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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  • Wuhan is right now a driverless car capital

    Remember Wuhan? Well, it turns out that it is emerging as an important hub for driverless vehicles. Right now it is home to the largest fleet in the world:

    In Wuhan, 500 robotaxis, mostly run by Baidu, China’s rival to Google, recorded more than 730,000 ride-hailing trips last year. That compares with combined orders of more than 700,000 last year in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles, according to Waymo, the self-driving car developer of Google’s parent company Alphabet. Waymo told the Financial Times that it had “a couple of hundred cars” in each of the three fully autonomous zones.

    One of the things that is allegedly helping Chinese companies is that they have access to more data. The networks of cameras and other infrastructure that make Chinese cities the most surveilled in the world are, coincidentally, also good for training machine learning models.

    This has some industry experts speculating that China could reach an autonomous vehicle “tipping point” sometime around 2027. Meaning, the technologies will be significantly safer than human drivers (at least 10x) and ready for mass adoption.

    I don’t know if this is the right timeline. There have been many forecasts made over the years. But I do know that competition is good for progress and that having a rival can be an important motivator. And right now, this is yet another example of the US vs. China.

  • High-rise graffiti in downtown Los Angeles

    About five years ago, a project in downtown Los Angeles, called Oceanwide Plaza, halted construction. I don’t know exactly what happened, but the reports suggest corruption, financing problems, and the Chinese developer running out of money.

    Under typical circumstances, once you secure your financing and start construction, it should mean that you have enough money to finish the project. That is unless there are significant cost overruns, you experience a cash crunch somewhere else, and/or somebody does something bad.

    In fact, on some projects, the peak equity requirement occurs before construction commencement, meaning that once you do secure your construction facility, you should be able to reduce the amount of equity that you have remaining in the project (i.e. you can pull out some cash).

    Here it sounds like a combination of things went sideways. And now today, Oceanwide Plaza looks like this:

    The towers have been tagged pretty much all the way up. And it kind of looks like each artist commandeered their own suite in the building. Not surprisingly, this has been attracting a lot of attention and debate. The project is also across the street from the Crypto.com Arena and so there are a lot of eyeballs on it.

    On the one hand, you have artists being creative and doing something with an abandoned set of buildings — ones that are beset with corruption charges and that people are generally upset about. But on the other hand, you have a busted project, and you have artists trespassing and creating what others see as another symbol for a spiralling downtown.

    LA police are reporting that the site is going to be better secured and that all of the graffiti will be removed. But until then, this has got to be one of the tallest expressions of graffiti ever created.

  • And that’s a wrap

    My time in the mountains has come to an end. I’m on a flight back to Toronto and about to start watching old Bond movies (as one should). If you don’t ski or snowboard or do any other winter sports, it’s maybe hard to relate to this, but the mountains are a truly special place. I’m always sad to leave them. In my opinion, there’s no better place to disconnect and recalibrate.

    And even though I’ve been mostly disconnected, it has been hard not to miss the hype around the new Apple Vision Pro, which was released into the wild this week. I haven’t tried one yet, but every review that I have read or watched seems to come to the same general conclusion: “Wow, this thing is incredible. It feels like a glimpse into the future of computing.”

    If you’re looking for a comprehensive technical overview of the device, you should check out Marques Brownlee’s video, here. But if you’re just looking to get a sense of what it might be like to, you know, wander around New York City wearing one, you should definitely check out Casey Neistat’s video, here.

    Now I think there’s no question that there’s a dystopian element to all of this. When Casey is standing around and watching a butterfly eat his donut, he looks pretty strange from the outside. Only he is seeing the butterfly. But then again, we all look pretty weird standing around staring down at our phones all the time. Maybe this will help us become less disconnected. I don’t know.

    Either way, it’s hard not to imagine this changing — a lot. I mean, here’s just one small example. Already Zillow has an app for Vision Pro that allows you to tour homes for sale. Assuming it’s as good as everyone says it is, I can’t imagine anyone going to physically tour a home ever again, unless they’re really serious and/or ready to put in an offer.

    Of course, there’s also no shortage of people saying that this device is simply too expensive. But I think that misses the point. This is version one. At this point, Apple just needs to be directionally right about what they are calling “spatial computing.” (They don’t want you to call it VR.) Because if they are right, the price will come down and then we’ll all be watching old Bond movies on these devices.

  • How to design a mountain house in the French Alps

    This is the chalet that our group has been staying in for the last week:

    • We’ve been calling it a tree house. It is 5 levels in total. And you circulate through the house using a spiral staircase in the center of it. It’s space efficient, but there are a lot of stairs.
    • The site is downhill from the road, which, as we have talked about before, creates a more challenging build than uphill from the road.
    • You enter the chalet on the third level, which itself houses 2 bedrooms. One floor below and one floor above also have 2 bedrooms, meaning there are 6 bedrooms in total. On the lowest floor is an indoor hot tub, a shared parking garage, and a shared ski/snowboard room.
    • Every mountain house needs, at a minimum, two things: a fireplace and a hot tub. Ideally the latter is outside.

    • As is typical in the mountains, the main living space is on the top floor (level 5 in this case). You want this for the views. If you’re building into a sloping site, the lowest floors are usually somewhat constrained.
    • We did the same thing with Parkview Mountain House. But it does mean that you circulate through the more “private” spaces within the house before reaching the more “public” ones. This is the opposite of what happens in most homes.

    • The underground parking garage is accessed by way of a small parking elevator that lowers you down two floors. Initially this seemed excessive, but it is a shared elevator/garage. The chalet is semi-detached chalet, if you will, and so this was probably the only way they could get enough parking on the site. Assuming our attached neighbor is of a similar size, that’s 12 bedrooms.
    • It also creates an important pathway so that people don’t need to bring their skis and snowboards through the house.

    Every site has its challenges and that is especially the case in the mountains.

  • It always starts with a bold idea

    This is a photo taken from the base village of Val Thorens. I took it while we were sitting on a massive terrace in the middle of it. But what stood out to me even more than the terrace itself was the buildings that frame it. They are all about 8-9 storeys, have no step-backs, and were clearly orchestrated to create a defined “street wall.”

    These framing buildings can be just as important as the public spaces themselves; they form the “walls” of the public realm and create a sense of enclosure. In this case, the buildings also follow a similar aesthetic. They were designed to pay homage to traditional Savoyard architecture, which is known for its use of local woods and stones.

    The other thing I find noteworthy is that all of this is only about 50-some years old. Val Thorens the resort opened in 1971. And it only became an idea sometime around 1969 when Pierre Schneblelen — an engineer and developer — decided that he wanted to build Europe’s highest ski resort. (The base of the resort sits at 2,300 m and the peak elevation is 3,230 m.)

    As time passes, it’s easy to take these kinds of places and experiences for granted. But they only exist because someone, at some point, had a vision. And when that vision was initially presented, it was probably perceived by many, or by most, to be crazy. That’s just how these things go, and so I like reminding myself of that.

  • Bar d’altitude

  • Jean Blanc Sports

    Shot on a Fujifilm X-T3 and iPhone

  • 3 degrees

    Yesterday, my knee started acting up again on the mountain. It (sometimes they) has a tendency of doing that. Supposedly it’s my IT (iliotibial) band. But I’m not exactly sure. So I had a low-impact snowboarding day and a high-impact aprés ski day, instead. However, when I was training with Noah Mandel last winter, one of the things that he suggested was rotating my snowboard binding to take some of the pressure off of the side of my knee and move it toward the front. So I did that. I rotated it exactly 3 degrees. And then today, I had one of my best days on the mountain. Sometimes all it takes in life is 3 degrees.

  • The après table test

    There are a number of ways to evaluate a good après ski spot. There’s the food. The drinks. The views/sun exposure. The overall atmosphere. And the simple test of: Am I having fun here? But another important telltale sign is the tables. Yes, the tables. What you want to do is inspect their structural integrity. If they were carefully engineered for dancing upon, then bingo — you’re more than likely at a good après ski spot. And it probably means that at some point in the afternoon or evening, you are going to end up on top of one of them. See above video. If you happen find yourself in this fortunate situation, then there’s no better place than one of the locations of La Folie Douce. I have been to a number of mountains, and I can confidently say that, so far, nothing comes even remotely close. Their tables are robustly engineered.

  • Gone snowboardin’