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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  • This river I step in is not the river I stand in

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    I was over at the Riverside Bridge yesterday taking photos and I was reminded of Eldon Garnet’s installation called, TIME: AND A CLOCK (1995). 

    The work spans a few physical sites, but perhaps the most well known component is the line of text on the west side of the bridge, which reads in 18″ high letters: “This river I step in is not the river I stand in.” (Photo above from Garnet’s website.)

    If you’re from Toronto, you may be already be familiar with this installation. But I love the message and I think it’s an important one. So I thought I would reiterate it here on the blog. 

    The text is derived from the thinking of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Its meaning is a simple one: change is fundamental to the universe. 

    Neighborhoods change. Cities change. Industries change. We change. The river you first step into, is not the same river that you’ll be standing in. That initial river has come and gone, replaced by a new river. In the words of Heraclitus, “No man ever steps in the same river twice.”

    As people, organizations and cities age, there can be a tendency to resist change. I believe in fighting that tendency. 

    Because that’s how established rich companies get destroyed by young poor companies. They – the incumbents – underestimate the importance of change. They forget that the river is constantly flowing.

  • How to achieve peak productivity

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    Lately I’ve been finding that I need to divide my time between multitasking and blocks of uninterrupted time. The multitasking phase is doing calls, responding to emails in 3 seconds, going from meeting to meeting, and so on. It’s a mode that many of us probably exist in virtually all of the time.

    But I can’t stay in this mode all of the time. I think of it as short attention span mode. There are times when I need blocks of uninterrupted time so that I can “go deep.” One example would be to review drawings. I really need to focus so that I can think of all of the externalities associated with the decisions being made.

    This is related to my post about managers and makers, but it’s also the focus of a recent book by Cal Newport called, Deep Work: The Secret to Achieving Peak Productivity. You can read more about the book here at Knowledge@Wharton, but I wanted to highlight two concepts. The first is this equation:

    High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus).

    Obviously the argument here is that if you want to maximize your output, you need to increase the intensity of your focus. Minimize distractions. Ratchet up the intensity. There’s only so much time in the day.

    Newport gives the example of Adam Grant. He is a New York Times bestselling author and the youngest tenured professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. 

    He is so committed to intensity of focus that he batches all of this teaching into the fall semester, allowing him to truly focus on the students. He’s the highest rated teacher at Wharton. At the same time, this lets him focus on research and writing during the spring and summer semesters. He’s also known to regularly use auto-of-office responders when he’s in the office, but needs to focus.

    The second concept is that of “attention residue.” The idea here is that when we switch from some Task A to some other Task B, our attention doesn’t immediately snap over. A portion of our attention remains on the original task and distracts us from fully focusing. There’s residue.

    An example of this would be when you’re working on something and you see an email come in. As soon as you turn your attention to that notification, your attention gets divided. And even if you don’t immediately respond to that email, a portion of your attention now remains with that uncompleted task. It lingers in the mind.

    The above probably makes intuitive sense to a lot of you, but in many ways our work culture today does not encourage intensity of focus.

    Thanks for reading today. There’s lots of evidence to suggest that the best way to learn new things is to not simply read about it, but to share it with others. That’s one of the reasons I blog and hopefully you find that valuable.

  • Case Study: Chophouse Row, Seattle

    The Urban Land Institute recently published an interesting case study for a project in Seattle called Chophouse Row. 

    It is the last phase in a series of projects that the developer, Liz Dunn, has been involved with in the neighborhood over the last 16 years.

    This particular project has 25,317 sf of office, 6,379 sf of retail, and 4,795 sf of residential (3 penthouses). It also incorporates a heritage building. Good example of fine-grained urban infill.

    Here is the video (click here if you can’t see it below):

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PmAMsWEv98?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

    On a related note, ULI’s 2017 Toronto Symposium is coming up later this month (April 24 – 25, 2017). Here is the program. 80+ speakers. If you’d like to register, you can do that there.

  • Free ice cream

    I was out for dinner this evening and the topic of road tolls (road pricing) came up. All of us at the table agreed that this was a missed opportunity for Toronto. Yes we proposed it, but then we got cold feet and backed away.

    Why might this be a good idea?

    City Observatory did a good job explaining this with their post about free ice cream day at Ben & Jerry’s. They argued that this sort of promotion actually provides a great crash course in transportation economics. Nobody is paying, but the lines are real long.

    Here’s an excerpt:

    Substitute “freeway” for “free cone” and you’ve got a pretty good description of how transportation economics works. When it comes to our road system, every rush hour is like free cone day at Ben and Jerry’s.  The customers (drivers) are paying zero for their use of the limited capacity of the road system, and we’re rationing this valuable product based on people’s willingness to tolerate delays (with the result that lot’s of people who don’t attach a particularly high value to their time are slowing down things for everyone).

    What we are talking about is simple, but apparently it’s not easy to execute on.

  • Ingressi di Milano

    A new architecture book, called Entryways of Milan, will be released next month that profiles some of the city’s most beautiful residential entryways. There are 144 of them and they are housed in buildings dating from 1920 to 1970. For a sneak peek of the architecture, click here.

    What makes a book like this interesting is that these are private entryways, which means they are spaces that are largely overlooked within a city. They are the spaces that mediate between public (street) and private (residences). The book also dives into things like materials and the art-historical and social significance of each lobby.

    I am now wondering if similar books or photography projects exist for other cities. I think it would be fascinating to compare residential entrance halls across different cities during the same time period. Although the above Milanese lobbies have set the bar pretty high. 

  • The Millennial Dream [Documentary]

    Back in 2015, I was interviewed for a documentary called The Millennial Dream. I then completely forgot about it until somebody tweeted it at me yesterday. So the documentary is out – it was released last year – and you can rent it or buy it on iTunes.

    The documentary calls into question the [North] American Dream. This idea that you just have to work hard, save up, buy a house in the suburbs, pay off your debt, and then everything will be just fine. For many, that dream is quickly disappearing, if it hasn’t already.

    Enter the Millennial Dream. Our economy is changing. Our jobs are changing. Our cities are changing. And by 2020, the Millennial generation is expected to form 50% of the global workforce. What is this generation dreaming about? That is what this documentary is about.

    But I should probably stop here because I haven’t actually seen the film. I could be overselling it. I’ll watch it this weekend and then report back. If you can’t see the trailer embedded below, click here.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVCNXJk2fT8&w=560&h=315]

  • Knowing how (automated medicine)

    I should read The New Yorker more often. I’m going to subscribe right now (done). The articles are fantastic. In the April 3, 2017 issue, Siddartha Mukherjee wrote a piece talking about automated medicine. It’s called A.I. Versus M.D.

    Here is an excerpt:

    His prognosis for the future of automated medicine is based on a simple principle: “Take any old classification problem where you have a lot of data, and it’s going to be solved by deep learning. There’s going to be thousands of applications of deep learning.” He wants to use learning algorithms to read X-rays, CT scans, and MRIs of every variety—and that’s just what he considers the near-term prospects. In the future, he said, “learning algorithms will make pathological diagnoses.” They might read Pap smears, listen to heart sounds, or predict relapses in psychiatric patients.

    This is a world where you could snap a photo of your unsightly rash, submit it, and then have a machine provide a diagnosis. This is a world where early detection and prevention would become common place. Already, today, there are instances where learning-based algorithms (distinct from rule-based) have proven to be more accurate than raw humans.

    I don’t know how you all feel about this, but I actually feel a sense of comfort thinking about this as the future of medicine. There’s piece of mind that comes with large amounts of data and the discipline of algorithms. At the same time, this is not necessarily about replacing humans. It is also about augmenting human ability.

    If it leads to better health outcomes, then why wouldn’t we?

  • Downstream effects of electric and autonomous vehicles

    I speculate a lot on this blog about what electric and autonomous vehicles will mean for the future of our cities. The reason it’s speculation is because it’s phenomenally difficult to know with any sort of certainty what the downstream effects of these technologies will be.

    I’ve seen some people claim that a car is still a car. That is, all of the same rules will apply even if they’re powered completely by renewals and we manage to make drivers obsolete (5-10 years?). But I fundamentally disagree with this line of thinking. There will be both positive and negative consequences. They are just yet to be seen.

    Benedict Evans recently wrote a post where he started to think about where some of these changes might happen. And so I thought it might be valuable to throw a few of these into the discussion mix. Here are some of his ideas:

    • About half of car maintenance spending in the US goes to things directly related to the internal combustion engine. Electric takes that away.
    • There are about 150,000 gas stations in the US. They go, along with their associated convenience stores, which is where the margins are made. Interestingly enough, more than half of all US tobacco sales happen at gas stations. Where does that go?
    • It is estimated that electric vehicles will increase overall electricity demand by 10-20%. But this could disappear with the battery storage and off-peak power.
    • Globally, about 1 million people die every year from car accidents. In the US, something like 90% of all accidents are thought to be caused by human error and about 1/3 of fatal accidents involve alcohol. Autonomy has the potential to take most of this away. Personally, I think we’ll look back and think about how dangerous driving used to be and wonder how/why we all did it.
    • A complete rethink of parking. This obviously gets talked about a lot. ~14% of LA’s land is thought to be used for parking. My guess is that parking ratios/requirements go way down (we’re already in the 0 to 0.3 per residential unit territory here in Toronto) and parking garages transform into yards for AVs.
    • Autonomous vehicles once again rewrite the retail real estate landscape. Benedict believes they will create more billionaires in real estate and retail than in tech or manufacturing. I like how he describes big box retailing as an arbitrage of land costs, transportation costs, and people’s willingness to drive and park. This point is likely about AVs + e-commerce. See yesterday’s post about Amazon.
    • Finally, his last point is that autonomous vehicles could become a kind of mobile Panopticon. The Panopticon was an institutional building typology conceived of by Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. It was based on the idea that inmates could all be monitored by a single watchman, without any of the inmates knowing if they were, in fact, being watched. It was a way of trying to impose strict obedience in prisons, and so on. Since virtually all autonomous vehicles require some sort of computer vision, Benedict argues that they could become the 21st century watchmen. Move over CCTV.

    The other big question is about decentralization. New transportation technologies have consistently promoted greater suburbanization – think streetcar suburbs to car suburbs. The fact that you’ll be able to use your time more productively in an autonomous vehicle is continually floated as an argument for this trend to continue. But I haven’t made up my mind about this one.

    Do you have any other thoughts on the downstream effects of electric and autonomous vehicles?

  • Amazon is just getting started

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    The Economist has an article up talking about what a behemoth Amazon has and will continue to become. Here are some interesting stats for you to think about:

    • More than half of every dollar spent online in America now goes to Amazon
    • Amazon’s share price has increased 173% since the beginning of 2015 (12x faster than the S&P 500)
    • With a market capitalization > $400 billion, it is the 5th most valuable company in the world
    • 92% of its value is supposedly being derived from profits expected after 2020 – they are playing the long game
    • Investors believe that revenue will go from $136 billion (2016) to half a trillion over the next decade

    If I can buy something online, instead of in person, I will do it. And that very often leads me to Amazon. In fact, I bought my new camera lens from them last week. Many others seem to be doing the same.

    When I go to a store now it’s because I need something immediately or because I’m looking for a new experience. I want novelty and I want to feel something special when I walk in. That, or I just need groceries.

  • rain gravity heat cold

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    Today I got a copy of rain gravity heat cold. It’s a book by the Toronto-based architecture firm superkül and it’s meant to celebrate their first 10 years of practice. 

    The book itself was put together by Blok Design. Blok has also done a new – yet to be rolled out – identity for superkül. (Definitely worth a click through.)

    One thing I wanted to highlight from the foreword of the book (written by Kiel Moe) is this line: “Great design does not respond to a static sense of context but rather perhaps transforms its flaws into assets and certainly amplifies the potential of site.”

    We often talk about contextual architecture. That is, architecture which responds to and is sensitive to its surroundings. But here’s the idea that responding is, in fact, not enough. The ambition should be “amplification of site through design.” 

    I like that a lot.

    If you’d like a copy of the book, it can be found on Amazon, at the University of Toronto bookstore, as well as, I’m sure, other places.