For all of us who are involved in the building of cities, it is important to remember that cities emerge and thrive as a result of economic purpose. Take, for example, Sao Paulo. Once one of the poorest of Portuguese colonies, it is today the… Read More
There is something happening in many North American cities right now. We are starting to question the supremacy of zoning for only single-family homes. This past summer, the state of Oregon passed policy requiring cities of 25,000 people or more to allow duplexes, triplexes, and… Read More
My recent post about minimum project sizes triggered some great follow-up discussions over email. Today, I learned about a Master Plan that was recently completed for Little Havana, Miami by the urban design and planning firm Plusurbia. In it, they try to address some of… Read More
This recent study used geotagged tweets to measure social connectedness within American cities. There are two measures: (1) concentrated mobility and (2) equitable mobility. The first measures the extent to which social connections (geotagged tweets) are concentrated in a set of places within the city.… Read More
A recent study and research paper by the MIT Senseable City Lab — called, Tasty Data — has discovered that restaurant data alone can be used to accurately predict location-based factors such as daytime population, nighttime population, number of businesses, and overall consumer spending within… Read More
The below Twitter thread, initiated by Brent Toderian, is a great collection of some of the “best streets in the world.” QUESTION: What’s the BEST STREET you’ve ever come across, anywhere in the world? Use whatever way you choose to define “best!” Show the street,… Read More
This recent NY Times article — which makes the case that the current protests in Hong Kong are at least partially a result of inequality — has a pair of interesting diagrams that speak to the city’s tight housing market. The first compares average living… Read More
Last week I went for a tour of Sidewalk Labs’ “307” workshop here in Toronto. In it they have a generative urban design tool that allows you to toggle things like density, building shape, building height, the amount of green space, the distribution of green… Read More
The 2020 Summer Olympics, which will be held in Tokyo, have added 5 new sports, one of which is skateboarding. As someone who grew up skateboarding as a teenager, and is all too familiar with being chased out of public spaces, this lends a great… Read More
“Cities have become the basic platforms for global innovation and economic growth, supplanting the corporation as the fundamental organizing unit of the contemporary economy.” -Richard Florida Richard Florida and Patrick Adler of the Martin Prosperity Institute here in Toronto have been doing some research on… Read More
