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

  • Location data companies Foursquare and Factual announce merger

    This week it was announced that Foursquare and Factual are planning to merge. Both use location data to improve advertising and overall business intelligence. But unlike Foursquare, Factual doesn’t have a consumer-facing app. So most of us probably haven’t heard of them before. But they are some of the data and tech behind many of the companies that we do all know, including Starbucks.

    I have long been fascinated by location-based startups — like Foursquare — because they are inherently spatial. And how we move about our cities and spaces is rich with information. Companies want this data because, among other things, it is a register of intent. Me going somewhere signals certain things, including where else my kind might want to go.

    But location data can also be used for many other things beyond advertising and retail analytics. Foursquare has started sharing aggregated and anonymized foot traffic data with local governments and public health officials in the fight against COVID-19. That data is currently powering http://www.visitdata.org. Foursquare is also publishing a regular insights report.

    Here is a chart from them showing casino visits in Clark County since March 1:

    In many ways this chart is fairly obvious. In fact, it actually mirrors my own journey into isolation. After the NBA shutdown on Wednesday, March 11, things started to feel pretty real and on Friday I was working from home. But there’s a lot more that can be done with location data and there’s a lot more that will be done going forward. I am confident that will help not only business, but also society more broadly.

  • A post corona world

    There’s a lot of speculation (that’s all you can really do) about what our world is going to look like on the other side of this pandemic.

    I think it’s easy to overreach at a time like this and prognosticate dramatic change — such as the demise of cities and urbanity as we know it. But while I do believe that there are bound to be changes, I also know that after 9/11 most of us eventually stopped being afraid of flying and of being in tall buildings. We forgot and moved on.

    So, what might change?

    Scott Galloway argued on his blog today that “things won’t change as much as they will accelerate.” In other words, this pandemic is simply going to make the future happen faster. And one of those things is going to be a faster shift to online for higher education. It is untenable for education costs to continue increasing at the pace that they have been.

    In this recent Intelligencer interview with Chamath Palihapitiya, he puts forward the idea that medical data might start to be used publicly. Meaning that, after this is all done, we might be willing to give up a certain amount of our personal freedom in exchange for knowing whether we’re in a restaurant with someone who is shedding a communicable disease.

    And finally, Richard Florida recently published this online talk about how cities can bounce back from COVID-19. In it, he argues that, yes, cities will survive and that it could actually reinforce the “winner-take-all urbanism” that we have already been seeing.

    This, of course, is really just the start of the conversation.

  • COVID-19 in the developing world

    One of the things that Bill Gates mentions in his recent TED talk about the coronavirus is that we need to be aware of what might be coming in developing countries, particularly in the southern hemisphere with winter about to arrive. (There’s some evidence of a relationship with temperature.)

    So far, countries like Brazil have been criticized for taking a laid-back approach to fighting the coronavirus. But the same could be said for many, or perhaps most, countries around the world at the outset.

    However, in the case of densely populated slums — like Brazil’s favelas — the problem is expected to be more severe. Without the ability to socially isolate and without proper services, it is questionable whether they will be able to “flatten the curve” in the same way that some developed countries have. There’s also a lack of government oversight in these communities.

    Incidentally, the Financial Times is reporting that organized crime has started to step in to fill this void — and it is happening over WhatsApp. Here is an excerpt from the above article: “Whoever is caught on the street will learn how to respect the measure. We want the best for the population. If the government is unable to manage, organised crime resolves,” read one message sent to residents of a Rio de Janeiro slum.

    One hope is that rich countries will be largely through their outbreaks by the summer and that a vaccine will be well on its way.

    (On a related note, here is an excellent slide deck from the London Business School on the economics of this pandemic. It’s very comprehensive and worth a read.)

  • The latest coronavirus figures

    The Financial Times has some of the best charts/graphics that I have seen on the coronavirus and its impact. They’re also free and regularly updated. Below is the cumulative number of deaths, by number of days since the 10th death (last updated March 23 at 21:00 GMT). I prefer this to the number of cases because it is more precise, though impacted by things like demographics. The number of cases is impacted by how good you are at testing. Some countries have been far better than others. And what we are continuing to learn is that lots of people were and are completely asymptomatic.

    Seeing China (and Iran?) continue to flatten out is encouraging. (Note the logarithmic scale.)

    Here has been the impact to the Chinese economy. It’s slowing coming back.

    And here are traffic volumes around the world. This chart was published on Sunday, March 22. At that time, Tokyo looked to be largely business as usual.

  • Leveraging mobile phone data during a pandemic

    Smartphone user data is hugely valuable at a time like this. Which is why governments all over the world from Israel to South Korea are using aggregated telecom data to try and track how their citizens are moving during this pandemic.

    Some are calling this a violation of digital rights. I don’t know enough to comment on that specifically, but I do know that the value to society as a whole is clear. It strikes me that if we knew (1) who was infected (you know this by doing widespread testing), (2) where people have been, and (3) where people are today, we would be in a much better position to contain the spread.

    To that end, Singapore’s Ministry of Health has been publicizing a surprising amount of information regarding its cases. And that data has been in turn made into interactive maps. You can see who is infected, where they live and work, which hospital they were admitted to, and so on. Is this an overshare? Or is this price of collective health and security?

    The New York Times has similarly gone and visualized the movement of people and the virus using data from major telecoms, Baidu, and other sources; though in this case it is more of a retrospective view of what went wrong as opposed to a proactive management tool. The argument they make is that Wuhan’s lockdown was too little, too late.

    According to the NY Times, 175,000 people left Wuhan on January 1st alone. Throughout the month of January, outbound travel from Wuhan accelerated as many started to fear a lockdown. About 7 million people left in January. Where they travelled to can be found here. Would it be too draconian to use this kind of mobile phone data to see who is obeying a lockdown and who is not?

    Images: New York Times

  • Living in a denser London

    LSE Cities has just published a new report called, Living in a denser London: How residents see their homes. The goal of the research project was to better understand how modern housing projects are working (or not working) for Londoners. And so they connected with over 500 residents from 14 completed housing projects and got their feedback on everything from built form to community engagement. Most of the housing projects were completed in the last ten years, but they also surveyed projects from 1980, 1947, and 1902. If you don’t feel like going through the full report, there is also this website and this short film.

    Image: LSE Cities

  • The TO360 wayfinding project

    Despite COVID-19, I am still going to work and going to the gym. (Zoom and Peleton are up 23% and 6%, respectively, from February 21 to March 5, presumably because there’s a belief we’re all going to start doing less of these two things.)

    On my walk home from the gym today I noticed that some new wayfinding had just been installed at the corner of Church and Wellington. I’m not sure how long it has been up, but I am fairly certain it is new. Here is a photo.

    The wayfinding is part of the City of Toronto’s TO360 project, which was launched in 2011 and includes everything from transit shelter maps to finger posts like the one you see here. (Don’t worry, I am confident that detailed shadow studies were conducted before this thing was erected.)

    The “Astral” street furniture that we still have kicking around this city can’t be removed fast enough and so wayfinding like this is a significant improvement. I like the designs.

    But I also think the project is important from a placemaking standpoint. Signage like this helps to brand the city and the places with in it. It also signals a certain degree of internationalism, because wayfinding is most useful for visitors.

    So I am happy to see more of these going up.

  • A dumpster fire in San Francisco

    This past week, San Francisco’s Proposition E was approved by 55% of voters. The measure works by limiting new office development if (or when) the city falls short of its affordable housing target for the year.

    If the city only builds 25% of its housing target (currently set at 2,042 affordable units per year), then only 25% of its annual allocation of office space can be built the following year. (I just learned that large scale office development in San Francisco has been limited to 875,000 sf per year as a result of a Proposition dating back to 1986.)

    San Francisco currently skews heavily in favor of jobs. The city creates about 8.5 jobs for every unit of new housing. And over the last decade, SF has only averaged about 712 affordable housing units per year and has never once met its target.

    So at the moment, San Francisco looks destined to start building a lot less office space. And considering that new office space actually helps to fund affordable housing, I am struggling to understand why the goal seems to be to constrain job growth.

    California State Senator Scott Wiener called Prop E a dumpster fire:

    Call me old fashioned, but I tend to think that if the goal is to build more affordable housing, you should do things that, you know, encourage the actual construction of affordable housing.

    Photo by Eduardo Santos on Unsplash

  • Safety and security per capita

    This is a city metric I haven’t seen before. City Observatory recently looked at the number of police officers (public) and security guards (private) per capita across American cities. They also ask a bunch of interesting questions. Why do some cities have far fewer police officers? Is high security an indicator for “anti-social capital?” (Social norms aren’t encouraging people to behave.) And do some cities simply have more cops because it is perceived to be necessary?

    Here is what they found:

    The average is about 3.3 police officers per 1,000. And in each case, city is defined as the metro area. The study relies on census data and, if we’re being precise, the data represents where people live as opposed to where they work. So some cities could be reporting a lower number simply because police officers tend to live outside of the metro area — perhaps because of housing costs. Either way, it’s interesting to consider why some cities spend a lot more on security than others and why Miami has so many security guards.

    Chart: City Observatory

  • City stereotypes

    The New Yorker recently published a “daily shout” on Instagram called, How You Know You’ve Made It, by City. It is essentially a series on city stereotypes, and it’s pretty funny. Sorry Cleveland. If you can’t see the embed below, click here.