Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Category: Urbanism

  • Self-expression and community move online

    The New Consumer, in collaboration with Coefficient Capital, just published its latest Consumer Trends report, which you can download for free over here (registration required). There’s a lot in the report to flip through, but I thought I would share these two slides:

    Generation Z and Millennials now make up ~40% of the US population and they are soon entering their prime consumer spending years. What’s noteworthy about these charts, but perhaps not surprising, is the extent in which self-expression and a sense of community have shifted from offline to online.

    Very few Boomers, at least according to this report, feel like themselves online. But nearly half of Gen Z feel most like themselves online. What it means to be part of a “community” has also shifted dramatically, with more if it happening online or at least partially online.

    All of this ties into what happened earlier in the week with Nike announcing the acquisition of RTFKT Studios. As I mentioned in this post, the so-called metaverse doesn’t necessarily have to mean VR goggles and living in video games. It can simply mean placing value on the parts of our lives that are now digital. The above two charts suggest that many are already doing this.

    Of course, what all of this means for our physical lives is an important question. Josh Stephens recently argued, over at Planetizen, that the metaverse is going to be really bad for cities. The more we focus on seductive virtual worlds, the less we will focus on our physical spaces. I get this logic.

    But again, I think it depends on how you define the metaverse. And I think VR headsets are a pretty narrow definition. I am both a lover of technology and a lover of cities. And throughout this pandemic I have been fairly consistent in writing about the resiliency of cities. Nothing in this post changes that for me.

  • A figure-ground map of Paris by building period

    This is a great tweet and link:

    The link is to a figure-ground map of Paris that allows you to filter its buildings by period of construction. Here’s what all of the periods and all of the buildings look like:

    Once you play around with the map, it will become obvious that the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century was a prolific building period for Paris (1231 hectares of area). This is what Samuel was getting at in his tweet.

    I would love to see a map like this for every city in the world.

  • Bangkok has a lot of messy wires

    Actor Russell Crowe tweeted this out back in October while he was in Bangkok filming a movie:

    It’s a photo of the city’s notoriously messy communication wires. As I understand it, many or most of these wires aren’t even active. The telecom industry just has a very ad hoc approach to running new ones and there’s also nobody responsible for removing any of the old ones.

    In response to this tweet, the Prime Minster of Thailand, Prayut Chan-o-cha, has called for these utilities to be tidied up and put underground. No more mess! Who knows if it’ll actually happen, but it’s kind of cool to see what can be done with a single tweet.

    I wish I could say that my tweets were also capable of inspiring such swift urban action.

  • Free roads or free-flowing traffic?

    If you are a longtime reader of this blog, you’ll know that I am a supporter of road pricing. I believe it’s the only way to realistically solve the problem of traffic congestion and I believe that underpricing roads (such as not charging for them) isn’t fair and equitable to taxpayers, especially given our need to shift to more sustainable forms of mobility.

    Todd Litman’s recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail is a good reminder of these points:

    Also, new highways are far more expensive than most people realize, typically costing tens of millions of dollars for each kilometre of lane. Considering land, construction and additional operating expenses, the cost-recovery price for additional highway capacity – the toll required to repay its incremental costs – is typically 50 cents to $2.00 per vehicle-kilometre, far more than what motorists pay in fuel taxes.

    The law of demand is a fairly simple economic concept. It states that price and quantity demanded have an inverse relationship. The more you charge for something, the less demand there will be. And the less you charge for something, the more demand there will be.

    So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that when you underprice road and highway usage, you get lots of demand — oftentimes too much demand. As Litman argues in his article: “You can have free roads or you can have free-flowing traffic, but it is not economically feasible to have both.”

    Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash

  • The tricks with masterplanning

    Alex Bozikovic of the Globe and Mail recently made a good point in one of his articles about how challenging it is to properly “placemake” when it comes to large-scale masterplanned projects. This blog post is not at all intended as a commentary on any one project, but I would like to acknowledge that, for a variety of reasons, places do often need time, layers of history, and some patina on them in order to really settle in. When you build big, it can be easy for things to end up feeling sterile.

    It is also true that tastes can change over time (as we have talked about before), though you could argue that this change is driven by the settling in process. Spaces start to get rethought, reconfigured and recast, and that can make them more desirable.

    But it’s not just about time. What else is going on here that makes masterplanning so tricky? Four things immediately come to mind. If you have any others, please share them in the comment section below.

    One, a lot of the old stuff that we love is now illegal and no longer possible. Here is a great example from Paris that I wrote about. But there are countless others. Another example from Toronto might be the corner retail stores that used to dot our residential neighborhoods. In my opinion, these are wonderful additions. They create urban vibrancy. But today they are generally legal non-conforming uses.

    Two, great urban experiences often happen at the micro scale. Things like the perfect patio with a great view of the street and full afternoon sun. Or that intimate side street lined with beautiful homes. These are some of the moments that make cities great. But when you’re masterplanning at the master scale, it is perhaps easier for more of these intimate details to get lost.

    Three, any new community needs to be seeded. Cities and communities are nothing without people. And so what will be the anchors? What will bring people here? How are we going to animate its streets and public spaces? These can be tricky problems to solve and they often take time (and density).

    Four, masterplanning likely equals fewer feedback loops. I recently came across this great line from Chris Dixon: “Composability is to software as compounding interest is to finance.” Composability is the ability to mix and match software components. And the idea here is that open source software allows new software to get built on top of existing stuff (just like interest on top of interest). This way the world never needs to solve a problem twice.

    I’m not sure what the pithy line should be for city building, but cities also compound. We are constantly building on top of the efforts of others, except when we’re largely not, and we’re designing a whole bunch of new stuff all at once, as is typically the case with masterplanned projects. This isn’t inherently wrong, but building a community from scratch will always be more difficult than adding on to one that is already successful.

  • Should we be building more live/work spaces?

    Lately, I’ve become very interested in live/work uses. This is not something that I have written much about over the years, but it is now on my mind for a few reasons.

    One, many of us tried working from home for the first time over the last 21 months or so, and my understanding is that some people enjoy it. It’s not my preference, but I don’t represent everyone.

    Two, photography is a hobby of mine and I’ve always thought it would be super fun to have a studio space to play around with on the weekends. If any of you have any suggestions or spaces available, please let me know.

    Three, there are lots of urban conditions where retail doesn’t work, but a bit more ground-floor animation would be nice. This is commonly how live/work uses have been used. That said, I can think of a number of unsuccessful examples of this in Toronto. It’s tough to execute on.

    And four, there are lots of instances of older non-conforming spaces throughout our cities serving this purpose: inexpensive spaces for people to live, work, and create in. Though often “illegal”, I believe they are important for fostering new ideas.

    Here’s an example that I was reading about this morning in The Spaces and that triggered this blog post. It’s about sculptor Andreas Anastasis and his live/work loft on the west side of New York.

    I don’t know what building this is and whether or not work functions are technically permitted (presumably they are), but it’s an example of what I’m talking about. Take a spin through the video embedded above. If you can’t see it, click here.

    Should we be designing and creating our new residential spaces with multiple uses and this kind of flexibility in mind? Is there a big enough market for it? Does it devalue the pure residential aspect of the building knowing that your next door neighbor might have an office in their space, an artist studio, or a short-term Airbnb rental?

    These are some of the things that I’ve been thinking about and I would love to hear thoughts in the comment section below.

    Photo: Maxwell Schiano via The Spaces

  • Decentralization, centralization, and new frontiers

    In this recent post by Naval Ravikant, he argues that innovation seems to like two things: decentralization and a frontier. He starts by giving the examples of more decentralized states (i.e. smaller federal governments) and the Wild West. The American frontier was, as you know, wild. But it was also a place of great innovation.

    Naval then goes on to talk about the pendulum that tends to swing between centralization and decentralization. And in the world of technology, the last decade has been one of centralization (big companies). But this pendulum is much broader. Cities, as we have talked about before on this blog, are constantly in tension between centralizing and decentralizing forces.

    COVID was a powerful decentralizing force for cities. Everything was closed and we were all supposed to stay home. And so most/all of the benefits of centralizing in a city were suddenly, yet temporarily, turned off. Many people naturally decentralized. But when the dust finally settles, I highly doubt it will be as dramatic as most people initially thought.

    We know that cities and urban density encourage innovation. That’s why “unicorns” tend to overwhelmingly originate in big cities. But here’s the thing: this is a form of centralization. The fact that cities even exist in the first place tells us that their centralizing forces are winning out over the decentralizing ones.

    So how do we reconcile this with Naval’s argument that new frontiers and decentralization are actually what are needed for innovation? I agree wholeheartedly that one of the key innovations with crypto, for example, is that it is decentralized and permissionless. But what does this ultimately mean for cities and our built form?

    Does it encourage a similar sort of decentralization to happen? Or is the irony that decentralized technologies actually still thrive in centralized urban places? We may all be online buying NFTs, but we still want to get together in person to show them off and exchange ideas.

  • Toronto is on the verge of finding the missing middle

    Toronto’s chief planner Gregg Lintern (who you can follow over here on Twitter) was recently in the Toronto Star talking about the city’s plans to allow more multi-unit dwellings in our low-rise single-family neighborhoods.

    I was careful to say “more” because they are already permissible in some areas. The challenge is that they’re not happening at any sort of meaningful scale, which is an obvious signal that some key ingredients are still missing.

    Or perhaps there are too many required ingredients. For example, right now the zoning by-law requires one car parking space for every dwelling in a multi-unit building. This is, of course, dumb and the requirement should be completely eliminated.

    Changes like this, as well as many others, are long overdue. Not just in Toronto, but in many other cities. And it is partially what I was getting at when I wrote about laneway housing this past weekend and hinted at the need for other solutions to increase housing supply.

    So when you have a few minutes, I would encourage you to complete the city’s survey on expanding permissions for multiplexes across the city. I just did it and voted to bring on the multiplexes.

    Photo by Tiago Rodrigues on Unsplash

  • Toronto is missing out on one of the biggest economic development opportunities right now

    Wired published a great article last week talking about “the 10,000 faces that launched an NFT revolution.” What they are of course talking about are the CryptoPunk NFTs that I think most people would agree are one of the “OGs” of NFT art. Initially minted in 2017, they are usually credited with starting the NFT craze that we are all living through today. CryptoPunk #7523, for example, sold for $11.75 million. I think this is the most expensive CryptoPunk in the world. Either way, it is one of the most expensive NFTs out there.

    But as I was reading through the article I was reminded of something. Toronto is doing an awful job celebrating the fact that an immense out of crypto innovation has and continues to come out of Toronto. CryptoPunks, which is Larva Labs, was started by two guys from Toronto who met at the University of Toronto. I know that it is still early days for crypto and web3, but why are we not telling this story to the rest of the world and using it to continue to attract the smartest and most ambitious people to our great city?

    This is a missed economic development opportunity. And the door won’t be open forever. If any of our city leaders are reading this post (which is unlikely), I would encourage you to give this some serious thought and take action.

    On a related note, the above article is great evidence for Chris Dixon’s argument that, “what the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years.” Larva Labs was started by two software developers who worked during the day and used their evenings and weekends for new passion projects. CryptoPunks wasn’t their first initiative, but it has obviously come to define them. Smart people need room to play and experiment. Often that happens after hours.

  • Toronto to eliminate parking minimums

    For the last year or so the City of Toronto has been doing a review of parking requirements for new developments. This would include things like how much car and bike parking needs to be provided for each residential unit in a new building. More information on this work can be found here.

    City staff are now preparing to release their initial findings and, as I understand it, it is going to include the removal of most minimum parking standards across the city and the introduction of some maximum parking standards. What this should mean is that in most cases you can build as little parking as you want, but in some cases you’ll be stopped from building too much of it.

    There are lots of examples of other cities doing this. Buffalo is one example and I recently wrote (over here) about what happened to new developments once its minimums were eliminated. Among other things, it revealed where the previous parking requirements were overshooting what the market was actually demanding.

    Urban parking is heavily dilutive to new developments. It drives up the cost of new housing. It is also hypocritical to claim that we want to encourage alternative forms of mobility while at the same time mandating that we build a certain amount of car parking. Do we want people to drive or do we want people to do other things? Which is it?

    Some will bemoan this inevitable loss of parking (though it was already happening). But I think this is a great thing. It is Toronto growing up and continuing to realize that it’s pretty damn hard to build a big and well-functioning global city if everyone is driving around everywhere. Maybe one day we’ll even allow e-scooters.