One of the best things about Toronto in the summer is that it feels like there’s a special event happening almost every day of the week. It would be impossible to go to everything, but one of my favorites is StreetFest at the Beaches Jazz Festival, which is running this week from Thursday (July 24) to Saturday (July 26).

If you’re from Toronto, then you’ve probably been. But if you haven’t been, StreetFest is basically a 2.5 km stretch of Queen Street East in the Beaches that gets closed to traffic so that hundreds of thousands of pedestrians can walk around and listen to jazz music on the street. It’s a lot of fun and I’m told there will be 40 bands this week.

This year TAS has sponsored a tent and so the Kingston&Co Condominiums team will be there to talk to people about our project (and also listen to some jazz music!). I’ll be there on Thursday night (tomorrow) and so if you’re around, come by and say hello. If you can’t find us, send me a tweet.

If you haven’t been to StreetFest before, here are two tips. It gets super busy and traffic is often bad heading in and out of the area. If you have the option of biking there (or riding on someone else’s handlebars), I would highly recommend that.

Also, given how busy it is, I remember it being difficult to find a beer the last time I went – all the restaurants and patios were full. So you may want to consider investing in a CamelBak Pack. We wouldn’t want you getting dehydrated :)

I hope to see some of you there.

Image: JR Photography

Most people would agree that branding is a powerful and important exercise in the world of business. We recognize that brand equity is something that pays dividends in the future.

When you walk around a city with a Starbucks, Tim Hortons, or some other coffee cup in hand, you are sending signals about who you are as a person and consumer. So, you could argue that you’re consuming the cup, as much as you are consuming the coffee.

But one area that still feels like it’s in its infancy is place branding. That is, the branding of nations, regions, cities, and places. I’ve talked a lot about the business of cities and how impressions are created around cities, but I’ve never explicitly talked about place branding.

However, it is an area on the rise. Monocle has written extensively about the importance of nation branding and there are firms, such as Vancouver-based Resonance, that now specialize in the strategy and branding of places.

Here’s a short 5 minute video that they prepared talking about place branding and their approach to it. If you can’t see the video below, click here.

//player.vimeo.com/video/66920801

But at the same time, there are more grassroot ways in which a place brand can emerge. Think about the number of times Jay-Z has referred to himself as the Brooklyn boy or Drake has promoted Toronto in one of his videos. It’s hard to measure the impact of these sorts of things, but I am sure there is one.

Here’s another example – a 4 minute video of Drake talking about why he loves Toronto. Click here if you can’t see it below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3TrbGEJbio?rel=0]

Recently, you may have heard that Drake is about to give Toronto a new moniker: The 6. Some think it is in honor of our two main area codes 416 and 647, and I think that’s probably a good guess.

But whatever the reason, I thought it was an interesting exercise in place branding. So I decided to partner with Toronto-based design firm Badd Press and make a “The 6” t-shirt (shown at the top of this post). You can get yours for $30 by visiting shopATC.

Yesterday a colleague at the office sent around this Globe and Mail article talking about a Vancouver family of 4 (plus one cat) who live in a 1,000 square foot loft near downtown that they purchased in 2003 for $269,900. There weren’t really any photos of the place, but the article makes it sound like they have 3 beds crammed into one room. (I wonder how the parents ever manage to have sex. There are better ways to lay out 1,000 sf.)

In any event, the point of the article is that there’s a growing number of families who are clinging to the downtown lifestyle that they’ve grown accustomed to and are refusing to follow the path of a conventional suburban house – regardless of how tight their current quarters might be. It’s happening in Toronto (here’s an article from the Toronto Star and here’s a post I wrote) and it’s happening in New York:

A recent New York Times article on a similar trend noted that the number of white professionals with one or more children living in one-bedroom condo units in that city had jumped by almost a third between 2000 to 2006. Prof. Andrew Beveridge, from Queens College of the City University of New York, said the pattern was showing up in other expensive American cities. In Toronto, the 2011 National Household Survey showed there are about 72,000 families living in 71,500 units in buildings with five or more storeys – undoubtedly many of them the new, tiny condos proliferating there.

To some this might sound crazy. I mean, why would a dual income family–such as the one in Vancouver–subject themselves to a smaller space when they could easily afford a bigger place somewhere else? Isn’t that the dream – to have a big house?

The answer is that these families are considering–in addition to the direct costs of a bigger place–both the indirect costs of living further away from the core (such as longer commute times) and the inevitable lifestyle changes that would happen should they move out from their downtown neighborhoods. The urban lifestyle is different.

But what I find interesting about this phenomenon is that if this trend continues (and I think it will), we’re going to have a new generation of people in North America who grew up in apartments, condos, and lofts, and don’t have the same biases around single family houses and suburban living. To them, an apartment will be a perfectly normal place to raise a family.