Last week we spoke about how many businesses don't want to own their own real estate, but that some do. We then spoke about Prada's recent acquisition of 720 and 724 Fifth Avenue for $835 million. However, they're not the only ones. According to New York's The Real Deal (thank you John Bell for the article), last year saw the following transactions:

• Swiss fashion house Akris bought a property from SL Green for $40.6 million

• Japanese coffee retailer Geshary bought a property on Fifth Avenue from the Riese Organization for $38 million

• And Dyson bought a building in Soho for $60 million

Now, some, or a lot of this, is strategic. New York is New York, and global brands need to be there. Another part of this is that there was less competition last year. Fewer real estate companies wanted to buy retail and office buildings, and so end users seem to have stepped in at what they presumably saw as favourable prices.

But it's also not totally foreign for retailers to want to own their own real estate. Perhaps the most famous example is McDonald's, which owns its own real estate and then leases it out to franchisees. Though as I alluded to last week, it's important to know what business you're ultimately in. And McDonald's knows it's in the real estate business.

I tweeted this out last night:

blogTO then picked it up and it got quite a bit of engagement.

Some people, okay a lot of people, used it as an opportunity to be tongue in cheek and respond with things like: cheaply built condos, boarded up Starbuckses, Hooker Harvey's, Drake's house in the Bridle Path, the crumbling Gardiner Expressway, and that McDonald's at the northwest corner of Queen and Spadina (this one is no longer a contender for me now that they've gotten rid of their walk-up window).

Of course, there were also a lot of the usual suspects: The Sky Dome, The Gooderham Building (our miniature Flatiron Building), Casa Loma, The Royal Ontario Museum (specifically the expansion by Studio Libeskind), "New City Hall", The Royal York Hotel, Honest Ed's, The St. Lawrence Market, Robarts Library (University of Toronto), and a bunch of others that you might find displayed on the seat screen on your next Air Canada flight.

But I'd like to unpack the initial question a bit more. Because what does it really mean for something to be a symbol of a city? And is there an important distinction between the symbols that resonate with locals on a personal level and the symbols that get exported around the world as a city's brand and identity? Indeed, one of the criteria in most global city rankings is a prominent and recognizable skyline. Icons are important.

Let's consider an example. I agree entirely with Sean Marshall that "New City Hall" is a deeply symbolic building. Built in the early 1960s after decades of work, New City Hall was the outcome of an international design competition. And it was decidedly modern at a time when Toronto really wasn't that modern. Montréal was the biggest and most global city in the country and multiculturalism hadn't yet become a federal mandate. And so New City Hall symbolized our genuine ambitions to becoming something more.

But does the rest of the world care? If you were to ask somebody my question on the streets of Rio de Janeiro or Tokyo, what would they say? What would they remember? The thing about most tall buildings or other city symbols is that they become abstractions. They turn into pictures on social media -- like logos of a company. But maybe that's all we can reasonably ask of the world. Maybe all that really matters is that a symbol has local significance; it's then up to us to export it and tell that story to the rest of the world.

Management guru Clayton M. Christensen died this week. Sadly, he was only 67 (leukaemia). A professor at Harvard Business School, Christensen was best known for probably two things: His work on disruptive innovation and his teachings on how to live a more fulfilling life. If you've read anything on innovation and disruption, I am sure you've come across the work of Christensen. He had a way of explaining things by reframing them. Here is a short video about the "job" of a McDonald's milkshake. And here is another one where he explains the cycle of disruptive innovations, sustaining innovations, and efficiency innovations. Both videos are worth watching.