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.
It has been a while since I shared a Kickstarter campaign on the blog and this one caught my attention:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1505932940/map-art-prints/widget/card.html?v=2
If you can’t see the project embedded above, click here.
The project is colorful abstract art maps of anywhere in the world. You can also choose whatever color theme you want.
I think these are beautiful. The print at the top of this post is Rome.
I was over at the Riverside Bridge yesterday taking photos and I was reminded of Eldon Garnet’s installation called, TIME: AND A CLOCK (1995).
The work spans a few physical sites, but perhaps the most well known component is the line of text on the west side of the bridge, which reads in 18″ high letters: “This river I step in is not the river I stand in.” (Photo above from Garnet’s website.)
If you’re from Toronto, you may be already be familiar with this installation. But I love the message and I think it’s an important one. So I thought I would reiterate it here on the blog.
The text is derived from the thinking of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Its meaning is a simple one: change is fundamental to the universe.
Neighborhoods change. Cities change. Industries change. We change. The river you first step into, is not the same river that you’ll be standing in. That initial river has come and gone, replaced by a new river. In the words of Heraclitus, “No man ever steps in the same river twice.”
As people, organizations and cities age, there can be a tendency to resist change. I believe in fighting that tendency.
Because that’s how established rich companies get destroyed by young poor companies. They – the incumbents – underestimate the importance of change. They forget that the river is constantly flowing.
Art Basel Miami Beach is going on right now so a few of us were talking about it in the office this week. If I had the time, I would have loved to go back this year.
I think it’s great how Miami (Beach) seems to be infusing art, design, and culture into seemingly everything it does.
Here is a really well done video tour of Miami’s Faena District (via Wallpaper*). It’s definitely worth a watch. Screenshot below.
If you don’t know the story behind Alan Faena, you should also read up. He’s an Argentinian fashion designer turned real estate developer.
This past summer I wrote about the 8 storey mural (by street artist PHLEGM) that was about to go up on the side of a Slate building at the corner of Yonge + St. Clair in midtown Toronto.
Well, that mural is now complete. It’s been in the news a bunch over the past couple of months, both locally and internationally. designboom (they’re allergic to capital letters) wrote about it last month.
In case you missed all that press and/or you’d like to learn more about the process, here is a video that the STEPS Initiative published last week. It’s 5 minutes. If you can’t see the video below, click here.
[vimeo 185861345 w=640 h=360]
The STEPS philosophy of creating public art in unlikely urban spaces is a hugely interesting one. It’s really the antithesis of the white-walled art gallery.
This morning
(Friday, July 8th)
at 11AM eastern time, the global street artist Phlegm will start work on a giant 8-storey mural at the corner of Yonge + St. Clair in midtown Toronto. It’s going up on the west elevation of 1 St. Clair West.
Here’s what it will look like when it’s complete:
The piece is intended to be experienced at two different scales. From afar, you read it as a human figure embracing itself. (See it?) Once you get closer, you are then drawn into an intricate interpretation of the Toronto landscape – both built and natural.
Embedded within are depictions of the Royal Ontario Museum (including Daniel Libeskind’s Crystal), the SkyDome (yes, the SkyDome), the St. Lawrence Market (my hood), the CN Tower (obligatory), as well as other landmarks in the city. It’s going to be awesome.
The project is a STEPS Initiative and it is being supported by the City of Toronto, Slate Asset Management, CBRE, CIBC, and a few others. They have also setup a great website with a live webcam, so that you can follow along as the artist works.
At the time of writing this post, nothing yet has happened. But by the time it reaches you (email subscribers) it should be well underway. The hashtag for all of this is #PHLEGMPAINTS.
Big things are starting to happen at Yonge + St. Clair.
This week, the first ever international street art festival will be taking place in Toronto. It’s called A Love Letter to the Great Lakes and it is running from June 20 to June 25, 2016.
The goal of the festival is to use public works of art to get people thinking about our water resources and, more specifically, about the Great Lakes. Together, these Lakes represent 20% of the world’s fresh surface water.
So this week, 21 local and international artists will be painting giant murals in 3 different areas of the city: Queen & Ossington, Queen & Spadina, and at the mouth of the Don River.
The collaborators for the event include Tre Packard (Pangeaseed Foundation), Jason Botkin (A Love Letter to the Great Lakes, En Masse), Jaqueline West (Herman & Audrey), developer Jeff Hull (Hullmark) and Devon Ostrum (Friends of the Pan Am).
Below is one of the works already in progress. It’s by Jason Botkin and it’s located on one of the bents of the Gardiner Expressway East at the mouth of the Don River.
This event caught my attention for 3 reasons.
First, I think the city is going to be left with some rad looking murals. Here is one from a similar event in Cozumel, Mexico called Sea Walls: Murals for Oceans in Cozumel:
Second, like many others, I care deeply about the environment. But until we put in place the right economic incentives / disincentives, we need all the awareness building that we can get.
Third, seeing Jeff Hull on the list of collaborators reminded me that there’s a new breed of real estate developers emerging in our cities. The big bad developer is sometimes (often?) thought to be greedy and insensitive to local communities. But I think the next generation sees itself quite differently. They see themselves more as city and community builders.
So if you’re in Toronto this week, get on your bike and head over to one or more of the mural sites. Tweet me if you decide to go and maybe we can connect.
John Maeda – Design Partner at venture capital firm KPCB – recently
published the second and 2016 edition of his #DesignInTech
Report. I shared his first one almost exactly a year ago.
His core thesis is that we are heading towards a world where technology,
business, and design become closely integrated – in school, in business, and so
on. Throughout the report he looks at the increasing impact that design and
designers are having within the startup ecosystem.
Here are a few verbatim bullet points:
– Design isn’t just about beauty; it’s about market relevance and meaningful
results.
– 36% of the top 25 funded startups are co-founded by
designers, up from 20% in 2015.
– The general word “design” will come to mean less as we
will start to qualify the specific kind of design we mean.
– Currently design education lags the technology industry’s
needs for data-oriented, coding enabled graduates with business acumen.
– We must consciously invest in education to develop a
more hybrid perspective on creativity in the 21st century:
Technology x Business x Design.
– President Obama’s signing of ESSA (Every Student
Succeeds Act) into law in 2015 is a positive sign: by turning STEM into STEAM (adding Art) in K-12 education as a US priority.
As somebody who studied design (architecture), business,
and computer science (briefly, before switching to architecture), I probably
have a bit of a biased view here. But to the extent that I can be objective, I
really see this as the future. I am a big supporter of the transformation from STEM to STEAM.
Below is a quote that Maeda uses to end his report, which I will also use to end this post:
“Engineers are efficient problem solvers. Business people think short term. Designer want things to be elegant and beautiful. All three need to create collaboration and harmony, and honor the value each other brings. There needs to be a new kind of ‘multi-dimensional’ approach to design that is yet to be invented.” –Linda Holliday
It’s becoming harder and harder to think of tech as a distinct silo. Tech is embedding itself into so many traditional industries that, one day, every company will probably be a software/technology company in some regards.
It’s for this reason that I often think and write about tech and its impacts on the built environment.
An interesting example of this phenomenon is a recent art installation by fuse* called AMYGDALA. What it does is translate collective social media sentiment (specifically from Twitter) into an audiovisual art installation housed within an urban space.
Here’s how they describe the project:
“The news and thoughts of users spread across social networks in real time. And so an event with worldwide implications immediately involves millions of people sharing their own opinions and emotions: happiness, anger, sadness, disgust, amazement or fear. Thus, imagining Internet as a living organism, we might think that its emotional state may be given by the overall emotions shared by users at any given time. AMYGDALA listens to shared thoughts, interprets states of mind and translates the data gathered into an audiovisual installation capable of representing the collective emotional state of the net and its changes on the basis of events that take place around the world.”
And here’s a video of it in action (click here if you can’t see it below):
[vimeo 154049756 w=500 h=281]
What I like about the project is how it takes something digital and ephemeral and then both aggregates and translates it into something physical within the urban environment. It’s a perfect visual representation of how technology and networks are – for better or for worse – seeping into our daily lives.
“Great ideas alter the power balance in relationships. That’s why great ideas are initially resisted.” –Hugh Macleod
I have been following the work and writing of designer Tobias van Scheider for quite some time now. If you don’t subscribe to his newsletter and you end up liking this post, you should consider signing up.
Recently I stumbled upon something he published back in October called “Ignore Everybody”, where he argues that when you’re exploring something new – that could potentially fail – one of the best things you can do is ignore everybody.
And that’s because:
“We have to understand that ideas are by nature very fragile. They’re like little naked babies, unable to protect themselves. If we really believe in a new idea, we have to protect her with great effort. This is difficult, because oftentimes the greatest ideas get killed by the people around us. Executing on a great idea is by nature a lonely path. If everyone would agree with you, the idea is probably not that great anyway.”
I am incredibly interested in how new things get started and how new ideas thrive. Fostering innovation has become a critical component of city building in today’s world. But sometimes I feel as if we’re thinking too top-down, as opposed to bottom-up.
As Tobias rightly points out in his article, lots of great ideas started as stupid little projects. Who would have thought that a teen sexting app with disappearing messages (Snapchat) would become a company worth many billions of dollars?
It’s for this same reason that Sam Altman of Y Combinator recently wrote that sometimes its better to call your new company a project, rather than a business. When you call it a business you impose all kinds of biases onto it in terms of viable business models, and so on. But when you keep it a “project”, it becomes more acceptable to be experimental.
As an example of all this, I was fascinated to learn this past weekend about a Toronto-based ad agency called OneMethod. Because as part of their agency they have a division called the MethLab, where the goal is to simply experiment with “absurd ideas.”
One of those absurd ideas was a social media campaign slash pop-up taco restaurant – remember, they are an ad agency not restauranteurs. It was so grassroots that they ended up having to sell original art work that happened to come with a “free” taco in order to get around all the legal requirements for serving food. Brilliant.
The idea was so well received that it has grown into a fully fledged restaurant called La Carnita, which today operates across 3 permanent locations and happens to be one of the most popular taco restaurants in Toronto.
But let me ask you this, if they had instead gone out to investors – as an ad agency wanting to get into the taco business – would they have been able to raise the money for their first physical restaurant? I can imagine this being a lot more difficult.
On a larger scale, this is exactly what Google is doing with Alphabet. The company was reorganized and rebranded so that they could continue to work on absurd ideas outside of the Google cash cow. If the idea/project takes off, then it becomes a fully fledged company. If it doesn’t, then it gets shut down and something else is tried.
This is what people and companies are doing today to stay relevant in the innovation race.
But in some ways it feels like a battle to allow the absurd to survive. That’s why the best approach might be to just ignore everybody. There’s value in the absurd but maybe you’re the only one who sees it right now.
The title of this post is a line from one of the works of Jenny Holzer. It feels appropriate right now.
On Wednesday, Toronto saw a large scale anti-Uber protest involving as many as 2,000 taxis. It involved a bunch of taxis driving real slow around downtown, some altercations, and lots of people who want to see Uber completely shut down.
This, of course, isn’t a new thing for cities.
Many cities around the world have seen similar kinds of protests. But many of you will probably also agree that this is not the most effective response from the taxi industry. It casts a negative light on them at a time when people are already switching to Uber for better service. It also ignores the fact that – in my view – Uber ain’t going anywhere.
I’ve been a vocal supporter of Uber on this blog and I continue to believe that it will continue to prove to be a good thing for both consumers and for cities. In fact, famed startup investor Paul Graham once tweeted that because Uber is so clearly a good thing, you can tell how corrupt a city is by how hard it fights against it. This has become the truism among today’s urbanites.
At the same time though, I am trying to take a balanced view on this issue, which is what got me thinking about the work of Jenny Holzer. Protect me from what I want. Today, I want Uber. But I am trying to think of where that want might lead me.
Like a lot of private companies, the goal of Uber is monopoly profits. They would love to control the market. And that’s not a knock against them. It is just business. But I am imagining a market where only Uber exists.
When I was in Miami last week I switched back and forth between UberX and regular taxis. Because Art Basel was going on, Uber was frequently in surge pricing. Sometimes as high as 4x. So in those cases, I just hailed a regular cab. Thankfully the cabs there are pretty reasonably priced and easily to hail. The driver didn’t ask me if I liked the electronic music playing on the satellite radio, but that’s not a big deal.
But what if I didn’t have the option of hailing a regular cab? What if Uber was my only option and I had to put up or shut up when prices were 4x? That would be suboptimal in my books.
So what does this all mean?
I am an Uber customer. I do not want and I do not believe it will go away. But I also believe that our public policy should encourage competition in the taxi marketplace. Competition holds people and companies accountable. It means that if you stop creating value, you will go out of business.
It’s for that reason that I think the taxi lobby is wrong in trying to force Uber to shut down. And it’s for that reason that cities are going to have to work very hard at crafting the right kind of public policy. I am optimistic that Toronto will make that happen. But as we’ve seen today, there will be bumps along the way.
