I started thinking about this the other night. For the first 18 years of my life, in other words, up until I moved away to university, I lived for the most part in a detached single-family house in the suburbs of Toronto. But since then, I have almost exclusively lived in apartments/condominiums ranging from converted houses to high-rise buildings.

This was true when I was at the University of Toronto and it was true when I lived in Philadelphia for grad school. In my first year of grad school I lived in a converted house in a questionable area of West Philly. In my second year I lived in a high-rise brutalist building. And in my third year I lived in a small three level walk-up apartment above a pet store and a really great deli. This perhaps not surprising given I was a student.

But since moving back to Toronto, the same has been true. I initially invested and lived in a single-family house, but then decided I preferred living in a condominium and so I have done that ever since. Maybe this changes with kids or maybe it doesn't. But it's interesting to think about the housing types we have chosen or were handed. Location and other factors certainly play a role.

What housing type have you lived in the most throughout your life? Let us know in the comment section below.

Cover photo by Michal GADEK on Unsplash

Past research has shown that as cities get larger, people tend to walk faster. The probable explanation for this is that as cities get bigger, they also tend to get wealthier, and so the opportunity cost of not walking fast increases. In other words, people's time is worth more.

Of course, there's something naturally unsettling about this. But it appears to be demonstrably true. Here's another, more recent, study that compares pedestrian behavior in 1979-1980 to 2008-2010 for four urban public spaces in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.

What the researchers did was use William Whyte's famous observational work from 1980 and then use computer vision to compare it to 2008-2010. And what they found was that, on average, walking speeds had increased by about 15% and that time spent lingering in these public spaces had basically halved across all locations.

These are pretty dramatic changes that speak to a different, or at least, evolving, urban life. Increasingly, we're all just atoms racing around and trying to get to our next engagement.

I started thinking about this the other night. For the first 18 years of my life, in other words, up until I moved away to university, I lived for the most part in a detached single-family house in the suburbs of Toronto. But since then, I have almost exclusively lived in apartments/condominiums ranging from converted houses to high-rise buildings.

This was true when I was at the University of Toronto and it was true when I lived in Philadelphia for grad school. In my first year of grad school I lived in a converted house in a questionable area of West Philly. In my second year I lived in a high-rise brutalist building. And in my third year I lived in a small three level walk-up apartment above a pet store and a really great deli. This perhaps not surprising given I was a student.

But since moving back to Toronto, the same has been true. I initially invested and lived in a single-family house, but then decided I preferred living in a condominium and so I have done that ever since. Maybe this changes with kids or maybe it doesn't. But it's interesting to think about the housing types we have chosen or were handed. Location and other factors certainly play a role.

What housing type have you lived in the most throughout your life? Let us know in the comment section below.

Cover photo by Michal GADEK on Unsplash

Past research has shown that as cities get larger, people tend to walk faster. The probable explanation for this is that as cities get bigger, they also tend to get wealthier, and so the opportunity cost of not walking fast increases. In other words, people's time is worth more.

Of course, there's something naturally unsettling about this. But it appears to be demonstrably true. Here's another, more recent, study that compares pedestrian behavior in 1979-1980 to 2008-2010 for four urban public spaces in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.

What the researchers did was use William Whyte's famous observational work from 1980 and then use computer vision to compare it to 2008-2010. And what they found was that, on average, walking speeds had increased by about 15% and that time spent lingering in these public spaces had basically halved across all locations.

These are pretty dramatic changes that speak to a different, or at least, evolving, urban life. Increasingly, we're all just atoms racing around and trying to get to our next engagement.