We've spoken about Vitalik Buterin before.

He is the inventor of the Ethereum blockchain, and its most prominent figure. He also happens to have grown up in Toronto. He went to the University of Waterloo. So when I wrote this post back in 2021, I asked: Why the hell is nobody talking about this? Why are we not celebrating the fact that our great city helped birth one of the most important technologies of our time? You couldn't ask for a better economic development story. Well, I guess the answer is twofold. Crypto isn't mainstream. Even back in 2021 when things were frothy it wasn't. And, we're awful at promoting and driving a global brand for our city. Both of these things need to change. So if you're interested in learning more about Vitalik and Ethereum, you should check out this new movie (trailer) called Vitalik: An Ethereum Story. To watch it, go to ethereumfilm.xyz and mint the NFT for $20. You'll then be able to stream it. I haven't done this yet, but I'll be doing it very soon. All of the proceeds from the NFT sales will go toward getting a more mainstream distribution deal.

So by watching, you're helping.

Update: I watched it. It’s great.

We have all seen these headlines before, so it's not so under the radar for us. But the New York Times just published this article about Toronto calling it a "quietly booming tech town." Depending on how you want to measure things, Toronto is now the third largest tech hub in North America after Silicon Valley and New York City (or at least that's what the NY Times is telling me). The article touches on some of the ingredients for this success, but let me be a bit more explicit in this post because I think it is particularly relevant right now.

Canada is a "Western" country. What does that mean? It means that we're a democracy, we have the rule of law, we respect individuals (including private property), and we allow for pluralism of opinion, along with many other freedoms. These are all wonderful and magical things that are sometimes taken for granted. But I couldn't imagine living in a place that doesn't allow for such freedoms, nor would I want to.

On top of this foundation, we have two other important ingredients: extraordinary universities, like the ones mentioned in the article (University of Toronto and University of Waterloo), and some of the most liberal immigration policies in the world. Our borders are open for the smartest and most ambitious. With just these handful of things -- freedom, rules, education, and talent -- we can screw up a lot of other stuff and still accomplish some pretty great things. I may be oversimplifying, but probably not by much.

Humans are wonderfully talented. Let people be and they'll show you. Because history has shown us time and time again that the above recipe works remarkably well. (Related post: Do the best cities have a lot of immigrants?)

This evening I attended the 27th Annual Toronto Planning Dinner. It’s an annual dinner for people in planning and development, put on by the University of Waterloo Planning Alumni of Toronto. Thank you Wood Bull LLP for the invite.

The keynote speaker was Dr. Anthony Townsend. He is the author of SMART CITIES: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. I haven’t read it (yet), but his talk offered a preview of it and I think it would be of interest to all of you.

It deals with many of the topics that we discuss on this blog, one of which is the interrelationship between our physical environment and the networks and software layers that we are now building on top of it.

These layers have the potential to augment and enhance our cities (maybe make them smarter), but they also have the potential to do us harm. One important issue that Townsend brought up is that of privacy.

Cities used to enable anonymity. 

When essayist and art critic Charles Baudelaire wrote about “modernity” in 19th century industrializing Paris, it referred to an ephemeral and fleeting kind of urban environment. Pass someone on the street and you may never see them again. That must have felt sad at the time.

Today we live in a fish bowl. 

Networks connect us, check us in, ping us when we are nearby people we know, and help us find people to meet and date. And we already have devices, like Alexa, that spy on us in our homes so that companies can serve us targeted ads. (This is deplorable by the way.)

Will the city of the future endeavour to do the same as we equip it with more “smarts”?

I guess that’s why Townsend believes that privacy will define a big part of 21st century urbanism. There’s no doubt that it will be very important.