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.
Each t-shirt comes with a custom hand-drawn logo and playful colors that are intended to reflect the spirit of each place. The first three cities are Toronto, Paris, and Park City (Utah). And the goal is that once this first release is sold out, there will be a subsequent drop with three new places.
This is a project we’ve been thinking about for a while now, so it feels great to get it out the door. To pre-order a city collection tee, click here. All prices in Canadian. Global shipping available. Please note that these are pre-orders. All tees will ship in early 2022.
If you have any feedback on the tees, I’d love to hear from you in the comment section below.
The Institute for Transportation & Development Policy (ITDP) is a non-profit group that works all around the world — everywhere from Jakarta to Rio de Janeiro — to design and implement both transport solutions and policies that help to make our cities more livable, equitable, and sustainable. If you’re interested in learning more about the kind of work that they do, you can download a copy of their latest annual report, here.
Most recently, the group published a report called, “The Compact City Scenario – Electrified.” In it they argue that two things need to happen together if we are to move humanity toward net-zero carbon emissions and reduce global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. One, we need to fully electrify our transport (which I think is fairly obvious at this point). And two, we need a modal shift.
To be even clearer, ITDP argues that both of these things need to happen at the same time in order to successfully hit our targets. Full electrification of our transport without any sort of modal shift isn’t going to cut it, and the same is true for a modal shift without electrification.
Why all of this is important is because electrification is in many ways just a technical problem. We need electric vehicles, we need batteries, and we need the infrastructure in place to charge these vehicles. Among other things, this has meant building new charging stations, retrofitting existing buildings, and encouraging/requiring new buildings to make provisions for a future with predominantly electric vehicles.
But for the most part, EVs allow us to continue living the way that we have already been living. Just instead of pumping gas, we now plug in our cars at the end of the day. On the other hand, encouraging a modal shift is a fairly significant behavioral change. Though we know that one of the most effective ways to encourage less driving is to build more compact cities.
This means changing the way we live. Changing the way we get around. And accepting more intense forms of development in our own backyards. It is fundamentally linked to land use planning and so it is going to be much harder to achieve. But if you agree with the above report, we won’t be able to meet our sustainability goals without it.
We knew it was coming. But it’s important and worth mentioning again. This week, Toronto City Council adopted new Zoning Bylaw Amendments that will remove most parking minimums across the city. We now join many other cities across North America who have done similar things in order to try and encourage more sustainable forms of mobility.
If you’d like to take a spin through the draft amendments, you’ll find them linked here. I haven’t gone through them in detail, but I did do a word search for “maximum” given that this week’s adoption represents a pretty clear change in perspective. Here’s an excerpt from the staff recommendation report that speaks to what I’m talking about:
Recognizing these challenges, this review of the parking standards in the city-wide Zoning By-law 569-2013 was guided by the principle that parking standards should allow only the maximum amount of automobile parking reasonably required for a given use and minimums should be avoided except where necessary to ensure equitable access. The previous review, which began in 2005, was guided by the principle that the zoning standards should require the minimum responsible amount of parking for a given land use. This is inconsistent with Official Plan policies which discourage auto dependence.
One other thing I found in the documents that went to Council was this map of parking spot selling prices in active high-rise developments across the city. Not surprisingly, downtown and midtown are showing the highest prices per parking space. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of all of these dots, but it looks directionally right and I can tell you that at least one of them is correct.
All of us in the industry know how much parking drives decision making. There’s a joke (half-joke) that when you’re designing a building, first you lay out the parking and then you design all of the residential suites around that structural grid. That’s not the way things should be done. The future of this city should not and cannot be centered around the car. This week’s adoption is in service of that.
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.
Retention of an existing concrete building, and architecture that’s a sensitive counterpoint to the original. This (if built as shown) will be excellent. https://t.co/Svbcq3pLJ5
The application proposes to retain the existing 12-storey office building and both expand its floorplates to the west and build new residential on top. In the middle is a shared multi-storey amenity space that also performs some pretty cool structural gymnastics courtesy of Stephenson Engineering (see above rendering).
This approach created some interesting design challenges for the team. Typically when you’re adding onto an existing building, you want to do something new and not try and copy/bastardize what’s already there. Oftentimes this means something more contemporary.
The architecture team at Gensler Toronto tried this approach but the podium proportions didn’t feel quite right when we did it. So a decision was made to instead pay homage to the existing building’s architecture, and then kind of reinterpret it by playing with scale and other details.
This way the original building remains architecturally legible, but the entire podium still reads as one and its proportions feel much better. We hope you like it as much as we do.
The cost of container shipping continues to come to the forefront in this current environment. Today I was reviewing prices from a number of our suppliers and the rates for a FEU (forty-foot equivalent container) now seem to range anywhere from $8k to almost $18k (both CAD), depending on the origin.
This is up from a few thousand at the beginning of the year, and from far less prior to that. To help illustrate this point, above is a chart I found over at Statista showing an aggregated global container freight rate index from July 2019 to November 2021. This chart, which is in USDs, suggests that container rates may have peaked and be now tapering off, but who knows really.
This is a challenge for our suppliers and partners to manage through and it is a challenge for us to manage through. In some cases these additional costs will necessarily trickle down to the end consumers of the spaces that we and others are building. But in other cases that is not possible.
This week it was announced that Nike has acquired RTFKT Studios (pronounced “artifact”) for an undisclosed amount. When I read the news (official Nike announcement here), I immediately thought to myself, “Yeah, of course!”
Some of you may remember that I wrote about RTFKT back in April. They are perhaps best known for their digital sneaker NFTs (on the Ethereum blockchain). And so this is an exceedingly obvious and strategic buy for Nike.
But more importantly, I think this is great validation for the crypto/NFT space and further evidence that our digital and physical worlds are continuing to collide in some new and very interesting ways.
What this ultimately means for life in 10 or 20 years is anybody’s guess, but sneakers are the tip of the iceberg. And this doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re all destined to live in some sort of metaverse video game.
Another way to look at this whole metaverse thing is to consider it not as an actual place or space, but instead as a moment in time (Shaan Puri makes this argument here). Put differently, the metaverse is simply a point in time where we begin to bestow tremendous value on our digital life and our digital assets.
Instagram is one example of this. Profiles have become integral to people’s identifies. We use them to vet restaurants. We use them to vet travel destinations. And we use them to vet potential dating partners, among many other things.
So while sneaker NFTs might be a new thing, there’s already lots of evidence that digital goods can have just as much value — and potentially even more value — than physical goods. I am sure that Nike recognizes this and it’s part of why they bought RTFKT.
Buildings of Paris from before 1800 vs 1800-1914. A reminder of how overwhelmingly what is widely celebrated in Europe's urban heritage is really the heritage of the long nineteenth century. From this brilliant database: https://t.co/fzXP1SFIQ0pic.twitter.com/8VAwR41mMK
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.
Today, Amazon ships approximately 72% of its own packages. This is up from about 47% in 2019. Ben Thompson of Stratechery recently published an excellent article talking about why this is important and how the company’s investments in logistics are, yet again, paying dividends.
The foundation of Amazon’s “moat”, Ben argues, is aggregating customer demand. When most people buy something on Amazon from a third party merchant, they think and feel as if they’re buying directly from Amazon. Some people probably don’t even appreciate the difference and in most cases it probably doesn’t matter. It comes in a box with Amazon’s logo on it and that’s that.
But it’s an important distinction because if you’re a third party merchant, Amazon pretty much “owns” your customers. They are the ones aggregating demand. They have the brand equity and loyalty. And if you left the platform, your customers would be unlikely to follow you.
This is kind of the opposite of how Shopify’s ecommerce platform works. When you operate a Shopify store you are using their platform, but you are bringing your own brand, web domain, and other assets to it, such that you can now establish a more direct relationship with your customers. This doesn’t mean that Shopify doesn’t have a moat, it’s just something different.
All things being equal, most businesses would rather “own” their customers than not. The problem right now is that shipping and supply chains are no joke, and so there are real advantages to being on Amazon and having them handle your fulfillment. It could mean the difference between getting your products out for Christmas, or not.
As many of you know, I am working on a new build in Park City, Utah. One of the things that I have had to get up to speed on are earth retention systems. Building in the mountains is challenging. Here are a couple of photos from this morning of a new single-family home under construction near the lot that I am working on.
It looks to be a combination of cast-in-place concrete and precast blocks (right side). We are looking at a similar strategy. To give you a sense of the magnitude, some of the concrete blocks we are looking at are 1,800 lbs each. As is the case with many construction projects, a lot of the costs here end up going towards things that most people won’t ever see or think about.
