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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  • Can starchitecture trump soul-crushing sprawl?

    Hunter Oatman-Stanford just published a longish read over on Collectors Weekly that talks about the history of suburban office complexes in America. That part alone makes it an interesting read.

    But he also makes the argument that innovative companies like Apple and Google are still stuck in a midcentury suburban mindset with their new mega headquarters:

    “I look at Apple’s Norman Foster building, and it’s 1952 all over again,” Mozingo says. “There’s nothing innovative about it. It’s a classic corporate estate from the 1950s, with a big block of parking. Meanwhile, Google is building another version of the office park with a swoopy roof and cool details—but it does nothing innovative.”

    Others have made this same argument. Back in 2013, Wired published an article talking about why Apple’s new Norman Foster spaceship could result in them losing the war for tech talent. 

    And if you read the piece in Collectors Weekly, you’ll see just how little, in some cases, the office environment has changed since the middle of the 20th century.

    Back then, we also had big name starchitects designing suburban head offices for innovative companies. Below is a photo from the GM Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. It was designed by Eero Saarinen and it opened in 1956.

    image

    There’s lots of research that suggests that, today, both entrepreneurs and capital are flocking to urban centers, instead of the suburbs. And I certainly don’t need to repeat that to this audience.

    But given this shift, I think we will increasingly view the suburban sprawl of places like Silicon Valley as a serious competitive disadvantage. I mean, I am sure these new buildings will be lovely, but I certainly wouldn’t want to work there. 

    Would you?

  • Building Toronto Tomorrow

    I’m going to be speaking on a panel on May 3rd, here in Toronto, called Building T.O. Tomorrow. The topic is the future of this city.

    It is being put on by the good folks at BuzzBuzzHome and it will be held in the lobby of Allied’s new Queen-Richmond Centre (134 Peter Street). If you haven’t yet been to this building, that alone makes attending worthwhile.

    Here’s the event poster:

    If you’d like to attend, make sure you RSVP to aleks@buzzbuzzhome.com.

    On a largely unrelated note, I recently picked up the handlebar bicycle mount for my GoPro and I’m looking for some fellow city geeks who would like to ride around the city and film some – potentially cool – videos.

    I find that being on a bike is one of the best ways to experience a city (at least the cities that are actually bikeable). So I’m hoping some of that magic will translate into video. If that sounds at all interesting, drop me a line.

  • New curated city building bulletin

    I have decided to spin-off the Architect This City identity into a weekly newsletter that I’m referring to as a “curated city building bulletin.” (This is as a result of the unbranding of this blog last week.)

    The inaugural issue went out this past Monday at 9am eastern with a collection of city building-related links. And that was it. This is not another blog. I’m not writing any new content for it. It’s simply going to be a collection of links to things that I think city builders would find interesting and/or valuable.

    Here’s why I decided to do this:

    It allows me to keep this new bulletin entirely focused on one thing. You’re not going to find me sneaking in a link about snowboarding, wine or something else that I’m interested in. It’s strictly about targeting city builders. (Of course, city building can be a pretty broad topic.)

    Keeping in mind what I wrote yesterday about saying no, I also chose this format because the additional workload for me will be minimal. In order for me to write a daily blog like this one, I have found that I need to keep a running list of reading material. But a lot of what’s on this list (stored in Pocket) never sees the light of day – there’s only so much I can write about. This new bulletin will be a quick way for me to share the rest of it.

    Finally, I’m also hoping it’ll be an efficient way for me to share the links, events, projects, and other things I receive from readers. In an ideal world, the bulletin will evolve into having a “links” section and a “from the community” section – which will be things that subscribers send me but today don’t get shared.

    So that’s the plan. If that sounds good to you, please subscribe at architectthiscity.com. 

    To kick things off, I’m going to be giving away 5 x free ATC t-shirts. (See photo at the top of this post.) To win one, just (1) subscribe and tweet out a link to this new city building bulletin, (2) tag @athiscity, and (3) tell everyone which city/town you live in.

    Regularly scheduled programming will resume tomorrow.

  • The value of saying no

    If you’re somebody who has a lot of ideas, it can be pretty easy to get overwhelmed and/or distracted by all of the possibilities. It’s also worse when you’re an optimist and you believe it can all be done. I am definitely guilty of this. It is one of my weaknesses.

    We all have a finite amount of time to work with and so saying no to the stuff that isn’t core is critical. I believe I am getting better at this, but every now and then I find myself having to do some pruning. And once I do that, boy does it feel great.

    Seth Godin has a fantastic blog post on this topic that I love called, No is essential. Here it is in its entirety (it’s a short post):

    “If you believe that you must keep your promises, overdeliver and treat every commitment as though it’s an opportunity for a transformation, the only way you can do this is to turn down most opportunities.

    No I can’t meet with you, no I can’t sell it to you at this price, no I can’t do this job justice, no I can’t come to your party, no I can’t help you. I’m sorry, but no, I can’t. Not if I want to do the very things that people value my work for.

    No is the foundation that we can build our yes on.”

    To drive the point home even further, let’s shift gears and talk about wine. (For all of you fellow wine drinkers.)

    In viticulture, overall yield – usually measured in hectoliters per hectare of vineyard – is often seen as an important indicator of quality. The idea being that low yields produce better wines because the flavors get concentrated over fewer grapes. 

    Part of what drives this is the leaf to fruit ratio. Too much fruit and not enough leaves, means the grapes won’t ripen properly.

    The parallel to this conversation is that leaves are much like time. There’s only so much of it. And while many of us are constantly trying to maximum yield – I know I am – there are limits to the kind and quality of grapes we can produce when we do that. 

    I know this in principle. And more and more, I know this in practice. I am learning to say no.

    Image from Flickr

  • 2 new ways to think about economic inequality

    We talk a lot about economic
    inequality these days. We worry, among other things, that our successful cities
    are becoming playgrounds for the rich and that housing is becoming increasingly
    unaffordable for the middle class.

    Without negating the
    importance of things such as attainable housing, I’d like to offer up two,
    potentially new, perspectives on economic inequality.

    The first is an
    essay by venture capitalist Paul Graham    . In it, he rationally unpacks, as he always does, the phenomenon of economic inequality. One of his key points is the distinction between rent seeking degenerate economic inequality and the economic inequality caused by rapid value creation (i.e. Two Stanford students decide to create a new search engine called Google).

    “If the rich people in a society got that way by taking wealth from the poor, then you have the degenerate case of economic inequality where the cause of poverty is the same as the cause of wealth. But instances of inequality don’t have to be instances of the degenerate case. If one woodworker makes 5 chairs and another makes none, the second woodworker will have less money, but not because anyone took anything from him.”

    Of course, Paul Graham is thinking about this from the perspective of a venture capitalist that funds startups and helps entrepreneurs get rich. But what about the impacts to people who live in a city where the rich are far richer than the poor?

    That brings me to the second perspective.

    A recent study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association and written about in the New York Times, has discovered a surprising relationship between income and life expectancy across the United States from 2001 to 2014.

    What they found was that cities with high economic inequality – such as New York and San Francisco – actually have lower inequality when it comes to life expectancy. 

    Here is a chart from the New York Times:

    And here is a chart from healthinequality.org:

    If you’re rich, it doesn’t matter where you live. The life expectancy of a rich person in New York is roughly the same as a rich person in Detroit. (Though, as to be expected, women generally live longer than men.)

    However, as income levels fall, so does life expectancy. But it falls more in a city like Detroit than it does in New York. In fact, rich cities such as New York and San Francisco are almost model cities in this regard. Why is that?

    The biggest predictor appears to be health behaviors, such as smoking and obesity:

    “The research seems to suggest that living in proximity to the preferences — and tax base — of wealthy neighbors may help improve well-being. New York is not just a city of rich and poor, but also one of walkable sidewalks, a trans-fat ban and one of the most aggressive anti-tobacco agendas of any place in the United States.”

    So there you have it. Two, potentially new, ways to think about economic inequality.

  • How much market share are New York’s yellow cabs losing to Uber?

    Todd W. Schneider recently mined data from the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission to create a chart summarizing yellow taxi, Uber, and Lyft usage. 

    The data only runs up until January 2016, but here’s what he found:

    “…yellow taxis provided 60,000 fewer trips per day in January 2016 compared to one year earlier, while Uber provided 70,000 more trips per day over the same time horizon.”

    The Uber data only begins in 2015, but you can still see how quickly it is growing and how yellow taxis are losing market share. Five years ago, yellow taxis were reaching over 500,000 trips per day (a pretty amazing number) and in January of this year they were at about 350,000 trips per day. 

    It also appears that Lyft is struggling to gain traction.

    image

    What’s also great about Todd’s blog post is that he has set it up so that his chart will automatically update as new data becomes available. So if you’re interested in this topic, you should bookmark his post.

  • How megacities are changing the map of the world

    In advance of his new book, titled Connectography, Parag Khanna recently delivered an interesting TED Talk called, How megacities are changing the map of the world. It’s about 20 minutes long.

    A lot of what is covered won’t be new to this audience, but I like how he talks about the importance of urban connectivity, the shift from political to functional geography, and the idea that, in a megacity world, countries can actually be the suburbs of some cities.

    One thing you might notice about the talk is how he glosses over both Canada and Europe. This is a reminder to me that if Canadian cities are going to continue to compete against the emerging megacities of the world, we are going to need to think at the scale of the megalopolis. And a big part of that means a focus on extra-urban connectivity.

    Click here if you can’t see the embedded talk below.

    https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/parag_khanna_how_megacities_are_changing_the_map_of_the_world.html

  • The unbranding of this blog

    You’ve probably noticed that I have removed the Architect This City branding from this blog and gone to just my name. I like to refer to it as unbranding. (Though one could argue that a person’s name is still just another brand.)

    Already I’ve received a few emails from people telling me that they prefer the old look and feel of ATC and that there’s some level of brand equity there. But let me explain my thinking.

    First and foremost, this is a personal blog. I’ve written about that before. And it’s why it’s hosted at brandondonnelly.com. But along the way, as readership grew, I attached a name to it (ATC) and it started to become a kind of pseudo-independent brand. 

    When I would speak at events, people would introduce me as the founder of Architect This City, which always struck me as a bit odd because, again, this is just my personal blog. People also started asking me why I wasn’t turning ATC into some big company and started treating the blog as a media channel. You should see how many press releases I now find in my inbox.

    Of course, these are good “problems” to have. It means my writing is getting out there and I am thrilled about that. But I was starting to feel increasingly uncomfortable with the grey area between a personal and independent brand. I also felt like it was starting to impact my creative writing because I would sometimes wonder if I was going too personal on “Architect This City.”

    To reinforce that point, below is a snippet from a post that Fred Wilson wrote on his blog last summer. His 10+ year old blog has been a huge inspiration for me.

    “There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in public with each other. This is how blogging was in the early days. And this is how blogging is today, if you want it to be.”

    So I decided to clarify the brand. I wanted to make it clear that this blog is about my personal musings on city building, among the other things that I’m passionate about. And I wanted it to not pretend to be anything else.

    Ultimately, regular scheduled programming won’t really change for you. The content on this blog is still going to be heavy on city building, real estate development, design, planning and so on. And I will endeavor to create as much value as I can for all of you on a daily basis. (I am humbled by the number of people who now subscribe.) But hopefully it will end up feeling a bit more personal.

    Of course, now there’s the question of what do I do with the ATC brand (and social accounts). Do I let it die or do I spin it off into something else? I’m considering the latter. I’ve been obsessed for years with the idea of crowdsourcing and collecting meaningful real estate and city building activity, so maybe ATC will turn into some kind of open platform for that.

    But for now, I am feeling pretty excited about the unbranding of this blog. Hopefully some of you feel the same way.

  • How Premise is crowdsourcing economic data in developing countries

    I have to tell you all about a company that I just discovered called Premise. I think it’s incredible what they’re doing and a perfect example of mobile (smartphones) eating the world.

    The problem that Premise is solving is that of developing-world economic data being both not timely enough and not all that accurate/granular. This is important, because lots of big organizations – ranging from governments to private companies – are making funding and investment decisions based on this inadequate information.

    So here’s what Premise did:

    They put smartphones into the hands of the people who are on the ground in these places. They paid them meaningful amounts of money (relative to local wages). And they developed a technology platform that could index and analyze the millions of local observations being sent in. So far they have paid out over $3 million to their contributors located across 34 countries.

    As an example: Premise has developed food price indices. And the data comes directly from locals physically going to the market on a regular basis (which most would do anyways) and snapping photos of the food + prices. This allows Premise to provide basically realtime pricing data. (There are checks and balances to ensure data integrity.)

    Why does this matter? 

    Because it allows Premise, for instance, to figure out exactly what happens to food staple pricing when something like an Ebola epidemic hits:

    “Premise started tracking food prices in Monrovia on September 8, and throughout the month we observed upward pressure on prices (our Liberia indices and data are freely available at data.premise.com). The price of rice, Liberia’s primary food staple, increased 12% during September. Moreover, we saw significant price differences across the city. Prices in neighborhoods with the most exposure to Ebola were 8-12% higher on average than relatively unaffected neighborhoods. As the disease tore through the city, market sellers avoided the worst-hit areas and trade declined.”

    This is powerful information and just one example of what Premise is doing. Obviously this data is also of use to for-profit companies, which is how the company has managed to raise over $66 million in VC funding. But I think there will also be big benefits for these developing countries. As the saying goes, you make what you measure.

  • Not zoned for dancing

    Yesterday, when I was reading up on Toronto’s “TOcore” initiative, I came across a report from 2014 called Not Zoned For Dancing: A Comprehensive Review of Entertainment in Downtown Toronto. 

    It was prepared by five graduate planning students at the University of Toronto: Anna Wynveen, Brenton Nader, Carolyn Rowan, Chris Hilbrecht, and Kyle Miller. 

    The entire report is fascinating, but here’s one diagram that stood out to me:

    image

    It shows the migration of bars, clubs, and lounges westward, away from the downtown core, from 1991-2013.

    This migration doesn’t surprise me at all. I saw it happening and I understand the market forces at play here. There’s also the simple fact that nightlife is often viewed as a nuisance.

    But it’s worth calling this out. 

    Because I don’t think enough city builders appreciate the value of nightlife. It can and has served as a valuable catalyst for urban regeneration and I believe that it should form part of any city’s economic development strategy.

    A lot of cities are focused on things like bike lanes, public spaces, and on becoming the next Silicon Valley. And don’t get me wrong, those are all important things (though we could debate the Silicon Valley part). 

    But let’s not forget about nightlife.