Tag: athiscity

• #DensityCreep

  The Toronto Star published an article today called: Midtowners battle the rise of the midrise. It’s about a group called The Density Creep Neighborhood Alliance, which was formed in order to fight a 4 storey stacked townhouse project that is currently going through the rezoning process.

  Here’s a snippet from the article:

  “I’m really concerned about my property value going down,” says Lisa Goodwin, 49, a stay-at-home mother of two who has lived in a four-bedroom dwelling on Keewatin Ave. for 19 years. “Right now all the houses are $1.1 to, say, $2.2 (million) but they’re looking at putting in places that are only $500,000.”

  Not surprisingly, social media took hold of this and #DensityCreep quickly started trending on Twitter. BuzzFeed ran a piece called, Toronto Real Estate Is So Preposterous People Are Protesting Condos That “Only” Cost $500K. And somebody even bought densitycreep.com (their site is .ca) and redirected it to NIMBY on Wikipedia.

  There’s so much I could say about this. But you all already know what I’m thinking. So I’ll end with this quote from the article:

  “The simple fact of the matter is that the creation of a more sustainable, equitable, and affordable city requires the development of midrise and other more dense housing options along major roads, subways, and streetcar lines in already built up areas,” says Christopher De Sousa, director of the School of Urban Planning and Regional Planning at Ryerson University.

  We have work to do.

  2015.05.25

• Scootering around New York City

  

  I am writing this post on a Porter flight from New York back to Toronto.

  For my last day in New York, my close friend and I rented scooters and rode all around Manhattan and Brooklyn. It was a great way to cover a lot of ground, but also a great way to still absorb the city. It’s harder to do the latter in a car and I never have any desire to drive in New York.

  Because the great thing about New York is that as a pedestrian you feel like you control the streets. When you’re waiting at a crosswalk, you’re never actually waiting. You walk off the sidewalk and onto the street so that you can assert yourself in front of the cars and wait for an opening. This serves to narrow the portion of road that the cars can actually drive on and reminds the drivers who is boss.

  At the same time, there are many instances throughout the city where New York has purposefully reallocated the space dedicated to pedestrians (and cyclists) and the space dedicated to cars. They’ve created new public spaces, widened the areas where people can walk, and seemingly blanketed the city with bike lanes. And that makes a lot of sense given that in many (most?) areas of the city, pedestrians greatly outnumber cars.

  So does that mean New York is at war with the car? (I’d be curious to know – in the comment section below – if those kinds of discussions take place in the city.)

  I suppose you could spin it that way. But New York also does things for cars. While riding around on the scooter today, I was so impressed by how well timed the streetlights were along the avenues. It made it incredibly easy to go downtown or uptown. In Toronto, I often feel like we time our lights to make driving as slow as possible.

  But make no mistake; New York is not a driving city. 

  New York is about walking, biking, taking transit, and hailing cabs. There is a reason they have the highest transit ridership in the US. The city is built for it. And unless driverless cars and ride sharing completely changes the equation, I will continue to believe that transit is the most efficient backbone for any big city.

  2015.05.25

• Walking the West Side Highway

  

  I am in New York this weekend. Every now and then I need to get my fix of this city. I just love it here.

  Given the debate that’s going on in Toronto right now about the elevated Gardiner Expressway, one of the things I wanted to do this weekend was walk the West Side Highway. The West Side Highway runs along the western edge of Manhattan from 72nd Street all the way down to the southern tip of the island. It used to be an elevated highway, but it runs mostly at grade now.

  I’ve been to and on it many times before, but I wanted revisit it with a different lens. Many people in Toronto seem to think that if we remove the Gardiner East and replace it with an enlarged Lake Shore Blvd that it would pose just as much of a physical barrier as an elevated structure.

  So I walked the West Side Highway and filmed this (Hyperlapse) video:

  Crossing 7 lanes of the West Side Highway. Super hostile 😉 #GardinerEast pic.twitter.com/dsdmvx3RKD

  — Brandon G. Donnelly (@donnelly_b)

  May 23, 2015

  //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  I think it’s a big improvement over an elevated structure. What do you think?

  There is, however, an elevated highway uptown. So tomorrow I plan to travel it on a scooter that I’ve rented to see how the urban fabric changes around it. I suspect it’ll be quite different.

  In case you were wondering, the picture at the top of this post is from the steps at the Whitney Museum. They face the West Side Highway and the water. It’s a great public space, but I’m pretty sure that Renzo Piano wouldn’t have designed it that way (and with that orientation) had there been an elevated highway in front of it.

  2015.05.24

• Learning from boutique hotels

  At the beginning of this year, my friend Amy Bath wrote an interesting post on her blog comparing condos and boutique hotels. It’s called: Could condos be more like boutique hotels? It’s a great read and it touches on something that I think we will see more of going forward.

  The idea is that boutique hotels – many of which invest heavily in things like programming and “cultural engineering” – could serve as a model for condos and developers who want to further differentiate themselves by doing more with their common areas and amenities. I think it’s a great idea. 

  But let’s backup for a second.

  In many cases, I feel that developers tend to privilege the brands of their specific projects over their own corporate brands. This likely has something to do with the entrepreneurial nature of how development projects often come together, but I personally don’t think it’s the best approach.

  It’s the equivalent of a car company downplaying its own brand and instead creating a new one for each and every car model that it comes out with. That’s a lot of work and it’s harder to build brand equity that way. So I think the trend is probably away from this approach.

  But as that happens, developers will inevitably start to wonder how they can differentiate them themselves: How do I make my bricks and mortar less of a commodity? The same way that Apple made computers not about processor speeds and memory, but about something so much more. You create a brand story and an experience.

  And one of the best ways I think you could do that is through exactly what Amy is talking about: programming and cultural engineering.

  2015.05.21

• Real estate and house music in Johannesburg

  I’ve written about the Ponte Tower in Johannesburg before. At 54 storeys, it is the tallest building in Africa. It’s located in Hillbrow, which is an inner city neighborhood known for its crime and poverty. 

  In the 1970s when the tower was built, Hillbrow was an Apartheid-designated white-only neighborhood and the tower was filled with affluent residents. But that didn’t last long and eventually the wealth fled for the suburbs.

  Here’s a brief 6 minute video talking the Ponte Tower. Let’s call it the real estate perspective. Click here if you can’t see it below.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EIKmmSifqw?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

  Now, here’s a Real Scenes documentary talking about the thriving electronic music scene in Johannesburg. I think it’s fascinating to look at a city from a particular subculture and, compared to the first video, I get a very different feel for the city. Click here if you can’t see it below.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykt2f6o7-e8?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

  2015.05.21

• Locations of the 100 tallest skyscrapers in the world

  This morning I stumbled upon the following chart (via The Atlantic) summarizing the locations of the 100 tallest skyscrapers in the world.

  

  As you can see North America dominated tall buildings for most of the 20th century. But then in the 1980s, Asia starting building. Then in the 2000s, the Middle East started building. And today, Asia and the Middle East are where the world’s “supertalls” sit.

  What’s fascinating about this shift is that in many cases, there’s absolutely no physical or economic need to developing so tall. Yes, rising land values can drive up the height of a building, but not to the extent that we’ve been seeing.

  Instead, building “the tallest building in the world” is more symbolic than anything else. It’s about ego. It’s about asserting your position on the global stage. And so while this is a chart about tall buildings, it’s actually a pretty telling chart about global ambitions.

  2015.05.19

• 4 design strategies for your cold-climate waterfront

  

  Sugar Beach in Toronto by christophmarten on 500px

  Since we’ve been discussing waterfronts lately, I thought I would share this post from ArchDaily talking about 4 ways that cold-climate cities can make the most of their waterfronts.

  They are:

  1. Plan for winter sun
  2. Create plazas that block wind
  3. Break up outdoor spaces with comfort stations (not sure why they just have to be stations)
  4. Design for active winter programming

  These, of course, aren’t new design strategies. Cities have been built around their climates since, probably, the beginning of cities. It wasn’t until more recently that we started basically ignoring local climates and focusing more on what mechanical systems can do to make us feel comfortable.

  But I think that was a mistake. I don’t think that mechanical systems are bad though. I just think that there’s a lot that we can do first – without mechanical systems – to address local climates.

  If you’ve ever sat on a patio during a swing season (i.e. right now) where the wind was blocked and you were in the direct sun, you already know that there’s a lot that can be done without relying on active systems.

  But the other thing I like about this post is that it acknowledges the fact that winter waterfronts require just as much, if not more, design attention than a warm-climate waterfront.

  Saying that we’ll (insert cold-climate city name here) never be Miami or Barcelona or Sydney is just giving up.

  2015.05.18

• I would make a terrible politician

  Ever since I was a little kid, I have thought that I would one day get into politics. 

  A lot of it has to do with me wanting to affect positive change, which is also one of the reasons I love real estate development (and one of the reasons I write this blog). Developers might have a bad rap in some circles, but I view it as a mechanism for positive change in the built environment.

  However, I have also felt that politics is something that’s better to do when you have grey hair and you don’t actually need the money to live. That way people take you more seriously and you can, hopefully, just do what you feel is right as opposed to playing the political game.

  But more and more I find myself thinking: Brandon, you would make a terrible politician.

  I don’t want to play games. I don’t want to have to think about which stance will win me the most votes. And I don’t want to have to dance around questions so I can avoid upsetting certain constituents. I’d rather be clear and decisive about what I think is the right thing to do.

  But that doesn’t always work so well in politics. So I think I’ll just stick to building things and writing this daily blog.

  2015.05.17

• A petition to Toronto City Council to remove the Gardiner Expressway East

  

  “If the decision ultimately of the council is to support the hybrid I think frankly it’ll be a major step backwards and you’re going to miss a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I’ll be very frank, we’ll be the laughingstock of the world.” 

  -Paul Bedford, former chief planner of Toronto

  As many of you I’m sure know, I have been a vocal and passionate supporter of removing the eastern portion of the elevated Gardiner Expressway in downtown Toronto. I have written about it so many times that a lot of you are probably sick of hearing about it.

  I’m sorry if that’s the case. But it’s a hot and important topic in Toronto right now. We’re just over 3 weeks away from City Council finally making a decision. That is scheduled to happen on June 9th and/or 10th. 

  For the most part though, I was pretty confident that we would ultimately make what many of us believe is the right decision. But then this past week Mayor John Tory went public in his support for the “hybrid” option, which is basically to rebuild the elevated expressway in a slightly different configuration. And that really upset me.

  Here’s what that looks like (versus the remove option shown at the top of this post):

  

  Have we learned nothing from our past city building mistakes?

  Since that announcement, I went on Twitter every night this week to check out the discussions that were happening around #GardinerEast. And every night it got me so worked up that I then had trouble falling asleep. I have since stopped reading about the Gardiner East before bed.

  But rather than just get frustrated, my friend (a fellow city builder named Stephen Job) and I decided to do something about it and create a petition using Change.org.

  It is a petition that we will ultimately be sending to Toronto’s entire City Council prior to their June 9 meeting and we hope that you will consider signing it and sharing it with your network – regardless of whether or not you happen to live in Toronto. (Although it’ll certainly help if you’re a taxpayer and voter in the City of Toronto.)

  We just finished getting it up and you can check it out and sign it by clicking here.

  Images: Toronto Star

  2015.05.16

• The perfect high street

  How do you create and maintain a thriving high street in this era of increasing online shopping? This was one of the questions that Monocle asked at its recent Quality of Life Conference in Lisbon and here’s a video with its recommendations. Click here if you can’t see the video below.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox2WJwDbuIo?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

  2015.05.16