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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  • Daydreaming about traveling again

    One of my favorite pastimes these days is planning out all of the places I am going to travel to once it is safe to do so and the world fully reopens. Traveling was something that I prioritized before COVID-19 and it is something that I know I will get back to sooner rather than later. But in the short-term, the travel and tourism industry is of course feeling it. According to this recent article from FT, there were 67 million fewer tourists around the world in March 2020 compared to last year. And in April, passenger demand was down even further with a 94% year-over-year decline. This is something, because globally, tourism is believed to account for about 10% of the world’s economic output. Over the last five years, 1 out of every 4 new jobs around the world was in the travel and tourism space. And for some countries, such as Cambodia, tourism accounts for over 30% of overall GDP.

    What has also happened over the last decade is that South and East Asia & Pacific has begun collecting a greater share of global tourism dollars, which is or was at about US$1.6 trillion in total. East Asia is now comparable to Europe & Central Asia — it may even be receiving a few more dollars at this point. However, there are some key differences. Tourism in Europe, more so than other region, relies on international travel. And since domestic travel is likely to recover before international travel, Europe is perhaps the most exposed in this regard. Europe also has a pretty pronounced peak. There is something magical about the Mediterranean in July and August and that is indeed when most people visit Europe (see above FT charts). Broadly speaking, the rest of the world doesn’t seem to experience this same overt seasonality. (If you think back to the start of COVID-19, you might remember that Asia’s travel “peak” usually happens in December.)

    Will international travellers feel confident enough by July and August? And if they don’t and Europe misses summer 2020, will travel plans get pushed to later in the year or will Europe need to wait for summer 2021? For me it’s feeling like a summer of road trips and local vacations. But that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about and planning for much more. My suitcase and passport are ready. What about you?

    Charts: Financial Times

  • Autonomous waste collection in Amsterdam’s canals

    Many cities around the world use underground waste containers to collect garbage. Instead of garbage being collected from individual homes and buildings, residents simply bring their waste to a nearby drop-off location, centralizing the collections process. This may not be the case in all neighborhoods, but it is being done. Ideally, and in some cases, these drop-off locations are connected through underground tubes so that the waste never actually needs to be collected.

    Amsterdam is one example of a city that has a robust network of waste bins. But access isn’t universal. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the historic city center of Amsterdam houses about 10% of the city’s population. But only a portion of these households actually have convenient access to a fixed waste receptacle. Apparently it’s because its quays along the canals aren’t all that conducive to underground waste storage. This means that garbage tends to get stored on sidewalks within the public realm.

    Researchers at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute) and MIT have been working on a solution to this problem and it involves Amsterdam’s waterways. It turns out that while most residents within the city center don’t have convenient access to a waste bin, almost all of them are within 120m of a canal. The proposed solution is called project Roboat and it involves a fleet of autonomous vessels that could serve as on-demand drop-off locations. Here’s what they might look like:

    The idea is that these garbage collectors would be dropped off and picked up by another set of autonomous “Roboats” and that the entire network could optimize itself over time as demand and usage changes. These Roboats might also serve to transport people and goods, all while they shuttle garbage around the city and perhaps even check the quality of the water in the canals. My first thought is that this sort of autonomy feels easier to execute on than autonomous cars. You have other boats to content with, but you don’t have pedestrians.

    So maybe we’ll be seeing Roboats around Amsterdam sooner rather than later.

    Image: MIT/AMS Institute

  • What’s in a street name?

    In Toronto we have a street named Avenue Road. If you’re learning about this for the first time, you might be wondering: “Well, is it an avenue or is it a road?” Then again, does that sort of distinction even matter? Does it imply certain characteristics? When I think of an avenue, I think of a broad and straight tree-lined street. And indeed, Avenue Road is connected to a street called University Avenue, which is pretty straight, broad, and has trees lining it. It’s a ceremonial kind of street that leads you toward the Ontario Legislative Building. It fits my definition. And so maybe Avenue Road is really saying, “Yeah, I know I’m not an avenue in the traditional sense, but I eventually connect into one and so I have decided to use both names.”

    It could also be the case that we haven’t always been that meticulous when naming our roads. Or perhaps we simply changed the way we designed and thought about our streets as we sprawled outward, and along with that came some name changes. In the oldest parts of Toronto, the main streets tend to be exactly that — streets. And our secondary streets are often named as avenues. This is the opposite of a place like Manhattan, where avenues are the broad north-south streets that take you downtown and uptown, and streets are the smaller east-west roads that take you across the narrower part of the island. Here there is a very clear logic. Avenues are big. Streets are small.

    Looking at this road name map of London by Giuseppe Sollazzo (click here if you can’t see it above), it’s obvious that London’s street network is pretty much the opposite of New York’s rational street grid. But you can see what appears to be a clear graduation from streets (in the center) to roads and then to some sort of melange that seems to include a bunch more avenues. They may just be street names, but they to speak to a whole host of things, including the evolution of our cities, changing attitudes toward city planning, and naturally the adoption of new kinds of mobility. They also make for nerdy maps.

  • Short Lane in Surry Hills

    Just look at these deep cantilevered balconies and this board-formed concrete. Let’s also not forget the fine-grain retail and small mid-block laneway.

    Designed by Woods Bagot for Komplete Construction, the “Short Lane” project was completed in the Surry Hills neighborhood of Sydney in 2018. It has 22 suites — each with both north and south exposure — and is about 1,900 square meters in total. So the average suite size looks to be somewhere in the range of 80 square meters.

    Here’s a peak inside:

    And here are those cantilevered balconies again:

    I have no idea what the entitlement process is in Sydney for a project like this. If you do, please share it in the comments below. But this is undoubtedly an attractive scale and type of infill housing, something that I think should be encouraged and allowed as-of-right. No multi-year rezoning process. No complicated site plan process. Just cool infill housing.

    Photos: Woods Bagot

  • Supertall drawings

    The submission documents for 1200 Bay Street — the supertall being designed by Herzog & de Meuron and Quadrangle Architects — are now publicly available through the City of Toronto’s development applications website. I went through the plans today out of curiosity. Below are the typical residential floors. The three tranches shown here are floors 19-46, 48-79, and 81-84. Note the side elevator core and the east-west shear walls — both of which I was expecting to see.

    And here are some of the main project stats:

    • Site area after laneway widening: 890.1 square meters
    • Total gross floor area (residential & non-residential): 54, 898 square meters
    • Floor space index: 61.67
    • Building height (excluding mechanical penthouse): 324 meters
    • Number of residential suites: 332
    • Vehicular parking spaces proposed: 0
    • Bicycle parking spaces proposed: 673

    As a rule and out of professional courtesy, I do not comment on other people’s projects on this blog (other than to occasionally point out awesome and ambitious projects). But I do enjoy going through drawing sets to see what others are doing and to see what I might learn. And I am similarly happy to collaborate with others who may want to learn from what we are doing.

    If you’d like to download a copy of the submission package, you can do that by entering the address over here.

  • City-to-city airline routes expected to decline by 20% this year

    Supposedly there are more than 14,000 airplanes parked around the world right now. And according to the latest numbers from IATA, this is expected to translate into an $84 billion loss for global commercial airlines in 2020. The industry is not expected to return to profitability until 2022. As a point of comparison, net profits were about $26.4 billion last year.

    Some more numbers from IATA:

    Here is something else from the Journal. The number of airline routes has doubled over the past two decades. That has included the number of city-to-city routes. IATA is predicting that by the end of this year we will see these urban routes decline by about 20% compared to last year. And who knows when they will return. Perhaps in 2022, along with profitability.

    The reason I point this out is because if you follow the work and writing of planner Joe Berridge, you will know that he often cites airports as being a key piece of infrastructure for global cities. At one point, having a deep harbor was everything you needed in order to bring in goods and people. But today a solid airport is paramount.

    Will the loss of this city-to-city connectivity have an impact on some cities?

  • First shoring rig arrives at Junction House

    Our first shoring rig was delivered and setup today at Junction House. A second one is on the way shortly.

    It will take a couple of months to complete all of our caisson piles. If you’d like to learn about how shoring is constructed, check out this “explainer” from UrbanToronto.

    It was also an absolutely beautiful day here in Toronto — not a cloud in the sky. So here are a few photos from site.

  • Masterplanning a successful main street

    I had a discussion with a friend of mine over the weekend about what it takes to masterplan a successful retail main street. We talked about street networks, storefront sizes, the impact of Toronto’s PATH on ground level experiences, and a bunch of other things. Ultimately, we both agreed that this is really not an easy feat to accomplish. More often than not, we screw it up. Many of the most cherished retail spines in this city rely on buildings that were primarily built during a different era. They’re old stock.

    All of this got me wondering:

    Some people responded by saying it doesn’t exist. Hmm. Is our track record that bad? Let’s dig a bit deeper and expand the scope of this question. What are some of the best retail streets around the world that comprise of buildings that were all or mostly built in the last 50 years? I would love to hear from you. Please leave any responses and/or thoughts in the comment section below. I plan to look at this topic in more detail and share specific examples in the coming weeks.

  • Urbanation releases May 2020 condo market update

    The latest condo market data from Urbanation is encouraging. As I reported last month, April was a very slow month, which isn’t surprising given that it was the first full month of lockdown. Residential resales across the Greater Toronto Area were down 67% year-over-year.

    In May, we have seen resale condominium sales increase by almost 60% compared to April, though they are still down by a wide margin compared to last year. The average sale price also increased by 7.9% compared to April and by 3.4% compared to last year. This puts resale condominium prices in line with what we were seeing in Q4-2019.

    The rental condo market (that is, condos being rented out via MLS) also showed signs of stabilizing. Leases increased by 75% compared to April, outpacing the number of new listings (66%). Rental rates remained more or less flat (0.3%) compared to April, but they are down by about 5% compared to their Q3-2019 high.

    On the new construction side, we have only really seen a handful of new launches/releases. Units are selling, but it still feels a bit early, at least for me, to really determine where we’re at in terms of pricing and velocity. Nevertheless, I suspect that we will see a significantly stronger fall market come September.

  • The fall of the Roman Empire and the future of cities

    Harvard economist Ed Glaeser and former New York City Health Commissioner Mary Bassett were recently interviewed on national radio about COVID-19 and the future of our cities. What both of them touch on is the long history that cities and pandemics have had together, which is something that Glaeser also wrote about over here in City Journal. This pandemic isn’t the first and it won’t be the last.

    Using history as an example, Glaeser makes the argument all of this can go one of two ways. After the influenza epidemic of 1919, cities rebounded quickly. The roaring twenties were one of “the great city-building decades in American history.” But on the other hand, there’s the Justinian Plague (circa 541 to 750 CE), which is thought to have played an important role in the fall of the Roman Empire. Glaeser argues that this plague, which took over 200 years to extinguish, is responsible for 800 years of de-urbanization across the Mediterranean. Is that so?

    A quick search reveals that the impacts of the Justinian Plague are, of course, greatly contested. Some scholars have questioned whether it was actually an “inconsequential pandemic.” Whatever the case may be, it doesn’t change the fact that the modern world has been built around density and proximity. We are social beings and we are smarter and more productive when we are able to cluster together. That was the case in 750 CE and it remains the case today.