I’m planning a trip to Detroit this month.

Some of you might be wondering why on earth I would do that, but I’m actually super excited. Why? Because I’m fascinated by the city. Detroit is such a dramatic example of how the fortunes of a city can change. I think some people forget what places like New York City and South Beach were like in the 1980s.

But more importantly, I’m interested in the future of Detroit and the opportunities that might lie ahead. In many ways, the city feels like a clean slate. It’s a city that’s trying to completely rebuild and reinvent itself. And there’s a lot of smart (and rich) people, like billionaire Dan Gilbert, putting their weight behind its renewal. Through his company Bedrock, he has quickly become one the largest private landlords in the city. I also have a good friend who’s working in Detroit on strategies for the Midtown area. He’ll be my “tour guide” during the trip.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in media headlines and so I want to see what’s happening first hand on the ground. Detroit has a long history of entrepreneurialism and so the eternal optimist in me wants to believe that it can come back.

One of its big challenges, however, is education. As Harvard economist Ed Glaeser put it in his book, the Triumph of the City, one of the greatest things about the Detroit of yesterday was its ability to create a lot of high paying jobs for people with little education. Now the city has to deal with that legacy and few jobs.

I’ll have more to say after my trip but, in the interim, what are your thoughts on Detroit? Can it come back? Will it ever be the economic powerhouse that it once was?

One of the North American truisms that I often like to challenge is the belief that kids should be raised in a house.

I’m interested in this topic, not because I’m planning for a kid, but because Toronto has gone through such a dramatic transformation over the past 15+ years to become a city where more and more people are living in multi-family dwellings (condos, apartments, and so on).

However, there’s still the belief amongst many circles that condo living is merely a stepping stone on the way to a house. Since Millenials have effectively added a new life phase between University and marriage, condos have become the home of choice for many twenty and thirty somethings. But how long will they stick around? I see a lot of people in my network getting married and subsequently moving from a condo to a house.

Why is this?

Is it because of schools? Is it a cultural belief that families require a house and a backyard? As someone who grew up in the suburbs, I can tell you that I never played in the backyard. I played on the street with other kids. I used a shared public space rather than a private one.

On a practical level, I think the condo-to-house tradition has a lot to do with the fact that condos are just more expensive on a per square foot basis than wood-framed houses. For the same price that you might pay for a small 2 bedroom condo in Toronto, you could still conceivably buy a 3 bedroom house in some inner city neighbourhood.

I stumbled upon an interesting TED talk this morning by Columbia University professor and city theorist Saskia Sassen. And while she herself admits in the talk that she doesn’t have all the answers to the questions and ideas she’s proposing, she does raise a few intriguing concepts that I would like to share with you all.

The first is the idea that cities talk back.

I like this idea because I’ve long thought of cities as a kind of living breathing organism. The example she uses is that of a car - specifically an Audi. She talks about all the great engineering that goes into a car like this, but then how it all gets muted once it enters a busy city centre. The city is “talking back” and telling the car how it’s now going to behave.

In her view, this idea of listening to what a city has to say is the first step towards what she’s calling “open source urbanism.” This is the idea that city dwellers can not only respond to and engage with cities, but also help make/shape them - just like how open source software works. This is a profoundly interesting concept that flips top-down city planning on its head. 

Again, how exactly this might work is still to be determined, but I can already think of a few early examples; one of which is a DC-based startup called 

I’m planning a trip to Detroit this month.

Some of you might be wondering why on earth I would do that, but I’m actually super excited. Why? Because I’m fascinated by the city. Detroit is such a dramatic example of how the fortunes of a city can change. I think some people forget what places like New York City and South Beach were like in the 1980s.

But more importantly, I’m interested in the future of Detroit and the opportunities that might lie ahead. In many ways, the city feels like a clean slate. It’s a city that’s trying to completely rebuild and reinvent itself. And there’s a lot of smart (and rich) people, like billionaire Dan Gilbert, putting their weight behind its renewal. Through his company Bedrock, he has quickly become one the largest private landlords in the city. I also have a good friend who’s working in Detroit on strategies for the Midtown area. He’ll be my “tour guide” during the trip.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in media headlines and so I want to see what’s happening first hand on the ground. Detroit has a long history of entrepreneurialism and so the eternal optimist in me wants to believe that it can come back.

One of its big challenges, however, is education. As Harvard economist Ed Glaeser put it in his book, the Triumph of the City, one of the greatest things about the Detroit of yesterday was its ability to create a lot of high paying jobs for people with little education. Now the city has to deal with that legacy and few jobs.

I’ll have more to say after my trip but, in the interim, what are your thoughts on Detroit? Can it come back? Will it ever be the economic powerhouse that it once was?

One of the North American truisms that I often like to challenge is the belief that kids should be raised in a house.

I’m interested in this topic, not because I’m planning for a kid, but because Toronto has gone through such a dramatic transformation over the past 15+ years to become a city where more and more people are living in multi-family dwellings (condos, apartments, and so on).

However, there’s still the belief amongst many circles that condo living is merely a stepping stone on the way to a house. Since Millenials have effectively added a new life phase between University and marriage, condos have become the home of choice for many twenty and thirty somethings. But how long will they stick around? I see a lot of people in my network getting married and subsequently moving from a condo to a house.

Why is this?

Is it because of schools? Is it a cultural belief that families require a house and a backyard? As someone who grew up in the suburbs, I can tell you that I never played in the backyard. I played on the street with other kids. I used a shared public space rather than a private one.

On a practical level, I think the condo-to-house tradition has a lot to do with the fact that condos are just more expensive on a per square foot basis than wood-framed houses. For the same price that you might pay for a small 2 bedroom condo in Toronto, you could still conceivably buy a 3 bedroom house in some inner city neighbourhood.

I stumbled upon an interesting TED talk this morning by Columbia University professor and city theorist Saskia Sassen. And while she herself admits in the talk that she doesn’t have all the answers to the questions and ideas she’s proposing, she does raise a few intriguing concepts that I would like to share with you all.

The first is the idea that cities talk back.

I like this idea because I’ve long thought of cities as a kind of living breathing organism. The example she uses is that of a car - specifically an Audi. She talks about all the great engineering that goes into a car like this, but then how it all gets muted once it enters a busy city centre. The city is “talking back” and telling the car how it’s now going to behave.

In her view, this idea of listening to what a city has to say is the first step towards what she’s calling “open source urbanism.” This is the idea that city dwellers can not only respond to and engage with cities, but also help make/shape them - just like how open source software works. This is a profoundly interesting concept that flips top-down city planning on its head. 

Again, how exactly this might work is still to be determined, but I can already think of a few early examples; one of which is a DC-based startup called