This morning I came across this beautiful photo by @callicles of the 11th in Paris. After admiring it for a few moments, I then immediately tweeted it out with the above caption: "It's okay to put buildings close together." Because here's the thing about this photo: It represents one of the great paradoxes of city building. When most people look at this photo, I suspect that they will find it beautiful. They will like the mid-rise architecture and they will like the quaint European-scaled streets. But despite its fairly universal appeal, very few cities are able to build this way today. It's often not allowed. So instead what people do is travel to Europe in the summer, sit in cafes, admire the architecture and urban design, and then lament the fact that we don't build cities like we used to.

What is it that makes this intersection so inviting? Well, the buildings are tight up against each other. I'm guessing that the right-of-ways (ROWs) in this picture are maybe 6-9 m wide. There are no building setbacks or stepbacks to speak of, save and except for the penthouse floors which taper back slightly. And so all of the spaces in these buildings would likely have some sort of direct facing condition with their opposing neighbors (but partially mitigated by the fact that these aren't all glass buildings). The ratio of ROW to building height is, I'm guessing, something like 1:4, which, at the end of the day, is a large part of the reason why these streets feel so intimate and inviting. The buildings frame the streets and public realm.

What I just described breaks many of the guidelines that I suspect many of you in the industry are accustomed to following. In our world, the streets should be wider to allow for adequate fire and service vehicle access. The buildings should stepback to allow light to reach the sidewalks, to mitigate impacts on any surrounding single-family homes, and to provision for sky views. Here in Toronto, the midrise guidelines also stipulate that buildings should have a ROW to building height ratio that is closer to 1:1. Though to be fair this guidance is often rightly broken. But the truth remains, we generally don't build like this anymore. Why is that?

It's not because we can't do it. We certainly could. We are, for whatever reasons, choosing not to. Is it because we're bad at understanding what we actually like and what makes for great cities? Is it because what we end up liking is a bit counterintuitive? My unproven and untested theory is that it is at least partially the result of an approach to planning that is defensive -- instead of offensive -- in nature. We plan around and bow completely to existing contexts. We plan to mitigate impacts. We plan to satisfy some very individualistic concerns about how cities and neighborhoods should be built. For better or for worse, we plan to piss off the least amount of people. Politics also play an outsized role.

What is far less common to think about is how to plan offensively. The fact of the matter is that the Paris we all love today pissed off a lot of people when it was being constructed. The approach was top-down and hugely disruptive. It ignored and completely erased much of the city's previous urban context. Artists at the time, and probably many others, despised the new regularity of Paris' street wall buildings. They longed for the old hodgepodge of medieval blocks and the visual variety that they created. But today, it's hard not to think of this offensive move as anything but visionary. Of course, there are also countless examples of top-down offenses turning out terribly bad for cities.

Perhaps the right approach, then, is to simply start being more deliberate about introducing elements of planning offense. My friend David Wex of Urban Capital likes to remind me that Montreal is a city with grandeur and that Toronto, for the most part, is a city without it. So as I have argued before, over here, I think it's time we rethink our approach. Instead of just worrying about things like shadow impacts and angular planes (defensive), we should also be asking ourselves offensive questions. How refreshing would it be to sit down in a project meeting and have someone ask: "Okay, but does this design contribute to the overall grandeur and beauty of our city?"

And maybe once we take this new perspective, we'll come to the conclusion that sometimes it's okay to put buildings close together.

The term flâneur is a French noun that more or less translates into lounger or saunterer. Its origins date back to probably the 16th century, but it was really during the 19th century that it was imbued with its new modern associations. A flâneur is a person about town, a person of leisure, and a kind of urban explorer. Their goal is to take in city life.

In the middle of Haussmann's overhaul of Paris, the flâneur emerged as an important literary and artistic figure in the new modern metropolis. They showed up everywhere from poems to Impressionist paintings. The flaneur was both a spectator, as well as an urban detective of sorts, responsible for hanging out and surveying the changing nature of city life.

Being a modern-day flâneur is one of my favorite things to do. I love to do it when I'm traveling, but I also love to do it when I'm at home. Always with a camera. (The last year has been particularly helpful at encouraging aimless walks outside.)

The flâneur is also a reminder that city life is indeed a kind of spectacle. Sometimes we walk around just to be seen and sometimes we walk around just to see others. Presumably, it is one of the reasons why many cafes in Paris arrange their seating so that you face outward toward the street. That's the important view.

When the flâneur figure was coming into its own, Paris was going through a profound transformation. And it was unsettling to many. These urban detectives were grappling with modernity and trying to make sense of where city life was heading.

Though the causes are very different, we are similarly living through a period of adjustment. What will our cities be like in the the post-COVID world? That is, of course, the question. But we shouldn't forget that our desire for urban spectacles is deeply entrenched. And I am certain that the spectacles will return much faster than most people think.

This weekend, I set out with a couple of friends to be flâneurs. We came with cameras and drones and with the goal of documenting construction and real estate activity in a chosen meetup spot. Everything was then posted to a shared Twitter account (@unlyst). We'd like to make this a habit. So if any of you would like to join our next meetup, drop me a note @donnelly_b.

Photo by Latrach Med Jamil on Unsplash

This is an interesting article by ArchDaily, looking at the "evolution of the house plan in Europe" between 1760 and 1939. The article focuses on London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Moscow and includes floor plans, photographs, as well as well-known illustrations like the one shown above. Created by Bertall in 1845, the drawing shows a section through a Parisian house and is called The Five Floors of the Parisian World.

What it shows is the declining opulence that used to exist in Paris' apartment blocks as you moved upward. If you were rich, you lived on the second floor, right above the ground floor lobby. The ceilings were higher on this floor and maybe had a balcony overlooking the street. If you lived on the third floor it meant that you were a less rich. And if you lived in the top floor attic, you were poor. That is what this comic is showing.

Now, all of this changed over time as new technologies, namely the elevator, were brought to multi-family buildings. All of a sudden it became convenient to live higher up and all of a sudden people wanted better views and to get further away from the chaos of the street. What I'm curious about, though, is how posterity dealt with the lower ceiling heights on these upper floors.