Today, Microsoft announced that it will be moving its Canadian headquarters from Mississauga to the new CIBC Square development that is currently under construction in downtown Toronto (and rendered above).
According to RENX, Microsoft will occupy 132,000 square feet across 4 floors in the first tower. Occupancy is scheduled for September 2020.
I love this project. The design architect is WilkinsonEyre. And there’s going to be an elevated one-acre park spanning the rail corridor between the project’s two towers.
But it’s also noteworthy because it is an example of a major suburban tenant deciding to relocate to a transit-oriented urban environment. (I have a post on this somewhere.)
Today, Microsoft announced that it will be moving its Canadian headquarters from Mississauga to the new CIBC Square development that is currently under construction in downtown Toronto (and rendered above).
According to RENX, Microsoft will occupy 132,000 square feet across 4 floors in the first tower. Occupancy is scheduled for September 2020.
I love this project. The design architect is WilkinsonEyre. And there’s going to be an elevated one-acre park spanning the rail corridor between the project’s two towers.
But it’s also noteworthy because it is an example of a major suburban tenant deciding to relocate to a transit-oriented urban environment. (I have a post on this somewhere.)
What this chart shows is patents issued – a proxy for innovation – in all U.S. counties between 1790 and 1900. This data is then compared against access to transport, such as rail. The discovery is a statistically significant relationship between innovation (patents issued) and rail (transport) access.
The spike in the 1850s (shown above) is as a result of increased rail access.
But Perlman takes it a step further and asks: what is causing this spike in innovation? Is it because inventors and creators started responding to the larger market now accessible to them because of rail connectivity? Or did transportation somehow improve productivity and the flow of information?
To answer this question, she dug into the patents themselves (over 700,000 of them) to try and identify how ideas and key words were spreading. What she found is that rail access alone doesn’t encourage innovation. References to new technologies did not increase.
What mattered was what happened locally. Transportation improvements promoted urbanization and density during her study period, and that’s what drove innovation. Connectivity created agglomeration economies at the local level.
Obviously a lot has changed since the 19th century. But whether it’s rail connectivity or internet connectivity, have the rules really changed? Place still matters. What happens locally still matters. Perhaps even more.
This is an important lesson to consider as we build our cities and invest in transportation. Rail alone isn’t enough. What matters more is what we build around it. Are we dense enough to be brilliant?
What they show is how far you can travel in a 24 hour period using only trains and brisk walking from a collection of 28 European cities. In a few cases, such as from London to Dublin, a ferry ride is also included.
Here’s a zoom in on London:
The obvious takeaway is that Western Europe is very well connected, whereas many parts of Eastern Europe are not. Some cities, such as Tallinn (Estonia) and Podgorica (Montenegro) are almost completely disconnected.
Of course today there’s stiff competition from air travel.
What this chart shows is patents issued – a proxy for innovation – in all U.S. counties between 1790 and 1900. This data is then compared against access to transport, such as rail. The discovery is a statistically significant relationship between innovation (patents issued) and rail (transport) access.
The spike in the 1850s (shown above) is as a result of increased rail access.
But Perlman takes it a step further and asks: what is causing this spike in innovation? Is it because inventors and creators started responding to the larger market now accessible to them because of rail connectivity? Or did transportation somehow improve productivity and the flow of information?
To answer this question, she dug into the patents themselves (over 700,000 of them) to try and identify how ideas and key words were spreading. What she found is that rail access alone doesn’t encourage innovation. References to new technologies did not increase.
What mattered was what happened locally. Transportation improvements promoted urbanization and density during her study period, and that’s what drove innovation. Connectivity created agglomeration economies at the local level.
Obviously a lot has changed since the 19th century. But whether it’s rail connectivity or internet connectivity, have the rules really changed? Place still matters. What happens locally still matters. Perhaps even more.
This is an important lesson to consider as we build our cities and invest in transportation. Rail alone isn’t enough. What matters more is what we build around it. Are we dense enough to be brilliant?
What they show is how far you can travel in a 24 hour period using only trains and brisk walking from a collection of 28 European cities. In a few cases, such as from London to Dublin, a ferry ride is also included.
Here’s a zoom in on London:
The obvious takeaway is that Western Europe is very well connected, whereas many parts of Eastern Europe are not. Some cities, such as Tallinn (Estonia) and Podgorica (Montenegro) are almost completely disconnected.
Of course today there’s stiff competition from air travel.
