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This morning I woke up to an email from the Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona. They are a public consortium dedicated to urban sustainability and made up of the City Council of Barcelona, the Municipal Council and Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, and the Barcelona Provincial Council. The email was about this upcoming “urban congress” taking place in Barcelona from May 22-24:
Sadly, I have no plans to be in Barcelona next month. But if any of you are based or traveling there, the conference is all about the future challenges that cities will face and about contributing to the new urban agenda. The main topics are: sustainability, city planning, social cohesion, and competitiveness.
Habitat III – which is in the title of the conference – was a United Nations conference on housing and sustainable urbanization. It took place in Quito, Ecuador in October 2016. However, it forms part of a much larger framework around sustainable global development. More info here.
Barcelona is also one of my favorite cities, so I am happy to share this one with all of you. If you’d like to register for Post-Habitat III, head over here.
Yesterday it was announced that Tim Hortons would be moving its corporate headquarters from Oakville, Ontario to downtown Toronto.
They’ll be taking 6,000 square meters of space in the PATH-connected Exchange Tower and moving all 400 employees by the end of this year.
I’m more of a Starbucks coffee drinker, but I am interested in this move. Here’s what their president, Alex Macedo, had to say about it (quote from the Financial Post):
“Consumer trends are changing very fast. We want to remain an innovative company,” he says. “We want to be able to react to guest changing behaviours so we thought being positioned in Toronto would allow us to do that.”
This is a good follow-up to a post I wrote back in April 2015, which talked about the trend of companies moving from the suburbs to downtown Toronto. I guess that is still happening.
In December of last year, the City of Hamilton launched an RFP process to find a team (from the list of prequalified bidders) to develop a new urban community at Pier 8 along the waterfront. The ambition is somewhere around 1,500 new residential units and approximately 13,000 square meters of commercial and institutional space.
That process has narrowed the pool to 4 teams and 1 will ultimately win the exclusive right to develop the new community. Here are the teams, along with a link to their submission materials, including a short video that I understand was a requirement of the RFP.
- GulfDream (link)
- Tridel (link)
- Urban Capital / Core Urban / Milborne Group (link)
- Waterfront Shores (link)
This is a super exciting project for Hamilton. So I would encourage you to take a look at the presentation materials. At this point, you only have until Tuesday, April 17, 2018 to provide any comments to the City’s evaluators. If you’d like to view the boards in person, you can do that this Monday and Tuesday in the main lobby of City Hall.
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