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.
The New York Times’ recent celebration of the city’s “legendary literary hangouts” is an important reminder of one of the great features of city life. Cities have a way of mixing different people together and inspiring the creation of great things. And sometimes that happens rather informally. (That’s one of the reasons why there’s tremendous value in the nighttime economy.) Tina Jordan writes: “You might think of them as solitary creatures, furiously scribbling or typing alone, but as long as there have been writers in New York City, they have socialized together in an assortment of bars, restaurants, apartments and clubs.”
The City of Toronto is currently reviewing its Official Plan, which is a city planning document that acts as a kind of master guide for land user matters. It is a pretty important document in that it dictates, among other things, what kind of development should go where. One way that it is often explained is that our OP is the “vision”, whereas our zoning by-laws are the “precision.”
This update will be completed by next summer. Why? Because the Province of Ontario said so. (That’s how things work around here. I think cities should have more power.)
Toronto is expected to grow by more than 700,000 people and add some 450,000 jobs by 2051. Where these people and jobs will be accommodated is a big part of the exercise here.
As part of this review, the City of Toronto published this Story Map. It is pretty neat. It looks at how the city has grown over the years (the above image is Toronto’s 1943 Master Plan). It explains a little bit about how planning works. And it has a bunch of stats on how people live and work in the city. I just used it to confirm my hunch that there are exactly zero single-family homes in my neighborhood.
Looking at the above map from 1943, it is, of course, interesting to see how much the city has grown. But it also interesting to note that many of the neighborhoods that now form part of the city were just “New Residential Areas with Prospective Populations.” They were colors and numbers on a map in areas that had yet to be built out by developers.
When I see this, I can’t help but wonder what the narrative was like at the time with respect to these new developments. Were people upset? Were people happy? Did people even notice what was happening on the edges of their city? Because sprawl, and that’s what this was, is quite different from intensification.
Our focus today is on the latter. It is about building up as opposed to out. There’s no more room for yellow shaded areas with numbers. This means that we will end up using our land and other resources more efficiently, but it also presents a whole host of issues. Change is hard. Intensification is hard. Part of the job of this document is to navigate some of these challenges.
If you’d like to get engaged with the city’s Official Plan review, head over here.
British designer Paul Smith was recently interviewed by Monocle on Design about his recent collaboration with BMW and Mini. If you like Mini cars, you’ll probably like the episode. But he also raises two interesting points about his business and about how he approaches design.
The first is that his business is a balancing act. In the front, he wants it to be pioneering, flashy, and self-indulgent. But in the back, he keeps the lights on by selling lots of navy blue suits and polo shirts. Both are important, because if you stop pioneering then you stop being relevant.
The second point he makes is about how he approaches design. Paul Smith’s London studio is famously cluttered. He likes to collect a lot of stuff. Some might call it hoarding. But for him, the space helps him think laterally and also remain “childlike.” (Where we work apparently matters.)
Children, as we know, are honest, curious, and free in a way that adults aren’t. They don’t have the same reference points and that can be very empowering. Forget the way that things are currently done and challenge yourself: “What if?” I like that a lot.
To listen to the Monocle on Design episode, click here.
It was recently announced that Amazon plans to start opening large brick-and-mortar retail stores that are akin to department stores. They won’t be quite as big. Supposedly they will be around 30,000 square feet. But this is still a meaningful commitment to physical retailing. The first stores of this type are expected to be in California and Ohio.
On the one hand, this move probably appears counterintuitive. I mean, Amazon is a machine built around e-commerce (though it does already have other physical stores). But on the other hand, you could argue that they are simply following a retailing playbook that was developed over a century ago by companies like Montgomery Ward and Sears.
Both of these companies disrupted traditional retailing in the late 19th century through mail-order catalogues. Why pay for physical space when you can just mail people catalogues? (Your margin is my opportunity, right?)
But as we know, eventually these mail-order catalogue businesses turned into brick-and-mortar stores, and they then thrived this way for many years. If you consider e-commerce to just be the 21st century equivalent of the mail-order catalogue, then perhaps this next move by Amazon was always destined to happen.
Next to the St. Lawrence Market (here in Toronto) is an appropriately named street called Market Street. It is a lovely street — perhaps one of the nicest in the city. It’s old and historic and it was completely redone several years ago (evidence here) with nice unit pavers, bollards, a curbless design, and seasonal restaurant patios.
In the winter months, the restaurant patios are packed up and additional parking is added to that side of the street. It was designed to be adaptable and in my experience it seems to be working quite well.
Right now the local Business Improvement Area is running a pilot project to see what this street might be like if it were to be pedestrianized. It was closed to vehicles this past weekend and the same will happen this upcoming weekend. Here’s a photo of what that looked like on Saturday:
It’s not perfect. A number of people commented on Twitter that the seating needs some shade. But hey, it’s a pilot project. It is about giving people a taste of what the future could be.
I am a fan of pedestrianized streets in the right locations and when executed well. And I think this stretch of Market Street is a perfect candidate. It’s already pedestrian-only to the north of Front Street and it has the right kind of “edges” to ensure that it can be properly animated.
If you feel the same way, I would encourage you to fill out this short survey that the St. Lawrence BIA has put out. I would also be curious to hear your thoughts on pedestrianized streets in general. Leave a comment below.
When I was a lot younger and growing up in Toronto, the place to go out at night was in the Entertainment District, centered around Richmond St West and Adelaide St West. This is where all of the bars and clubs were. Thinking back, the concentration of nighttime activities in this area was pretty incredible.
Those of you who are familiar with Toronto will know that this area isn’t the same nighttime epicenter that it once was and that it’s been this way for many years. The scene shifted westward and down to King St. It also went from larger clubs and venues to smaller bars, restaurants, and lounges. Tastes change, I guess.
So if you had to choose one intersection to be the epicenter of nightlife in Toronto right now, I think you could easily argue that it’s King St West and Portland St. (Disagree with this take? Leave a comment below.)
But why this intersection? Why did the nighttime economy land right here?
Part of it was surely development pressures in the Entertainment District, which forced a broader move. I also think that these areas tend to become victims of their own success. Clubs and bars generate a lot of noise and that makes some people grouchy.
But I think you could also argue that the intersection of King and Portland has some very specific urban qualities that lend itself to becoming a kind of heart for nightlife.
It helps that it is the only north-south street that intersects King between Bathurst and Spadina. However, I think the more important point is that both Bathurst and Spadina are fairly broad arterial avenues (certainly that is the case for Spadina). These intersections aren’t as hospitable to pedestrians and so they create a natural break in “the strip.”
The result is that Portland, which is a much smaller street, became the heart. The intersection feels much more like an urban room. Leave one bar and another one is right in front of you. That’s one of the things about cities. Intimate spaces, rather than big ones, are often what attract people.
With every passing year, the Matrix feels less and less like science fiction. With the continued rise of the metaverse — Zuckerberg is betting all of Facebook on it — we are increasingly living our lives between two worlds: one is offline and one is online. What this will ultimately mean (for us and for our cities) is of course up for debate. But what is clear is that the traditional trappings of real life have quickly made their way online into the metaverse. Arthur Hayes recently penned this fantastic article about the future of the world (it’s the metaverse) and the role of art (including NFT art). In it, he makes the argument that to “flex” is integral to the human experience. Here’s what he means by that:
As social beings, the sole purpose of many activities and purchases is to publicly display how much energy you can waste. The nightclub economy is extremely a propos to this concept. Individuals walk into a dark room, listen to loud music (art), dance (a waste of energy akin to a mating call), and pay exorbitant amounts of money to drink liquid. Everyone gets dressed up real nice in articles of clothing that serve no useful purpose other than to demonstrate that the wearer spent a lot of money to display their social status to the rest of the clubbers present.
Why this matters is that many of us are now doing the same kind of things online. Buying a CryptoPunk (an OG NFT) for a large sum of money and posting it as your social media profile pic is a flex. Is this rational or irrational behaviour? Whatever your answer, it is akin to paying several hundred dollars for a t-shirt from some cool streetwear brand. The real job to be done is not that you desperately need a t-shirt to cover your upper torso. It is the signalling that goes along with owning something scarce and valuable. One of the things that is so special about NFT-permissioned stuff is that there’s now a simple way to prove and enforce all of these things: ownership, scarcity, and so on.
What’s equally fascinating to me is how offline and online will end up interacting with each other. (Arthur refers to our offline world as the meatspace. I don’t know if he coined the term, but I’m going to rolling with it for the purposes of this post.) If people end up preferring to flex online instead of offline (and I’m sure many already do), what does that do to our meatspace(s)? And what does it do to our cities and how we build? I have no doubt that these questions are coming.
Building height and density are not one and the same. You can have tall buildings configured in a low-density way (think post-war towers in the park). And you can have low/mid-rise buildings configured in a high-density way (think Paris and Barcelona). This is one of the reasons why it is important to decouple density and tallness when thinking about our cities.
This line of thinking is the approach that a recent study took when trying to determine the optimal built form for minimizing climate impact. In the study they define four building typologies: 1) high density, high-rise, 2) low density, high-rise, 3) high density, low-rise, and 4) low density, low-rise.
What they found was that taller environments tend to have higher life cycle GHG emissions, but that lower-density environments are (obviously) far more land consumptive. To determine life cycle GHG emissions they looked at both embodied and operating emissions, which is why the taller stuff didn’t score as well under their methodology. There’s typically a lot of concrete and steel in tall buildings.
This lead the team to conclude that if you want to optimize around climate impact, you should probably aim for that perfect middle ground: dense, but not super tall.
But as Joe Cortright (City Observatory) rightly pointed out in his email newsletter, one of the big limitations of this analysis is that it does not consider transportation-related impacts. And since we know that transportation is one of if not the largest source of GHG emissions and that how we get around is heavily dependent on land use patterns, it is probably an important piece to consider.
I was riding my bike on Bloor Street along the north edge of High Park over the weekend. And in between cyclists in spandex yelling at me for seemingly riding the wrong way in the bike lanes, I managed to safely snap this picture:
It was a reminder of that thing we like to do in Toronto where we want lower-rise along our main streets and then we tuck the taller parts somewhere in the back so that we can pretend they are maybe not there. Here’s an aerial shot of the situation from Google Maps:
It’s a very different condition from what you will find in New York along virtually all edges of Central Park:
Now, New York and Toronto are not the same city. This much is obvious.
But there is a grandeur and degree of urbanity that is present along Central Park that is not present along High Park. And I would argue that this feature isn’t exclusive to New York. It can be found in many other cities, including places like Montreal.
I am sure that part of the rationale here on Bloor Street had to do with matching the lower-rise existing context. But we shouldn’t forget that the edges of public spaces are oftentimes just as important as the spaces themselves. Sometimes they can be even more important.
So I thought I would put it out to all of you. To stepback or not to stepback. What do you think would be the most appropriate built form along this north edge of High Park? Leave a comment below.
In the world of development, there is something known as a floor space index (FSI). Some places call it a floor area ratio (FAR), but they mean the same thing. It is one measure of density. To calculate it, you simply divide the total building area by the site area. For example, if you had a 25,000 square foot piece of land and you were to build a single storey building that occupied every bit of the site (also 25,000 sf), you would have an FSI or FAR of 1.0. If you built a two storey building on only half of the site, you would similarly have an FSI or FAR of 1.0. The area didn’t change, you just moved things around. That’s how FSI’s work.
A ratio like this tells you how intensely you may be using a piece of land, but it doesn’t tell you everything or necessarily give you the full picture. Which is why I find it silly when too much emphasis is placed on this singular number. I don’t think anyone in the history of the world has ever traveled to a city — let’s take Paris — and remarked how beautiful it is because of its floor space indices. Nobody thinks like this. It’s way too esoteric. What guides our experiences is built form, the ground plane, relationships to streets, materiality, light, context, and many other important things.
To give a specific example, let’s take One Delisle. This project was in effect approved twice. After it was approved by City Council in July 2020 an adjacent land parcel was acquired. It wasn’t absolutely necessary to do this, but we felt it made for better city building and so we did it. (We wanted to look back knowing we did the right thing.) That meant that we needed to go back to Council to revise our approvals, which ended up happening at the beginning of this year (public staff report, here). There was no change to the tower and and no change to any of the key setbacks or stepbacks. But the overall FSI did go down!
Will anyone notice or care about this lower ratio? I doubt it. Which is why I think it’s silly to try and plan our cities around them. It feels like design by spreadsheet. Thankfully, I think many people recognize this.
