If any of you have gone to architecture school (or know someone who went to architecture school), you’ll know that everything revolves around something called studio. Studio – that’s really all you need to say – is worth many multiples of your other classes and… Read More
Eduardo Porter recently published this piece in the New York Times on the “relentless economic decline” of small-town rural America. We often talk about rising income inequality, but the greater concern is the alarming rate of joblessness in many of these communities. Earning less than others… Read More
We often talk about agglomeration economies in terms of their horizontal clustering within cities. But a new paper in the Journal of Urban Economics – summarized here by Richard Florida – has looked at the other dimension: the vertical clustering of economic activity within tall buildings. … Read More
This morning I came across the below graph in a Medium article by Eric Jaffe of Sidewalk Labs. It is taken from a research paper by Elisabeth Ruth Perlman called, Dense Enough To Be Brilliant: Patents, Urbanization, and Transportation in Nineteenth Century America. What this… Read More
When I met with all of the lovely folks from Amsterdam last week, one of the things that I mentioned about intensification is that it is almost certainly a contributing factor towards innovation, agglomeration economies, and the overall startup ecosystem here Toronto. I don’t know… Read More
I don’t always agree with economist Edward Glaeser, but I really enjoyed the talk that he gave at the Vancouver Urban Forum back in 2012 (at least part 2 of it). I came across it on Twitter today and, since it only has about 300… Read More
https://500px.com/embed.js There has been and continues to be many divided cities around the world. Berlin had the Berlin Wall. Northern Ireland (mostly Belfast) has its Peace Walls that still separate Protestant loyalists and Catholic republicans from each other. Beirut had the Green Line, which separated… Read More
The City of Toronto recently started an initiative called “Comprehensive to the Core.” It’s a look at how downtown Toronto–which is growing at 4 times the rate of the rest of the city–should continue to grow moving forward so that it remains a great place… Read More
Robert A.M Stern–who is a fairly traditional architect (stylistically) and Dean of the Yale School of Architecture–recently coauthored a book called “Paradise Planned: The Garden Suburb and the Modern City.” It’s over 1,000 pages. I haven’t read it yet and I likely won’t, but I did just read this… Read More
Jackson Hole has been on the top of my list of places to visit for a number of years now. And having just snowboarded it for the first time, I can honestly say that it lives up to the hype. It’s by far the most… Read More
