I’m not sure how much you can actually glean from this Australian Bureau of Statistics data (taken from this recent New Geography article): The data was collected on August 20, 2021 and, at that time, there were still a number of pandemic lockdowns in place.… Read More
Japan has a building typology known as machiya. They are found throughout Japan, but my understanding is that they are most closely associated with downtown Kyoto. The typical machiya consists of a long wooden home with a narrow street frontage, and at least one interior… Read More
Here is an interesting working paper that assesses the effect of new market-rate housing construction on the low-income housing market: Increasing supply is frequently proposed as a solution to rising housing costs. However, there is little evidence on how new market-rate construction—which is typically expensive—affects… Read More
This short video by City Beautiful makes the case for multi-way boulevards. The way to generally think about a multi-way boulevard is that it is a really big street that has been subdivided into areas that move cars relatively quickly and into areas that are… Read More
I have been reading Fred Wilson’s blog for over a decade now (and he has been blogging for almost two decades). A lot of the time it is about venture capital and tech, but similar to what I do here, it can be about almost… Read More
Here is an excellent reason for why you may want to spend more time walking: People have noted that walking seems to have a special relation to creativity. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1889) wrote, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking” (Aphorism 34). The… Read More
There is an ongoing debate about the value of cities hosting the Olympic Games. And that’s because this is usually how it works: You, the host, spend a lot of money (Tokyo 2021 was over $25 billion), it feels really good during the games while… Read More
This is an excellent video that I would encourage all of you to watch. It provides a visual look at city finances and explains how car-dependent suburbs are usually heavily subsidized by productive urban places. These are the kinds of analyses that all cities should… Read More
A few days ago I tweeted this chart out (from Statistics Canada): It is a list of the densest downtowns in Canada (people per square kilometer). But to be more precise, it is a list of the densest primary downtowns for each census metropolitan area.… Read More
As I understand it, there is now something called hybrid work. The way this works is that on some days you go into the office and on some days you work from home, or from some “third space” near to your home. As a result… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 