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: downtown toronto

  • Have your say in the future of downtown Toronto

    I was recently on a call with someone living in California, but who is originally from Toronto. He told me that every time he comes back to Toronto to visit, it feels like the city has changed, grown, and become even more cosmopolitan.

    That is a great compliment, because every city today is in a competition to remain relevant. Which means that if a city is not changing, evolving, and adapting, then it is falling behind. Competition is fierce and it’s global.

    Toronto is fortunate enough to be experiencing rapid population growth and that is driving a lot of this change. But at the same time, it naturally raises questions about how to best manage and leverage that growth, particularly in areas like the downtown core where a lot of that intensification is happening.

    To that end, the City of Toronto has been working on a three year study called TOcore, that will, among other things, result in a new comprehensive plan for the downtown core. (I’ve blogged about this before and it has come up in the comments a few times.)

    Today, however, marks the start of their public engagement process. And so if you’d like to have your say (there will be implications for developers, architects, and other city builders), you can do that here. There’s an online survey, an email address, events you can attend in person and, of course, a hashtag: #DTadvice.

    But the tool I think is really neat, is their “Favourite Places” map. What it allows you to do is drop pins onto a map of downtown and describe your “Favourite Places” and places that have “Great Potential.” Notice that the focus is on positivity. There’s no pin for “Shitty Places.”

    I have a lot to say, so I’ve been flooding the map with pins. I would be curious, though, to hear what you would like to see happen in downtown Toronto – and so would the TOcore team.

  • The new Toronto 2030 District

    Photograph Financial District, Downtown Toronto, Canada by Yeonju SEONG on 500px

    Image: Financial District, Downtown Toronto, Canada by Yeonju SEONG on 500px

    Today I learned about something new called 2030 Districts. They are: “designated urban areas committed to meeting the energy, water, and transportation emissions reduction targets of the 2030 Challenge for Planning.”

    Toronto’s new 2030 District is downtown, which is bound by the lake in the south, Bathurst Street in the west, Dupont Street and Rosedale Valley in the north, and the Don Valley in the east. 

    It’s the first district outside of the US. The other established districts are in Seattle, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Denver, Stamford, San Francisco, and Dallas.

    The goals for Toronto’s district are as follows (quoted from 2030 Districts):

    • To cut district-wide emissions in half, including zero-emissions from new buildings by 2030.
    • Support a better understanding of where and why energy use, water use, and GHG emissions occur across the District.
    • Work in partnership with building owners, service providers and conservation groups to accelerate the adoption of best practices for building design and management.
    • Facilitate broad stakeholder dialogues to uncover and overcome systemic barriers to long term reductions in energy use, water use and GHG emissions.

    I’m looking forward to following and learning more about this initiative. I think many of us can agree that producing less, not more, GHG emissions in the future would be preferable. And we know that the bulk of it comes from both buildings and transportation.

  • Downtown Toronto in numbers

    Last week I tweeted out a Tweetstorm with some of the key facts from this City of Toronto study on the downtown core. Here are two of those tweets:

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    While I realize that reading city reports is probably not everyone’s idea of fun, it is a good one if you want to understand the massive change that is taking place in Toronto right now and also the importance of the downtown core for this region.

    To put things into perspective, consider that the downtown core (including King West, King East, and the Portlands) is estimated to be responsible for 51% of the entire wealth generated in this city. And yet its physical area is easily less than 10% of the entire city (which is about 630 square kilometers).

    That’s fascinating to me.

  • We want what we want

    This past Sunday night I was out for a bike ride with a few friends all around downtown Toronto. According to Strava, we did almost 22 km. Click here to see our route. During the ride, one of my friends said something to me that stood out. He said that when he’s on a bike he wants all cars off the road; but when he’s in a car, he wants all bikes off the road.

    Now, this may seem like a fairly banal statement, but I think it demonstrates a number of things about people and the way we interact with cities. First, we’re all probably pretty selfish. We want what we want at a specific moment in time and we easily forget what it’s like to be on the other side of a situation.

    Second, I think it reinforces what I wrote a month ago in a post called: Every street can’t be everything to everyone. If we want to improve the user experience for a variety of different use cases (driving, biking, walking and so on), we should decide when and where we’re going to optimize for each. 

    The reason my friend said what he said was because we were riding on a road with no bike lanes. We were swerving in and around cars. And when the street is shared like this it naturally becomes a competition of who can be the most aggressive and dominate the road–bikes or cars. But as exciting as that might be, it’s probably not an ideal way to build our cities.