Tag: cities

• The un-hotel

  

  According to Condé Nast, the coolest hotel trend for 2018 is the “un-hotel.” Here’s what they mean by that: “Instead of many rooms under one roof, these new un-hotels have different rooms in various locations, united only in character and concept.”

  I wrote about one of these un-hotels, the Vipp Shelter, back in the spring. I was interested both in how the company was using their hotel as a kind of shop and how they had adopted this decentralized approach to hospitality.

  Different rooms in different locations has got to create some diseconomies. But the appeal is clear. We are all craving new experiences.

  To me, it feels like a hybrid between an Airbnb and a boutique hotel. You get to “travel like a local”, but you’re still staying with a brand and there’s likely some sort of unifying concept across the portfolio.

  Check out the SWEETS hotel in Amsterdam.

  Image: SWEETS hotel

  2018.09.18

• Leading female architects

  Reed Kroloff has a noteworthy piece in the New York Times talking about how architecture is no longer just a ‘gentleman’s profession’. Though less than a third of AIA (American Institute of Architects) members are females, “offices led or owned by women are creating an ever-wider range of public buildings that address architecture and urbanism in new and invigorating ways”, says Kroloff.

  

  I am thrilled, but not surprised, to see Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang on the list (pictured above). Her firm is the design architect behind our One Delisle proposal. And I was also happy to see Magui Peredo of Estudio Macias Peredo on the list. She is based in Guadalajara and, if you aren’t familiar with her work, I recommend you check it out. I love the materiality of it.

  Image: New York Times

  2018.09.16

• Invisible walls

  

  This is an interesting working paper by a team of researchers at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management. The paper examines the relationship between urban density and organized violence, first in Colombia and then within a sample of 200 global cities.

  The finding is that organized violence actually increases the population density of the surrounding areas within a city because it creates a kind of “invisible wall” – effectively a no-go zone.

  This makes perfect intuitive sense, but it’s not something I ever considered. Geography and other natural constraints typically drive density. Think about the island of Manhattan. But so too can invisible walls.

  For the full working paper, click here.

  Photo by Joel Duncan on Unsplash

  2018.09.13

• How we make the decisions that matter most

  I’m listening to the below podcast right now with Sonal Chokshi, Chris Dixon, and Steven Johnson. Steven recently published a new book called, Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter Most. If you can’t see the embedded podcast below, click here.

  [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/497128947″ params=”color=#ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”300″ iframe=”true” /]

  It is about the big and meaningful decisions that we make as individuals – such as where to live or who to marry – as well as the big and meaningful decisions that we make as a collective – such as how to plan a city or fight climate change. But most importantly, it is about how we can get better at them.

  Supposedly, part of the science (and art) behind deliberative decision making is using tricks to get our minds to see problems and their complexities differently. That could involve scenario planning and even considering the weirdest possible outcomes. In fact, Steven finds a lot of value in fictional storytelling.

  There could also be implications for city building. Tech is allowing us to collect a lot more data about the ways in which our cities operate today. But as we get better at running complex simulations, we should also get a lot better at understanding the long-term implications of our decisions.

  I may just have to get Steven’s new book.

  2018.09.11

• Unzipped wall on King Street West

  

  Last night I checked out the Unzipped Toronto exhibition, which is the relocated Serpentine Pavilion (pictured above) that was designed by Bjarke Ingels Group in 2016. 

  It was initially housed in Hyde Park London, but it’s now on King Street West Toronto. Westbank purchased the “unzipped wall” after it was installed in London and supposedly it will eventually find a permanent home in Vancouver.

  The official opening of Unzipped Toronto is September 15th, 2018. It will be free and open to the public. If you’d like to get a complimentary ticket, you can do that here. 

  The timing of all this lines up with condo sales for Bjarke Ingels’ first project in Toronto. I believe that will be starting this fall. And I am sure they will end up setting some new records for the King West submarket.

  2018.09.09

• Red streetcar tracks

  A few months ago when I wrote about “Toronto’s great streets” I mentioned that Queens Quay West – while magnificent – has had its share of issues. Cyclists and pedestrians often find themselves battling for space. And drivers are consistently driving in the wrong places.

  Part of the problem, I think, is that the turning radii (among other things) are a bit atypical and unusual compared to the rest of the city. And so if you’re at all in mental autopilot, it can be fairly easy to make a wrong turn. You really have to be paying attention.

  Below is a screenshot from Google Street View showing the foot of Lower Spadina, looking east on Queens Quay West. If you’re making a left turn from the former onto the latter, you need to end up on the left (north) of the streetcar tracks (even though the tracks themselves might be directing you elsewhere).

  

  There’s lots of signage telling you not to drive onto the tracks, but that hasn’t really been working. So the tracks were recently painted in bright red. You can see what that looks like here. Some people are still getting mixed up, but it’s certainly more noticeable.

  What I am wondering today is whether all of this signage and paint should be considered a symptom of poor design. In other words: Should good design require few instructions? Or, is this simply a normal part of iterative city building?

  What do you think?

  2018.09.08

• Limits of housing affordability

  

  The San Francisco Chronicle recently published an article called, “SF residential projects languish as rising costs force developers to cash out.” It talks about the impact that rising costs (both construction and other) are having on new housing supply. Some developers aren’t building even though may have entitled sites. And that’s because the math doesn’t work, even though we’re in a market with a severe housing shortage.

  Here is an excerpt from the article that talks about the kind of pricing that is needed in order to make a project work:

  Chris Foley, a real estate investor and partner in brokerage firm Polaris Pacific, said that in the current construction environment a condominium developer needs to sell units for at least $1,400 a square foot for a wood-frame building and $1,800 a square for a taller, steel-frame midrise or high-rise. Even in a city where more than 80 percent of the population is priced out of the market, those numbers are a stretch, Foley said.

  San Francisco also has inclusionary zoning, which requires a certain percentage of units in any new development to be priced below market. According to the article, it is 18% for new rental projects and 20% for new condo projects. That’s a cost that needs to be absorbed by the remaining market rate units – so price accordingly. 

  The MIRA tower designed by Studio Gang is currently under construction and has 156 affordable units and 393 market rate units. The market rate pricing looks something like this:

  That’s the case with three buildings rising near the new Transbay Transit Center: Mira, the Avery at 400 Folsom St., and One Steuart Lane, which overlooks the Embarcadero at the foot of Howard Street. Unless there is a remarkable drop in the market, units in all three of those buildings will probably have an average sales price of more than $2,000 a square foot and penthouses could fetch $3,000 or even $4,000 a square foot. A 3,326-square-foot penthouse at 181 Fremont St., which opened last spring, recently sold for $15 million, or $4,500 a square foot.

  Projects being squeezed by rising costs is something that we are also seeing here in Toronto. And I don’t believe that the general public fully appreciates that there are limits to the costs that can be shouldered by new development. And the reason for that is because there are limits to what people can afford to pay for new housing.

  Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

  2018.09.07

• A more distributed startup geography

  The Economist recently argued that Silicon Valley’s innovation hegemony is waning and that it is a product of two factors: there appears to be more innovation happening elsewhere (good news), but that innovation in general also seems to be harder to achieve (bad news). Here is an excerpt from the article:

  Other cities are rising in relative importance as a result. The Kauffman Foundation, a non-profit group that tracks entrepreneurship, now ranks the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area first for startup activity in America, based on the density of startups and new entrepreneurs. Mr Thiel is moving to Los Angeles, which has a vibrant tech scene. Phoenix and Pittsburgh have become hubs for autonomous vehicles; New York for media startups; London for fintech; Shenzhen for hardware. None of these places can match the Valley on its own; between them, they point to a world in which innovation is more distributed.

  Part of the problem, of course, is rising costs in the Bay Area. Everything from the cost of living to the cost of operating a business. The article cites a recent survey where nearly half of all respondents said they are planning to leave the Bay Area in the next few years. This is up from 34% only two years ago.

  I don’t doubt that rising costs are causing some people to look to other cities, as well as other countries in the case of draconian visa policies. But I am suspect of the claim that we’ve heat peak “innovation” – however you want to define that.

  2018.09.05

• Photoblog: Aga Khan Museum

  Today we visited the Aga Khan Museum here in Toronto, which is a museum dedicated to the arts of Islamic civilizations. I had been outside the building before but this was my first time inside and my first time seeing some of the collections.

  Here is the main entrance:

  

  Here is a photo looking the opposite way over one of the reflection ponds:

  

  The museum was designed by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki and was completed in 2014. 

  The site area is approximately 70,000 square meters and the building itself is approximately 11,600 square meters. Maki won the Pritzker Prize in 1993.

  Here is the building’s interior courtyard, which was one of my favorite parts:

  

  The glass is patterned with the Islamic eight pointed star. But since the symbol is typically represented by two overlapping squares, the patterning was placed on two different sides of the double pane glass. Or at least that’s my guess as to why they did it that way.

  Lastly, here is the Bellerive Room:

  

  It was designed to be a contemplative room that could, on occasion, also host intimate events and performances. Note the shadows being cast by the screens in front of the windows.

  If you haven’t yet been to the Aga Khan Museum it is worth a visit, even if you just walk the formal gardens surrounding it.

  2018.09.03

• Is Tesla the new iPhone?

  

  Benedict Evans just published a great post on his blog about “Tesla, software and disruption.” I recommend a full read. In it, he tries to answer whether Tesla is really “the new iPhone” and if it will be as disruptive to the car landscape as some/many people think.

  In his line of thinking, electric (as opposed to an ICE vehicle) feels a lot more like a sustaining innovation, rather than a disruptive innovation. In other words, it something that incumbents will be able to incorporate. So it will not change the “basis of competition.”

  The more critical aspect is instead autonomy. Here are two snippets from the piece:

  All of this takes us to autonomy. Electric is compelling but will probably be a commodity, whereas Tesla’s improvements on top of electric may not be commodities but are not necessarily decisive. Autonomy changes the world in profound ways (I wrote about this here), and it’s a fundamentally new technology that doesn’t look at all like a commodity. And Tesla is doing this, too. Sort of.

  In this competition, Tesla’s thesis is that the data it can collect from its cars will give it a crucial advantage. The only reason that anyone is interested in autonomy today is that the emergence of machine learning (ML) in the last 5 years probably gives us a way to make it work. Machine learning, in turn, is about extracting patterns from large amounts of data, and then matching things against those patterns. So how much data do you have?
  

  But even if we are to all agree that autonomy is the “disruptive innovation”, it is not yet clear who will get there first. Maybe it is Tesla. Maybe it is Waymo. Regardless, many or most people seem to agree that it will arrive in 202x.

  Image: Tesla

  2018.09.02