Category: Urbanism

• A line vs. a circle — which is the optimal urban form?

  So I guess I was wrong. I thought “The Line” in Saudia Arabia was never going to be built — at least not in its current incarnation. But apparently it is now under construction, and it is still planned to be 170 km long and house some 9 million people when it’s complete. I suppose something could happen between now and when all 170 km are complete, but I’m happy to accept that, for the time being, I was wrong.

  Now it’s time to ask ourselves what a 170 km long city would even be like. To answer that, here is a fascinating article from npc Urban Sustainability describing how mobility and urban interactions are likely to work in this kind of a linear city. And it turns out that a line is actually an optimal urban form if you’re trying to both maximize commute times and maximize the average distance between inhabitants:

  One of the most critical aspects related to The Line is distance. If its 9 million inhabitants are homogeneously distributed in the city, each km will have roughly 53,000 people. If we randomly pick two people from the city, they will be, on average, 57 km apart. Although The Line occupies only 2% of the surface of Johannesburg, if we pick two random people in Johannesburg, they are only 33 km apart. Keeping the surface fixed, a line is the contiguous urban form that maximises the distance between its inhabitants. In The Line, people are as far away from others as possible. Considering that a walkable distance is 1.0 km, in The Line, only 1.2% of the population is at walking distance from others. Active mobility is not viable in The Line since distances are too long. The plan for The Line has no cars but also gets rid of most active mobility. Although in The Line, basic needs could be satisfied within 5 min, most journeys to school, work, leisure or visiting other people will depend on public transport.

  So what would be better? Well if you’re trying to minimize the average distance between people and increase urban interactions, then the optimal form is generally the one that cities have been using ever since they were first created:

  We can think of a city called The Circle, where we take the same tall buildings as in The Line but put them next to each other, forming a circular shape. A circle that occupies the same surface as The Line (34 km²) has a radius of only 3.3 km. In The Circle, the expected distance between two random people is only 2.9 km. In The Circle, a person is at a walking distance of 24% of the population (and within 2 km, they could reach 66% of the destinations), so most of their mobility could be active. In The Circle, a high-speed rail system is unnecessary since people could walk or cycle to most places, and buses could supply the rest of the journeys. The Circle occupies roughly the same surface as Pisa, Italy, but has 50 times its population. A round urban form is the most desirable since it reduces commuting distances and the energy required for transport.

  This is one of the challenges with building large scale cities from scratch. It’s easy to become enamoured with a particular plan or symbol; whereas in reality, cities don’t care about these kinds of visual representations. They don’t care that, in plan, the city may look like an eagle (see “Helicopter Urbanism“, a term that was supposedly coined by Jan Gehl). What matters is how interactions between humans play out at street level.

  2023.06.25

• How to create narrow European-style streets

  If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that I have a thing for narrow streets. Which is why when I travel I sometimes (okay, oftentimes) bring a laser distance measuring device with me. I like measuring things so that I have dimensions that I can feed back into our own development projects. But perhaps most importantly, it allows me to appear as nerdy as humanly possible while traveling. Walking around with just a camera in hand isn’t enough. You need to try harder than that. And so far the narrowest street that I have come across was in Noto, Sicily at just over 1.3m wide.

  If you also like to fawn over narrow European streets, you may enjoy this recent video by City Beautiful. In it, Dave Amos compares European cities, like Rome, to US cities, like Salt Lake City and Philadelphia, and then asks: Can the US build European-style street networks? His immediate answer is, “probably not.” And this is something that we have talked about before on the blog. Street networks tend to be really sticky. They’re hard to change. However, there is another possible solution: create new smaller mid-block streets. And that’s the focus of Dave’s video:

  But if you think about it, this condition already exists in a number of cities. Here in Toronto, we have somewhere around 300 kilometers of laneways, which tend to range in width from 4 to 6m. These are European-scaled streets and amazingly they’re already in place! The only difference is that, today, they mostly serve a back-of-house function. They provide access to garages. However, that is quickly changing with the introduction of laneway suites. And so over a long enough time horizon, our laneways are going to inevitably flip from back-of-house to primarily residential.

  Though maybe there’s even more we could do with this asset. European cities manage to fit retail, restaurants, patios, and more within 6m. Why not do the same with some of our narrowest streets?

  2023.06.24

• Canada is about to pass 40 million people

  I learned this morning that Statistics Canada publishes a real-time population counter and that it is currently hovering at just below 40 million people:

  

  So by the time that many of you read this post, Canada will likely be over the 40 million mark. If you’d like to see for yourself, you can do that here.

  2023.06.15

• Paris just banned tall buildings

  

  So, Herzog and de Meuron are building this trapezoidal-shaped tower in Paris right now.

  It’s 158m tall and about 40 storeys (which makes it comparable in height to One Delisle). It’s extremely narrow in one direction (see above), and so from central Paris it is intended to be read as a kind of thin pencil tower. But when viewed in the east-west direction, you get the full width of its trapezoidal shape (see above, again).

  Not surprisingly, this has been a highly contentious development — which is why it was 15 years in the making. It is now under construction, though, and it is expected to be completed sometime in 2026. But this is likely to be the last tower in Paris for quite some time.

  Partially because of this Triangle Tower, Paris has just decided to ban tall buildings in the city. The new height limit is now back to 37 meters (or 12 storeys), which is essentially the same height cap that was put in place in 1977 following completion of the Tour Montparnasse.

  So this is seemingly how things work in Paris. Somebody builds a tall tower. People mostly hate it. And then the city bans tall buildings for a number of decades. The previous height cap was relaxed in 2010. (Also, for those of you who are wondering, La Défense, which is generally where Paris puts its tall buildings, is outside of the city limits.)

  Regardless, I think there’s no question that this new Triangle Tower is destined to become an iconic punctuation in the city’s skyline. Which means that we’re probably going to have to update our thinking. If Paris, today, is sometimes thought of as a city with two principal towers — the Eiffel Tower and the “awful tower” — it will soon be a city with three principal towers.

  Perhaps the only question that remains is: Will people learn to love it like the Eiffel Tower or will it end up as another Tour Montparnasse?

  Image: Herzog and de Meuron

  2023.06.14

• Decentralization and public infrastructure

  

  Decentralization, in the crypto/blockchain/web3 sense of the word, is a crucial thing. Here is an excellent article talking about why it is the key innovation of blockchain technology and why it is a central feature in this new emerging web3 world.

  But of course, it can all get very complicated. So I thought this — and in particular the sentence in bold below — was a good way of describing the benefits:

  “…decentralization enables web3 systems to be credibly neutral (they cannot discriminate against any individual stakeholder or any group of stakeholders, which is critical to incentivize developers to build within ecosystems) and composable (to mix and match software components like Lego bricks). As a result, web3 systems function more like public infrastructure than proprietary technology platforms. In contrast to the gated software of Web2, web3 protocols provide decentralized internet infrastructure on which anybody can build and create an internet business. Crucially, in web3, this can be done without the permission of the original deployer of the protocol or the need to use a centrally controlled interface.“

  This resonated with me because think about how important public infrastructure is to our cities. Most of us take it for granted that, when we need it, we can just plug in and access electricity, water, sewer, and other public infrastructure.

  But throughout history, these services have been fundamental to the growth of our cities. They empowered scale and better health outcomes, among other things. So it’s exciting to think that we are now living through the creation of something kind of similar in tech.

  Image: a16z

  2023.06.12

• From unfashionable, dirty, and full of prostitutes, to too many tourists

  Cities are complicated. And we have spoken before about how it can sometimes feel like they never really reach homeostasis. In extreme cases, it might seem like they’re either decaying and losing people, or they’re too successful.

  I was reminded of this again this morning while reading an article about how Rome’s historic city center is being overrun with Airbnbs and tourists, and how it is pushing out the locals. It has, arguably, become too successful as a tourist destination.

  

  Of course, this problem isn’t unique to Rome. Venice has the same thing going on, though probably to a greater extent. And Amsterdam is currently working to attract more highbrow tourists and to move their red light district out of the city center.

  But the question I have is: What’s the right amount of tourism? If 25,000 listings is too many for Rome, what’s the right number? And do cities ever really achieve homeostasis, where, you know, things feel just right? Here’s an excerpt from the above article that describes what parts of Rome were like before the tourism boom:

  Ms. Rapaccini remembers when Monti was a quiet, authentic haven for arty types and locals. She and her late partner, the film director Mario Monicelli, who received six Oscar nominations, moved to Monti in 1988. The area was unfashionable, dirty and full of prostitutes, but beautiful in its gritty way, “like a little village” even though it was in the heart of a big, bustling city, she recalls. The apartments were cheap and the area began to attract film types, journalists and artisans – none of them rich – who mixed easily with local workers and shop owners.

  It’s a romantic description of what sounds like a pretty gritty area. Unfashionable, dirty, and full of prostitutes is apparently better than full of annoying American tourists. And perhaps it is. But then what was the area like before it was unfashionable, dirty, and full of prostitutes? Was that also better?

  I have no idea. But cities are constantly changing and evolving, and they were doing it long before any of us arrived, especially in the case of an ancient city like Rome. Maybe that’s what makes it so difficult to hang onto that exact moment in time when everything was just right.

  Chart: Globe and Mail

  2023.06.11

• EVs are cool, but what about high-speed rail?

  As many of you know, I am an advocate for high-speed rail in Canada. Specifically along the Windsor-Quebec City corridor, which is the most densely populated part of the country. And so I found this comparison interesting:

  “If there is one project that would create thousands of jobs, improve business productivity, clean up the air, reduce the output of greenhouse gases and cut the demand for endless highway construction, it would be high-speed electric rail between Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, where population densities are high enough to make the project sensible. Cost estimates are all over the map. The University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy put the price tag at about $12-billion, which is $2-billion less than the bucks being thrown at the Volkswagen battery plant alone. But forget it – the Canadian government wants more cars, not fewer. Canadian cities will remain car sewers forever.”

  The above excerpt is from this opinion piece talking about EVs and the public subsidies being paid to encourage battery production within Canada. I get that we want to be part of this important mobility shift. But we are way behind when it comes to high-speed rail.

  And by behind, I mean that we don’t have it at all in this country.

  2023.06.09

• Will Apple Vision make our cities more lonely?

  Okay, so I haven’t tried it yet. But Apple Vision looks pretty awesome and the people who have tried it seem to be very impressed by it. The best article that I have read, so far, is this one here by Ben Thompson (of Stratechery). He gets into some of the tech details and explains why Apple is probably the only company in the world that could have created a device like this.

  For those of you who are interested, Apple Vision is still technically a VR device, even though it is being marketed as an augmented reality (AR) device that allows you to stay engaged with the world around you. This last part is true, but it is all done digitally through 12 cameras that capture the world around you and then display it back to you.

  So experientially, yes, it is an AR device; however, the tech behind it is actually just exceptional VR.

  But this is not the point of today’s post. The point I would like to make is one that Ben raises at the end of his article. After praising Apple Vision’s achievements, he goes on to argue that the arc of technology is one that is leading toward “ever more personal experiences.” In other words, it is increasingly about individual, rather than group, use cases.

  And this is one of the first things that I thought of when I watched the Vision Pro keynote. “Wow, this looks like a really cool way to watch and experience a movie. But how do I do that with my partner? I guess we both now need Vision Pros. And what about families with a bunch of kids? That is a lot of Vision Pros.”

  But maybe this doesn’t matter. Ben’s point is that it’s probably not an accident that this technology arc is happening at the same time as a larger societal shift away from family formation and toward more feelings of loneliness. Indeed, the number of single-person households has been steadily increasing in the US since the 1960s. The current figure sits at more than 1 in 4 households.

  So there is an obviously dystopian narrative that we could all tell ourselves here. It is one where everyone works from home, plugs into virtual workplaces, and then flips over to other, more exciting, virtual worlds when it’s time to unwind from the stresses of the former. And if you think about it, this isn’t that much of a stretch compared to what many of us do today.

  Whatever the case, in my mind, none of this is any reason to become bearish on cities. Humans will still be humans. And none of this tech is going to replace the feeling of enjoying a perfect pesto gnocchi in an impossibly narrow laneway in Milan, or drinking a caipirinha on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro while being surrounded by shockingly beautiful people.

  Or at least let’s hope so.

  2023.06.06

• Live/work in Oklahoma City

  I am really drawn to live/work spaces like these ones here in Oklahoma City’s new Wheeler District. (Additional project info can be found over here.) We have some examples of this in Toronto, but I wouldn’t say it’s commonly done. And oftentimes they don’t work at all. More often than not, these spaces seem to just get used as strictly residential (which is okay).

  But there are some arguably successful examples that we can point to. CityPlace is maybe one. When the area was first getting developed, retail would have been an extremely difficult use to underwrite. It was a development island. And so live/work suites were introduced at grade along much of the area’s main artery.

  The area did eventually get new dedicated retail, but its live/work suites also started taking on more “work” as demand in the area grew. Today, nobody is going to confuse it with Bloor Street, but importantly, the ground floor was able to change and adapt. And this is one of the great benefits, or at least promises, of live/work: you get additional flexibility.

  Personally, I would love to have a live/work space. I’d use it to incubate new ideas and sell random stuff. And I have a feeling that, given the opportunity, many others would do the same. So I plan to spend some more time thinking and writing about this topic. If any of you have shining examples of live/work successes, please share them in the comment section below.

  2023.05.30

• Density is good, but let me explain

  I tweeted this out last week:

  

  Not surprisingly, the responses were divided. Some responded saying that beauty is more important than density, and a lot of people were quick to point out that there’s good density and there’s bad density. And because I can appreciate both of these comments, it made me think that I should probably elaborate on my glib tweet.

  The points I was trying to vaguely imply are the following.

  More often than not (at least for North American cities), I think our problem is not too much density, it’s too little. This translates into cities that aren’t walkable, aren’t conducive to transit, and that are overall less sustainable. Right now, every mayoral candidate in Toronto is promising to fix our crippling traffic congestion. I don’t know how they’re going to do it, but they’re promising it because they know it’s something people are pissed off about.

  But here’s my take: counterintuitively, the problem is not enough density. The problem is that too many people in our region have no reasonable way to get around without a car. So they’re forced to drive. The way you fix this not as simple as more traffic enforcement or better signal timing. Good luck! You fix it through density, because density is what makes other forms of mobility suddenly possible.

  All of this is not to say that density alone will render you a great city. Obviously things like beauty also matter a great deal. But in my opinion, density is a fundamental component. Because what good is beauty if you don’t have any urban vibrancy? The answer is that you probably don’t have a real city.

  The other point I was trying to make is that space and density are both relative and oftentimes difficult to understand. We think building height and density are correlated, but that’s not always the case. Look at Paris or Barcelona. We also like to make a lot of spatial rules that we think are right and make our cities better: streets should be at least this wide, buildings should be no taller than the width of the street, and so on.

  But here (pictured above) is a street that narrows to around 6 meters and has buildings that are probably 2.5-3x the width of the right-of-way. Sure, it also happens to be beautiful, historic, and Italian. But what would happen if you maintained this same beauty and made the street 5x as wide and lined up parking in front of the stores?

  Somehow it wouldn’t be as enjoyable as what you see here.

  2023.05.29