This is an interesting chart from the New York Times showing the breakdown of (real estate) uses across the largest downtowns/CBDs in the US. It was put together using satellite data and data from CoStar, including their boundary definitions for each downtown/CBD. The point of the chart is to show that some US downtowns are heavily dominated by office square footage. But if you look a bit closer, there are other interesting takeaways. Look at retail in Honolulu, hotels in Austin, and how much residential many US cities have in their CBDs.

Vancouver House is such a wonderful example of great city building. It’s an awkward site hugging the off ramps of the Granville Street bridge. It’s less than ideal.

And yet Westbank (developer) and Bjarke Ingels Group (architect) have turned it into something remarkable. The tower is incredibly unique, though it is not form for the sake of form. It is a direct result of the site’s setback constraints.

But perhaps more importantly, the project manages to activate the ground plane and underneath the off ramps through its architecture, a mix of uses (retail and office) and a giant chandelier.

So if you happen to find yourself in Vancouver, I would encourage you to visit the Beach District and do a walking tour of Vancouver House.

There’s also a great Italian restaurant in the base of the tower (Autostrada Osteria) that you should try once you’ve finished your tour.

Yonge Street divides Toronto between east and west. It's an iconic street (though it has its ups and downs). Since 2018, the City has been studying ways to redesign and improve the stretch that cuts through the middle of downtown.

It is a story that we have seen in many other cities around the world, perhaps most famously in NYC. Here is a street where pedestrians outnumber vehicles and yet we allocate more space to the latter (within a fixed ROW). This study hopes to fix that.

They've narrowed things down to four Alternative Designs (downloadable, here). All of them prioritize pedestrians, but in different ways. As of right now the preferred option is Alternative #4. It looks like this:

The section around Dundas Square (from Dundas Sq up to Edward Street) is fully pedestrianized with only emergency vehicles having access during the day. This segment has the highest pedestrian volumes. The other blocks allow for a combination of one-way and two-way vehicular traffic.

Vehicular access is obviously still important for things like loading, but it's pretty clear that the future of Yonge Street is pedestrian priority. We should probably be doing this right now. If you'd like to voice your own opinion, you can do that here until Friday, December 6, 2019.