it may seem. Delivery timelines are constantly being compressed. And as the purchasing data gets better, it may be possible to anticipate sales before they even happen such that you’re minimizing the amount of unsold product being hauled around.

I’m going to end here because it’s now time for some Raptors playoff basketball. But what are your thoughts?