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.

Subscribe

  • Your own signpost

    Work Market is an “on-demand talent marketplace.” They connect companies who need work done with skilled freelancers who are looking to do work. Conceptually, we’ve seen this before.

    But this morning, as I was reading this interview with the CEO, the following lines got me thinking:

    “By 2040, I’m pretty confident that every skilled worker will have their own signpost. You will be your own enterprise, in a much more meaningful way than the lip service of today.”

    We are already seeing this phenomenon play out. Social media, for instance, has made all of us our own media brands. So it’s not outlandish to believe that we will also see more, not less, of this in the labor market.

    But what I started thinking about is how this changing relationship between business and labor will ultimately manifest itself in our cities. 

    If we are indeed shifting toward a fluid and dynamic labor market where not only do people switch jobs more frequently, but they have their own signposts, then I have got to believe that urban density will only become more important. We’ll all need to be “plugged in” to the market – both online and offline.

    But what are your thoughts? I think this could make for an interesting discussion in the comments.

  • Snap Inc.

    Snap Inc. (Snapchat) nailed the launch of Spectacles. I want a pair.

    If you haven’t been following, it all started with a pop-up vending machine in Venice Beach. But like Snapchat itself, it was an ephemeral installation that eventually disappeared, moving on to Big Sur, California. At the time of writing this post, the countdown is on to discover where the vending machine will pop up next. It’s a viral marketing play that aligns very well with their brand.

    But there’s even bigger news.

    Earlier this week it was revealed that Snap Inc. has filed for an initial public offering. It plans to go public by as soon as March 2017 and expects to be valued somewhere around $25 billion. Remember when everyone flipped out because Evan Spiegel had rejected Facebook’s acquisition offer of $3 billion?

    Here’s their revenue story from Vanity Fair:

    Last year, Snapchat brought in $59 million in revenue—a low number that reflected the embryonic stage of its business. This year, however, Snapchat predicts it will generate revenues between $250 million and $350 million. And in 2017, the company estimates it will reach revenues between $500 million and $1 billion, based on “bullish sales targets.”

    I’ve been a Snapchat fan for awhile now, so I am thrilled to see the company going public. As Fred Wilson wrote on his blog this morning: “Snap is a great company led by a creative and ambitious founder and they have a loyal and growing use base. I think Snap can be an excellent public company.”

    If you’ve got people’s attention, you can figure out how to monetize it.

  • New political support for laneway housing

    There’s some great news in the Toronto Star this week.

    (Thank you Mike for bringing this to my attention.) 

    Two councillors – Mary-Margaret McMahon and Ana Bailao – have come out in support of allowing laneway housing in Toronto. Some cities call them detached accessory dwelling units (DADUs). 

    If you’re new to laneway housing, check out this post and this post (both are 2+ years old). I’ve been on this horse for over a decade.

    Because going beyond their small space cool factor, laneway housing has the potential to fundamentally alter the housing supply constraint that I wrote about a few weeks ago – namely the yellowbelt. It’s a way to gently allow for new housing, while at the same time preserving the character of our “stable” neighborhoods. 

    And frankly, I can’t think of any other way to add new ground related housing at any sort of meaningful scale within the city limits – not unless we’re willing to give up the “stability” of our neighborhoods. So this is it.

    If you’re on the same page, I would encourage you to reach out to Councillor McMahon and Bailao and let them know that. There’s also a public workshop scheduled for Monday, December 5th at 7pm at the Evergreen Brick Works (550 Bayview Avenue).

  • GLUE

    I am all booked for my annual retreat to the mountains, which means I now have snowboarding on the brain. This year we are headed back to Whistler (/Powder Mountain) so that we can all check heli boarding (and heli skiing) off the bucket list. That’s one goal – among a few others – that I plan to accomplish in 2017.

    If you don’t snowboard (or ski), this probably means nothing to you. It can be hard to explain the feeling. Thankfully, Christian Haller (Swiss snowboarder), Kris Lüdi, and Stephan Maurer have just released a short film that may very well be the closest approximation to the real thing. It’s called GLUE.

    The whole point of the movie is to portray, in an authentic and visual way, what it’s like to snowboard. To do that, a lot of the footage was shot using a “follow cam.” There are also a lot of close-up shots. I just love the perspectives when it kicks in at 1:50.

    If you can’t see the video below, click here. And if snow and snowboarding aren’t your thing, check back tomorrow for regular scheduled programming.

    [vimeo 190544188 w=640 h=360]

    GLUE from Christian Haller on Vimeo.

  • re:Public + NXT City Night

    On Friday, November 25th, NXT City will be hosting a one-day symposium here in Toronto (re:Public) that brings together some of the top people, projects, and ideas in the world of public spaces. Following that will be an after party (called NXT City Night) that runs from 8pm to very late. 🙂

    Here are some of the organizations that will be represented at the symposium: City of Toronto, Uber, CivicAction, Monocle, Arup, STEPS Initiative, Breather, The Laneway Project, Oxford Properties, as well as many others. It will be a great event.

    For the full speaker list, the agenda, and to buy tickets, click here. There’s an under 35 / student offering for both the symposium during the day and the after party at night. If you attend during the day though, you automatically get a pass to the after-party. I hope to see you there.

    Here’s a time lapse video from NXT City Night (edition 2015). If you can’t see it below, click here.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i6R687sdk0?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

  • Are you T-shaped?

    image

    The world-renowned design firm IDEO is known for hiring people described as being “t-shaped.” Here’s a quote from an interview with CEO Tim Brown explaining what that means:

    “T-shaped people have two kinds of characteristics, hence the use of the letter “T” to describe them. The vertical stroke of the “T” is a depth of skill that allows them to contribute to the creative process. That can be from any number of different fields: an industrial designer, an architect, a social scientist, a business specialist or a mechanical engineer. The horizontal stroke of the “T” is the disposition for collaboration across disciplines. It is composed of two things. First, empathy. It’s important because it allows people to imagine the problem from another perspective – to stand in somebody else’s shoes. Second, they tend to get very enthusiastic about other people’s disciplines, to the point that they may actually start to practice them. T-shaped people have both depth and breadth in their skills.”

    For an interdisciplinary design firm like IDEO, I’m sure you can see why the above would be important. But I also think it’s hugely important for those of us who work in the arena of the built environment.

    City building projects don’t get accomplished by individuals, alone, or “I-shaped people” who don’t play well with others. They get accomplished by people with breadth in their skills and by large cohesive teams with vastly different core competencies. The notion of the individual genius is overplayed.

    New buildings, for instance, typically involve a coming together of the project team (hugely diverse in and of itself), the city, the community, and other stakeholders. You can try and bully your way through that process or you can try and navigate through with empathy.

    Based on the tremendous success of firms like IDEO, one could certainly argue that creativity and innovation seem to thrive more on empathy.

  • The spatio-temporal hierarchy of urban form

    I was recently introduced to the work of Brenda Case Scheer – specifically a journal article she wrote called The Anatomy of Sprawl. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys geeking out about cities, this is for you. (Thank you Oliver.)

    What she does in the article is break down the various components / layers of a city according to the rate in which they change. Her “spatio-temporal urban hierarchy” includes: site (slowest rate of change), superstructure, infill, buildings, and objects (fastest rate of change).

    The way to think about this is that the bottom layers of a city – the paths and roads we have chosen to establish – are incredibly persistent. They don’t change all that often.

    On the other hand, buildings do change. Old ones get demolished. New ones get built. There’s a cycle. They too probably feel pretty persistent in many cases, but in comparison to our roads, they change far more frequently.

    The reason why all of this has bearing is because the paths we choose to carve out at the very beginning will ultimately dictate the kind of city that gets built and rebuilt over time.

    The rectangular grid of Manhattan was planned out in 1811. Central Park was missing from this original plan, but it did establish the street network and ownership lots that are now so central to the identity of New York City. That was a 200+ year decision.

    It seems to have worked out just fine for New York. But what if you’re in a position where the existing street network is viewed as failing and/or inappropriate for the future success of the city? 

    Well that’s where things get interesting. Now you need to dig down to some of those base layers and work on changing the (frequently) unchangeable. 

  • One Spadina Crescent

    One of the most exciting projects under construction right now in Toronto is 1 Spadina Crescent – the new home of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, & Design at the University of Toronto. (This must be one of the longest faculty names in existence.)

    I am excited to see the existing 19th century structure come back to life by way of a new addition; especially given its ceremonial position within the city. And I am excited – as an alumnus – to see the faculty growing.

    On Monday, an event was held at the building to honor the donors and offer a sneak peek of the building. I wasn’t able to attend (as much as I wanted to), so I figured the next best thing I could do would be to write a blog post about it. 

    So here’s the official news release and here are some photos from Urban Toronto.

  • Trump

    Many of us are living in a bubble.

    Since Donald Trump won the election less than 24 hours ago, it feels like everything has already been said. It’s been non-stop. My social feeds have been filled with everything from frustration and anger to Canadians offering marriage to the highest bidders. (Obviously tongue-in-cheek?)

    I didn’t think Trump would win the election, but he did. I also didn’t think Brexit would happen, but it did.

    Part of the reason I thought this is because nobody seemed to be supporting Trump. My friend graph was virtually 100% Clinton (and vehemently opposed to Trump). The media I consume – Globe and Mail, New York Times, Twitter feed (interest graph), and so on – was virtually 100% Clinton. And the polls told us that would be the outcome.

    But what I just described is – now quite obviously – a filtered view of the world. I was thinking within my own little bubble and I was wrong. The number of biases at work here are numerous.

    Firstly, it has been well documented that we prefer to associate with people that are most similar to ourselves. It gives us comfort when someone shares the same religious views, sports-team loyalty, education level, socioeconomic status, and so on. And you see this in cities. We cluster in so many different ways.

    Secondly, we often privilege information that reinforces our own view of the world (see confirmation bias). We believe what we want to believe. Here is an excerpt from an op-ed in the New York Times this morning that stood out for me

    (see, I’m again reading the same media):

    “The silence in this great city, a stronghold of Clinton and the Democratic Party, is revealing: The elites of the East and West coasts, betraying a dangerous arrogance, were dismissive and ignorant to the last of the heartland anger feeding Trump’s rise.

    This is the revenge of Middle America, above all of a white working-class America troubled by changing social and cultural mores — not every American loves choose-your-gender bathrooms — and by the shifting demographics that will make minorities the majority by midcentury.”

    Thirdly – but probably not lastly – I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw the social desirability bias play out here. It is possible that many people simply did not want to openly admit that they were supporting Trump. And they perhaps responded that way in the polls. But privately, when it came time to vote, they went with what resonated most.

    I say all this simply to suggest that now is not the time to get angry. Now is the time to open our eyes and pay attention to our rapidly changing world. Globalization and technology are transforming what we know and it is not benefiting everyone equally – far from it. Trump overwhelmingly won the support of white people without college degrees; people who are feeling left behind.

    This divide is real.

  • World’s best city brands

    Resonance Consultancy – they do brands and strategies for places and products – has just released a new report called: World’s Best City Brands – A Global Ranking of Place Equity.

    With all of these sorts of rankings, it really depends on the research methodology being used and the rigor in which it is being applied. In this case, they evaluated each city based on “six pillars of equity”:

    1. Place: Perceived quality of a city’s natural and built environment
    2. Product: A city’s key institutions, attraction and infrastructure
    3. Programming: The arts, culture and entertainment in a city
    4. People: Immigration and diversity of a city
    5. Prosperity: Employment, GDP per capita entertainment in a city and corporate head offices
    6. Promotion: Quantity of articles, references of a city and recommendations online

    What’s perhaps unique about this study is that it combines measurable statistics with “visitor perception metrics” – data that they mined from social media. Here’s an excerpt from the methodology page:

    “Our team became interested in the way visitors and citizens themselves influence the identity and perception of cities. Increasingly, they do it through their evaluation of experiences on social media and via the comments, images and reviews they share with family, friends and people around the world. These opinions and attitudes, much more than traditional marketing, influence the way people perceive places today.”

    This is a fascinating shift for city brands and is something that we have discussed before on this blog. All of us are now involved in telling the story of the places in which we live and visit.

    The entire report is well done and worth a read. It’s also a free download (you’ll need to enter your contact info). But below are the top 10 world’s best city brands. Not really any surprises for me. What about for you?

    image