I jus pre-ordered a copy of Edward Glaeser and David Cutler's new book called, Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation. (I'm usually a hard copy kind of guy, but I decided to try this one out on Kindle / my iPad). The official release date is September 7, 2021, so if you're reading this post in your inbox, the book is now available online.

I'm not familiar with the writing of David Cutler (he's a public health expert), but I am a follower of Edward Glaeser and have written about his work on a number of occasions. Glaeser's last book, Triumph of the City, was a kind of celebration of the wonders of urbanism. After reading it, you couldn't help but feel that cities are our best chance at creating healthy, sustainable, and wealthy communities.

But in listening to Glaeser throughout this pandemic I have noticed that his commentary on the future of cities hasn't been filled with unbridled optimism. You get the sense from him that cities are at a crossroads. This is not to say that city life will not persist, because it will. Cities are powerfully resilient. But not all cities are created equal. Some will continue to flourish in this new economy, but others will not.

This is one of the arguments that they make in this new book and I'm looking forward to reading it once it lands in my Kindle app.

I just backed this project on Kickstarter.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wmougayar/the-business-blockchain-books/widget/card.html?v=2

I haven’t backed a lot of projects on Kickstarter, but I definitely enjoy the process of discovering a project that I’m interested in and then providing a small, seemingly insignificant, sum of money to help make it a reality.

In this case, it’s a collection of two books by William Mougayar about Bitcoin, blockchains, cryptocurrency, and decentralization.

These are all topics that I’ve touched on before on this blog, albeit with much less rigor than what I’m sure William will be applying to his books. I wrote this post about 2 years ago, when I first started wrapping my head around Bitcoin. And more recently, I wrote posts about how the blockchain could transform home buying and how Honduras is building a decentralized land registry system using the blockchain technology.

So while at first glance it may seem like these books having nothing at all to do with city building and real estate, I am betting that they will over the long term, which is why I am doing my homework today.

Here’s a snippet from William’s Kickstarter page:

“The fundamental characteristics of blockchains are puzzling to consumers, corporations, governments, policy makers and regulators, because their implementation challenges centrally orchestrated trust, and enables a new kind of trust: one that is distributed, decentralized, from peer to peer, and not centrally managed by any single entity. Take any service, and add “without previous center-based authority”, and replace by “peer to peer, trust-based network”, and you will start to imagine the possibilities.”

If all of this isn’t enough to pique your interest, then you should also know that William is from Toronto. Great things come out of this city :)

I’m reading a great book right now called Tech and the City. I’m only 31% of the way through it (according to my Kindle app), but already it’s been an interesting read. It’s about the making and rise of New York City as a technology and startup hub – which, is fairly recent phenomenon. There aren’t too many cases where New York plays second or third city, but tech is one of those instances. Silicon Valley dominates.

The book talks about the deliberate efforts that were made, by the Bloomberg administration as well by many others, to diversify New York’s economy away from financial services and towards technology, startups, and entrepreneurship. It gives you all the backstory about the rise of Silicon Alley in the 90s, its subsequent crash in the dot com era, and all the players involved. And yes the reference to Sex and the City is both on purpose and explicit throughout the book.

But at a time where cities all around the world are trying to replicate the success of Silicon Valley, the takeaways from this book are perhaps universally applicable. It certainly got me wondering if, here in Toronto, we’re doing enough to prepare our city to dominate in the 21st century.

Image: Stephen Wilkes

I jus pre-ordered a copy of Edward Glaeser and David Cutler's new book called, Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation. (I'm usually a hard copy kind of guy, but I decided to try this one out on Kindle / my iPad). The official release date is September 7, 2021, so if you're reading this post in your inbox, the book is now available online.

I'm not familiar with the writing of David Cutler (he's a public health expert), but I am a follower of Edward Glaeser and have written about his work on a number of occasions. Glaeser's last book, Triumph of the City, was a kind of celebration of the wonders of urbanism. After reading it, you couldn't help but feel that cities are our best chance at creating healthy, sustainable, and wealthy communities.

But in listening to Glaeser throughout this pandemic I have noticed that his commentary on the future of cities hasn't been filled with unbridled optimism. You get the sense from him that cities are at a crossroads. This is not to say that city life will not persist, because it will. Cities are powerfully resilient. But not all cities are created equal. Some will continue to flourish in this new economy, but others will not.

This is one of the arguments that they make in this new book and I'm looking forward to reading it once it lands in my Kindle app.

I just backed this project on Kickstarter.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wmougayar/the-business-blockchain-books/widget/card.html?v=2

I haven’t backed a lot of projects on Kickstarter, but I definitely enjoy the process of discovering a project that I’m interested in and then providing a small, seemingly insignificant, sum of money to help make it a reality.

In this case, it’s a collection of two books by William Mougayar about Bitcoin, blockchains, cryptocurrency, and decentralization.

These are all topics that I’ve touched on before on this blog, albeit with much less rigor than what I’m sure William will be applying to his books. I wrote this post about 2 years ago, when I first started wrapping my head around Bitcoin. And more recently, I wrote posts about how the blockchain could transform home buying and how Honduras is building a decentralized land registry system using the blockchain technology.

So while at first glance it may seem like these books having nothing at all to do with city building and real estate, I am betting that they will over the long term, which is why I am doing my homework today.

Here’s a snippet from William’s Kickstarter page:

“The fundamental characteristics of blockchains are puzzling to consumers, corporations, governments, policy makers and regulators, because their implementation challenges centrally orchestrated trust, and enables a new kind of trust: one that is distributed, decentralized, from peer to peer, and not centrally managed by any single entity. Take any service, and add “without previous center-based authority”, and replace by “peer to peer, trust-based network”, and you will start to imagine the possibilities.”

If all of this isn’t enough to pique your interest, then you should also know that William is from Toronto. Great things come out of this city :)

I’m reading a great book right now called Tech and the City. I’m only 31% of the way through it (according to my Kindle app), but already it’s been an interesting read. It’s about the making and rise of New York City as a technology and startup hub – which, is fairly recent phenomenon. There aren’t too many cases where New York plays second or third city, but tech is one of those instances. Silicon Valley dominates.

The book talks about the deliberate efforts that were made, by the Bloomberg administration as well by many others, to diversify New York’s economy away from financial services and towards technology, startups, and entrepreneurship. It gives you all the backstory about the rise of Silicon Alley in the 90s, its subsequent crash in the dot com era, and all the players involved. And yes the reference to Sex and the City is both on purpose and explicit throughout the book.

But at a time where cities all around the world are trying to replicate the success of Silicon Valley, the takeaways from this book are perhaps universally applicable. It certainly got me wondering if, here in Toronto, we’re doing enough to prepare our city to dominate in the 21st century.

Image: Stephen Wilkes