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: bangkok

  • Bangkok has a lot of messy wires

    Actor Russell Crowe tweeted this out back in October while he was in Bangkok filming a movie:

    It’s a photo of the city’s notoriously messy communication wires. As I understand it, many or most of these wires aren’t even active. The telecom industry just has a very ad hoc approach to running new ones and there’s also nobody responsible for removing any of the old ones.

    In response to this tweet, the Prime Minster of Thailand, Prayut Chan-o-cha, has called for these utilities to be tidied up and put underground. No more mess! Who knows if it’ll actually happen, but it’s kind of cool to see what can be done with a single tweet.

    I wish I could say that my tweets were also capable of inspiring such swift urban action.

  • Measuring street-network disconnectedness around the world

    Here is a recent research paper by Christopher Barrington-Leigh and Adam Millard-Ball that looks at the connectivity of local street networks across the world. They refer to this as “street-network sprawl” and they measure it using a Street-Network Disconnectedness index (SNDi).

    This is important for many reasons. Compact street networks with shorter blocks and fewer dead ends are far more conducive to different forms of mobility, including transit. Street networks are also incredibly sticky. Once laid, they rarely change. And if they do, it’s over very long periods of time.

    The study period in the paper is 1975 to 2013. What they found is that in 90% of the 134 most populous countries in the world, the street network has become less connected since 1975. What this means is that we have been making it harder to service our communities with transit.

    That said, there has been a reversal in “high income” countries, most notably in North America. If you take a look at the above graphs, you can see a fairly dramatic drop off, signalling a reduction in the construction of low-connectivity streets. Southeast Asia, on the other hand, is trending in the opposite direction. Note Bangkok in the upper righthand corner.

    For a copy of the full research paper, click here.

    Images: Global trends toward urban street-network sprawl

  • Maeklong Railway Market — plan view

    Many of you have probably visited or seen videos of the Maeklong Railway Market in Bangkok. (I’ve done the latter, not the former.) It is one of the largest seafood markets in Thailand and it is literally housed on the railway’s tracks. Every time a train passes through, the entire market needs to be pulled up and relocated. Even the awnings that cover the market need to be collapsed. The videos I’ve seen have all been taken from grade. But the below video (via Vala Afshar on Twitter), showing the market in plan view (from what was likely a drone), is arguably even more impactful. There isn’t a foot of wasted space.

  • Making cities resilient to climate change

    This past fall, Goldman Sachs published an important report about “making cities resilient to climate change.” In it, they remind us that the scientific consensus is that the world has already warmed from the pre-industrial era (and will likely continue to do so) and that a great many of us live near water (and will likely be impacted going forward).

    About 40% of the world’s population lives within 100 kilometers of a coast, and about 10% of the world’s population lives in a coastal settlement that is less than 10m above sea level. Above is a list of some of those cities, along with their average elevation in meters. The cities with single digit elevations include Bangkok, Miami, Alexandria, and Amsterdam.

    Goldman’s prediction is that this need for “urban adaption” could lead to one of the largest infrastructure build-outs in history. And that cities all around the world should already be thinking about how they will finance and equitably execute on greater resilience (assuming they aren’t already).

    Click here to download a full copy of the report. The diagrams showing the average change in global mean surface temperatures against the pre-industrial period are something you should all look at it. The 2015-2019 change is pictured above.

    Charts: Goldman Sachs

  • Parasitic architecture

    Parasitic architecture sounds like a bad thing because of the connotations, but you could make an argument that it is, in fact, the exact opposite. It is a way to better leverage existing structures and reclaim under-utilized urban spaces. Perhaps additive architecture would be a more appropriate name.

    Here’s one example. WARchitect recently completed this “skyscape apartment” on top of an existing 5 storey apartment building in Bangkok. It’s about 1,600 square feet. And the entire space is organized according to the structural grid of the apartment building below.

    Many/most structural systems have excess capacity because of a built in factor of safety. So for a small addition like this, I’m guessing that they probably just loaded up the existing column grid. It also looks like there were already stairs leading up to the roof of the building.

    Years ago I looked at doing an addition on top of an existing apartment building here in Toronto and it ended up being a lot more complex than I may be making it out to be in this post. Mind you, we were looking at adding on a few floors, which triggered all sorts of issues.

    But now that Toronto is allowing accessory dwelling units along its laneways, is it time that we also look at the rooftops of our existing buildings?

    Photo: Rungkit Charoenwat