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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Tag: anthony bourdain

  • Visual architecture guides by ÅVONTUURA

    “If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.”

    –Anthony Bourdain

    My general recipe for travel is as follows: I want to see cool architecture, I want to eat good food, and I want to get a local sense for the place. Meaning, I’d ideally like to hang out with locals and learn from them. What’s it really like, here?

    Because of this, I’ve never been one to over schedule on trips. There will be things I absolutely want to see and do, but I always want to make sure that there’s time for the unknown.

    I think you want to walk into places that you don’t have on your list, sit at the bar, and have a conversation with the person behind it. You will learn things, and maybe it’ll set you on a travel journey that you couldn’t have possibly planned back home.

    That said, guides are still helpful for things like architecture and food. But I have never found general purpose guides — like the ones from Frommer’s — to be of any use. They have too much information that isn’t curated.

    When I was in my early 20s, I used to use the Wallpaper* City Guides. They were small. I would mark them up as I went. And they gave me the list of must-see architecture. More recently, I’ve been relying on Monocle’s Travel Guides. They’re great too.

    But I am now also a fan of Toronto-based ÅVONTUURA and the architecture guides that they produce. They are simple and beautiful pamphlets that give you a map of each city; a breakdown of contemporary, modern, and historic architecture; a recommended route through the city; and a full list of the important buildings, including their architects.

    The founder of Avontuura, Karl van Es, was kind enough to send me their entire set, which as of this month includes new guides for Amsterdam, Berlin, Singapore, and Toronto. Thank you, Karl.

    I’m now looking forward to trying one of these out on a future trip. I’m going to use it to decide what architecture I want to visit and, for the rest, I’ll just do what I normally like to do — wing it.

    P.S. It took me multiple attempts of tossing these guides onto my kitchen counter in order to arrive at the above photo. I hope you like it.

  • Do the best cities have a lot of immigrants?

    I tweeted this out last night while watching old reruns of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown series. This was a great show. If I were to give everything up and become a YouTuber, this is the kind of travel and food channel I would want to make, except that I would naturally have to add in some equal parts around architecture, planning, and real estate.

    The responses to my tweet were of course mixed. Some people agreed and some people didn’t. And a few people provided examples of great cities that aren’t particularly known for their openness to new entrants — places like Tokyo. This kind of response is not at all surprising given how divisive this topic has always been throughout history.

    But here’s what I was thinking:

    1/ There are some obvious current case studies. Consider places like Toronto and Miami, where foreign born residents now make up the majority of the population. These are two fast growing and dynamic cities that wouldn’t be anywhere near as interesting without their immigrant populations. Certainly the food wouldn’t be as good.

    2/ Many of the most beautiful cultures in the world are the result of different cultures coming together. Brazil is one example that comes to mind. Throughout history they have been one of the largest recipients of immigrants in the western hemisphere. Sadly, Brazil was also the last country in the western world to abolish slavery.

    3/ Rome and Tokyo were cited (in the comments) as two great cities that frankly aren’t all that diverse. According to Wikipedia, less than 10% of Rome’s population is non-Italian. But Rome, while nice, is provincial these days. And Tokyo, while awesome, has a bit of a demographic problem.

    4/ Even if you think a place doesn’t have a lot of immigrants and maybe isn’t all that diverse, it is still probably the result of diverse cultures coming together at multiple points throughout history. Maybe because of immigration. Or maybe because of something bad like war. Think of the Moors from northern Africa who crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and conquered the Iberian Peninsula.

    5/ An openness to new people could signal and probably does signal an openness to other things. And since we are living in a world that thrives on innovation and new ideas, being open strikes me as being a fairly good and useful characteristic to have.

    6/ Lastly, I come from a family of immigrants. I self-identify as being entirely Canadian. But I had to come from somewhere (multiple places, in fact). And so it strikes me as being odd and entirely selfish to want to block the flow of people now that I’m here and established.

    What are your thoughts?

  • Love letter to Québec

    I watched this for the first time last night. It is the late and great Anthony Bourdain hanging out in Montréal and Québec City with two of Canada’s most respected chefs and restaurateurs: Dave McMillan and Fred Morin of the famed restaurant Joe Beef. Initially aired in 2013, it’s hard not to miss Bourdain when you watch it. And it’s also hard not to love Québec. This is an episode about humility, authenticity, good living, and, of course, some of the best food and drink in the world. Bourdain has a great line right before they visit Wilensky’s (in Le Plateau area of Montréal) where he says, “no matter how you feel about Québec as either separate or as an essential part of Canada, any reasonable person loves this place.” I couldn’t agree more.

    If you can’t see the embedded video above, click here.

  • City guides in the pre-smartphone era

    I came across this stack of old Wallpaper city guides while reorganizing a few things over the weekend (because that’s what happens on the weekends now). They are pretty beat up and color faded from travel. It looks like these guides are still being published by Phaidon (along with an app), but it’s been well over a decade since I bought one.

    I know the exact time period of the above books because I used to do really nerdy things like date and location stamp them when I got them. The Rome book was July 2007 and I picked it up in Dublin, while I was there working for a real estate developer before the global financial crisis. I also discovered old phone numbers and email addresses written inside of them. Usually it was a Hotmail address.

    What I liked about these guides is that they were fairly condensed — good for a long weekend — and they were generally design-focused — perfect for architecture nerds like me. Their restaurant, bar, and club selections were also just fine as a jumping off point. After that it was up to you to make your own adventure.

    I sent this photo to my friend Alex Feldman over the weekend — he also went without any sleep in Berlin — and he reminded me what it was like at this time. This was 2007. The first iPhone was just being released. Its map functionality was nowhere near what it is today (or didn’t exist). And I certainly didn’t have one. I had a Blackberry with a plastic wheel on the side. It was basically a giant pager.

    To navigate a city at this time meant using a physical map. It also meant getting repeatedly lost and having to ask real people where to go. Alex also reminded me that I made him wander all around Berlin so that I could buy a new pair of glasses. What can I say, this was pre-laser Brandon and I needed cool architect glasses. They ended up being red.

    As frustrating as this must have been at times, there’s something nice about traveling without knowing each and every step and without being able to summon an Uber at any point in time to take you exactly where you want to go. In fact, this is probably the central ingredient of all good travel: you need to allow yourself to be open to new experiences.

    One of the great lessons of Anthony Bourdain was that you have to get out of your comfort zone. Cities have both highs and lows, but there’s real value and authenticity in the lows if you’re willing to engage beneath the surface. Perhaps that is the irony of old fashioned guide books in the pre-smartphone era. They were supposed to tell you exactly where to go, but they actually helped you find the opposite.

    The only city that I never actually got around to visiting from the above stack is São Paulo. As you can tell, Brazil has been on my list for many years. I did make it to Rio de Janeiro a few years ago and São Paulo was supposed to be October 2020. But I’m pretty sure that trip will need to wait. Maybe I should leave my phone at home.

  • Planning for the unplanned

    I was listening to The Urbanist (Monocle Radio) last night while I was making dinner and there was a segment on Moscow’s “illegal retail kiosks.” These are small scale retail structures that were built without formal planning permissions and so the city decided to demolish them. 

    There was lots of backlash. Photos here.

    Now, I’ve never been to Moscow. So I can’t really comment on the attractiveness and usefulness of these kiosks. But I suspect that these illegal retail kiosks, many of which seem to have been located around metro stations, contributed quite a bit to the city’s urban vibrancy. Retail is hard to get right. It doesn’t work everywhere.

    All of this got me thinking about our tendency to sterilize and overplan cities. I’m not saying that planning is bad. It’s not. But I do think we should acknowledge that we don’t know everything about the future and that human ingenuity will undoubtedly unlock new things we never thought would be beneficial.

    So how do we plan for the unplanned? Perhaps it starts with accepting the off-center. Here’s a quote from Anthony Bourdain (it’s all over the internet, but I can’t seem to find the original blog source):

    I think that troubled cities often tragically misinterpret what’s coolest about themselves. They scramble for cure-alls, something that will ‘attract business,’ always one convention center, one pedestrian mall or restaurant district away from revival. They miss their biggest, best, and probably most marketable asset: their unique and slightly off-center character. Few people go to New Orleans because it’s a ‘normal’ city — or a ‘perfect’ or ‘safe’ one. They go because it’s crazy, borderline dysfunctional, permissive, shabby, alcoholic, and bat shit crazy — and because it looks like nowhere else. Cleveland is one of my favorite cities. I don’t arrive there with a smile on my face every time because of the Cleveland Philharmonic.

    There’s value at the margins.