Joe Berridge's recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail is a good reminder -- in the face of a whole lot of uncertainty -- about the resiliency of our cities.

Those previous decades saw a surge of people and jobs locating downtown, with consequent escalation in rents and prices of offices and housing. Why? Partly demographic, as the well-educated children of the baby boom reached adulthood, and partly lifestyle and work style. Young people go to big cities not just to work and live, but for sex, style, money and power. For ambition and anonymity. And for risk. All in the petri dish of downtown density. These drives have always been as powerful as their subsequent search for suburban security and community.

The structure of the modern megalopolis is not an accident – the dramatic rise of tech employment, two-earner families, the decline of manufacturing, the later date of marriage, smaller households, lifestyle consumerism, teamwork cultures, serial re-education and training – none of these societal trends looks to be diminished by COVID-19. All of them seem to prefer high-density, high-interaction environments.

For those of us in Toronto, it's also important to remember just how quickly this city region was growing pre-COVID-19. That is unlikely to change on the other side of this.

But Berridge does also point out some of the potential fallouts from this pandemic. The economics of urban transit, for example, could remain a problem for quite some time. This will strain public purses. (Car usage rebounded quickly, but transit ridership has not.)

We are also likely to see increased traffic congestion as a result of people eschewing transit (and probably a bunch of other factors). Like Berridge, I am a supporter of road/congestion pricing, and have been writing about that on this blog for many years.

The best things to tax/price are things that are generally viewed as bad and where demand is largely inelastic. That is, even if you increase the price, many or most people will probably still do it anyway. Think of things like smoking.

Up until now, Toronto hasn't had the moxie to make difficult (political) decisions like this one. Perhaps this pandemic will leave us no other choice.

I was in Montreal for the long weekend and I decided to take the time off from writing. I don't do that very often, but it was the right thing to do this past weekend.

Montreal is one of my favorite cities. I spent quite a bit of time there when I was in my early 20s and I almost ended up at McGill for my undergraduate degree. So I have a soft spot for the place.

One of my friends once described Montreal to me (and contrasted it against Toronto) by saying that it has grandeur. And I think that is exactly the right word.

There are so many moments throughout the city where you just feel its impressiveness. It's almost as if, from the very beginning, the city knew what it was destined to become.

In contrast to this, urban planner Joe Berridge has, in the past, referred to Toronto as an accidental metropolis. And I think that is a similarly accurate way of describing our city.

Sometimes in Toronto (or perhaps oftentimes, depending on who you ask), you have to scratch a little beneath the surface to find what makes Toronto a truly great city.

It's as if the city didn't know what it was destined to become, and built accordingly. Things just happened -- accidentally.

Grandeur isn't usually something that is discussed today in city planning circles. We instead talk about things like angular planes, context and, of course, building height.

But maybe it's time we rethink our list of requirements. Maybe it's time we ask ourselves: "Are we creating a city with grandeur?"

Image: Drone photo from the top of Mount Royal

Supposedly there are more than 14,000 airplanes parked around the world right now. And according to the latest numbers from IATA, this is expected to translate into an $84 billion loss for global commercial airlines in 2020. The industry is not expected to return to profitability until 2022. As a point of comparison, net profits were about $26.4 billion last year.

Some more numbers from IATA:

Here is something else from the Journal. The number of airline routes has doubled over the past two decades. That has included the number of city-to-city routes. IATA is predicting that by the end of this year we will see these urban routes decline by about 20% compared to last year. And who knows when they will return. Perhaps in 2022, along with profitability.

The reason I point this out is because if you follow the work and writing of planner Joe Berridge, you will know that he often cites airports as being a key piece of infrastructure for global cities. At one point, having a deep harbor was everything you needed in order to bring in goods and people. But today a solid airport is paramount.

Will the loss of this city-to-city connectivity have an impact on some cities?