This past Sunday night I was out for a bike ride with a few friends all around downtown Toronto. According to Strava, we did almost 22 km. Click here to see our route. During the ride, one of my friends said something to me that stood out. He said that when he’s on a bike he wants all cars off the road; but when he’s in a car, he wants all bikes off the road.

Now, this may seem like a fairly banal statement, but I think it demonstrates a number of things about people and the way we interact with cities. First, we’re all probably pretty selfish. We want what we want at a specific moment in time and we easily forget what it’s like to be on the other side of a situation.

Second, I think it reinforces what I wrote a month ago in a post called: Every street can’t be everything to everyone. If we want to improve the user experience for a variety of different use cases (driving, biking, walking and so on), we should decide when and where we’re going to optimize for each. 

The reason my friend said what he said was because we were riding on a road with no bike lanes. We were swerving in and around cars. And when the street is shared like this it naturally becomes a competition of who can be the most aggressive and dominate the road–bikes or cars. But as exciting as that might be, it’s probably not an ideal way to build our cities.

The journey of Architect This City has been an organic one. When I first started blogging regularly in September 2013, I had no plan in mind other than that I wanted to write about cities. I had just come off working full-time on my startup, Dirt, where I had gotten into the habit of writing and I enjoyed it immensely. So I wanted to continue.

Cities seemed like the perfect umbrella to capture all of my passions: architecture, design, planning, real estate, and even technology. And so I rebranded brandondonnelly.com—which I had already been using as a microblog—and slapped the title “Cities” on it. (That personal microblog has since become brandondonnelly.me.)

Then, after a few months of blogging, I was having drinks with a good friend of mine and telling her about my new daily discipline. She immediately asked me what it was called and, when I replied by saying that I didn’t really have a name for it, she insisted that I create one immediately. Since she’s one of the brightest people I know, I gave it some serious thought. A few days later, Architect This City was born.

I liked the idea of having a distinct brand, because then it meant it could grow beyond just a personal blog. It could become a real community of people passionate and committed to building better cities. And that ultimately became the goal as I got deeper and deeper into writing.

Since that time last year, I’ve had friends guest blog on ATC. It has gone on to become syndicated on Mobility Lab and Urban Times. And it has been featured by the Guardian in the UK has one of the big city blogs in the world. But even more exciting are the moments when somebody tells me, either face-to-face or through a quick message, that they’re really enjoying ATC and that they read it daily. That’s what keeps me going.

Lately though, I’ve been thinking about what’s next. What’s the purpose of ATC? What’s the why? I thought about writing a manifesto of sorts, but that just seemed unnecessarily onerous. So I sat down, primarily on the subway, with Evernote, and I wrote a purpose statement for ATC:

To promote the building of beautiful and environmentally sustainable cities that offer strong economic opportunities and a high quality of life.

That’s really what I believe cities should do. They should be enjoyable and beautiful places to live life and they should empower people to get richer. At the same time, we need to be aware that as more and more of the world’s 7 billion people move into cities, the need for environmentally sustainable solutions is only going to increase.

So those are the kinds of discussions I hope we can have on ATC. Regular scheduled programming will continue as usual, but hopefully now the why is clearer. If you have any feedback on the above statement, I would love to hear from you in the comment section below.