Last year Nolan Gray mapped out “the cities of the world where you don’t need AC or heat.” And just recently he updated his data with the help of Guardian Cities for their “sweltering cities” series. As part of the study, they projected out average temperatures, in both the summer and winter, to 2059, showing which cities may become more dependent on air conditioning. The answer looks to be many.

In his original study, Gray had 9 climatic categories, all of which were based on average high and low temperatures throughout the year. Category 1 was you definitely don’t need AC or heat. These cities are essentially perfect year round. And category 9 was you definitely need heat and AC. These cities are basically the worst places on earth to occupy from a climate perspective.

Here is that climate classification system in lovely chart form (note his caption):

The climatic utopias ended up being places like Bogotá, Guatemala City, Lima, Mexico City, San Diego, São Paulo, and Sydney. The worst places were the southeastern United States, Central Asia, and northern East Asia.

But one factor that is not included in the study is humidity, which Gray rightly points out has a meaningful impact on comfort. Toronto, for example, is classified in his system as category 7. Heat needed. But AC definitely not needed. Personally, I would bump us up to category 8: AC preferred, but not needed.

Still, this is an interesting study. There are relatively few cities with so-called perfect climates. And I have always found these sorts of climates fascinating because they empower a very different kind of relationship to outside spaces.

I’m reading a book right now called Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt. 

One of my graduate school buddies recommended it to me on one of our annual ski/snowboard trips and I’m finally getting around to reading it. I’m only about half way through it, but I’m enjoying it so much that I have decided to write about it today.

One of the protagonists in the book is a Toronto-native by the name of Brad Katsuyama. That’s probably one of the reasons I like it – although Michael Lewis makes all Canadians out to be overly polite and well-behaved. Is that what we’re like?

The other reason I like the book is that a lot of it actually has to do with geography. Technology and the internet were supposed to make cities and location irrelevant. But as Flash Boys argues, location and physical connectivity matter a great deal in the world of high-frequency trading. Each millisecond matters.

To illustrate this point, the book starts by describing the construction of a $300 million, 827-mile cable running as straight as humanly possible from Chicago to New Jersey in order to reduce data travel times from 17 to 13 milliseconds. That’s how much the milliseconds matter.

This is also not a topic that I know a lot about and so it’s eye opening (and a bit disappointing) to learn about the sorts of things that happen in our financial markets. If any of you would like to borrow the book after I’m done (and are located in Toronto), leave me a comment below.

If you have been following the headlines over the past year, you’re probably aware that Atlantic City — the “Gambling Capital of the East Coast” — is in trouble. This year alone, 4 casinos shut their doors – including Revel, which only opened in 2012.

To be perfectly honest with you, gambling isn’t my thing. I’ve only been to Atlantic City once, and it was really just so that I could say I had been (it was when I used to live in Philadelphia). But I know that many people derive a lot of entertainment value out of gambling.

However, I worry when cities starting believing that a casino can fix all of their city building and economic development challenges. They are not a silver bullet. And many would argue that they cause far more harm than potential benefit. The negative socioeconomic impacts have been well documented.

In the case of Atlantic City, I suppose you could say that casinos “worked” – for awhile. But that’s because Atlantic City had a monopoly on gambling. In 1978 the city opened the first legal casino in the eastern United States. And that led to a boom in casinos and a spike in municipal revenue. But those revenues peaked in 2006 and have been on the decline ever since. 

My good friend Alex Feldman argued in a recent Next City article that Atlantic City is, quite frankly, the next Detroit. It repeated the same mistakes and now it’s going to need to go through the same painful rebuilding process:

It’s no exaggeration to say that Atlantic City is poised to become the next Detroit. In many ways, the trajectories of the two cities are similar. Both cities relied on one industry to prop up their economies — and both failed to innovate as competition increased. Similarly, both Atlantic City and Detroit failed to invest in a sense of place — casinos and factories were more successful when their customers and employees had little reason to go outside. The result: defensively built cities designed around the automobile that gave visitors little reason to stay.

And I think he’s right. The time has come to rethink Atlantic City. Onwards!