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.
The train from Paris to Marseille takes just over 3 hours:
To drive this same distance, it would take just over 8 hours:
So unless you had a very specific reason, I don’t know why you’d ever want to drive this route. I certainly hate long drives and would avoid this at all costs.
On a related note, the Canadian government announced this week that it will actually be moving forward with a high-speed train linking Québec City to Toronto, stopping in Peterborough, Ottawa, Montréal, Trois-Rivières, and Laval. And unlike previous announcements, it will actually go pretty fast — upwards of 300 km/h, which is comparable to what the TGV does on the above route.
There are three consortia currently competing for this contract, but apparently the federal government has already chosen a winning bidder. An announcement is expected next month. At the same time, the project office owns all of the bids, and so there’s a chance that elements from each of them could be used in the final project.
According to official messaging, the design alone is expected to take some 4 to 5 years, which is an eternity and way too long. But at least we seem to be moving forward. This rail link is a no brainer. It will compress the geography of an importantly bilingual corridor with nearly 20 million people — about half the population of Canada! It’s our megalopolis.
Now we just need to move forward with urgency and with an unwavering commitment to creating the best high-speed rail service in the world. Let’s not accept mediocrity. And let’s not cancel it once we’ve already sunk millions into it. That would be a terrible outcome for such an obviously important nation-building project.
Neat B and I tried surfing for the very first time today in Biarritz. Our instructor was a 57-year old Frenchman who has been surfing for 50 years (he allegedly started when he was 7) and who spent some 20 years living in Costa Rica doing the same. Sounds super stressful, if you ask me. We both did well for our first time, and managed to catch waves and get up on our massive spongy boards. (This is what they give you when you have no idea what you’re doing.) Naturally, we’ll be doing the same thing tomorrow morning. Biarritz is an awesome place. It feels to me like the summer version of all the things I love about Utah in the winter — breathtaking landscapes, chill vibes, and cool people doing fun things on boards and such.
The mighty — and automatic — bollard is an important city-building tool that isn’t employed nearly enough in North America. It’s typically used to control car access to small pedestrian-only or pedestrian-first streets. But I guess if you don’t have any of these, then you may not feel the need to install such a device. The above photos are from Bordeaux. And if you want to gain access, you need to hit the intercom button and explain why you’re local traffic. Can you think of any streets in your city that could use a system like this? I can think of many in Toronto.
Since the modern Olympic Games were revived in 1896, no city has ever hosted swimming events in an urban river. Too poopy. But Paris, as we talked about, hopes to be the first. Starting on July 30, the Seine is scheduled to host the swimming portion of the triathlon competitions.
Except, it will depend on water quality. Today’s training sessions (scheduled for Sunday, July 28) were cancelled because water tests showed that the Seine is currently below acceptable standards. This is due to heavy rain over the last few days, which I guess overloaded the city’s storm network.
So what is clear is that — 36 years after then-Mayor Jacques Chirac first promised to clean up the river — the city has only been able to successfully achieve this, sometimes. It’s not an easy task.
According to Bloomberg, the clean-up efforts have already cost €1.4 billion. This was spent on doing things like constructing a 50,000 m3 holding basin (about the size of 12 Olympic-sized pools) under the Gare D’Austerlitz. This now holds storm overflow during heavy rain events, in lieu of it going into the Seine.
But this doesn’t provide any guarantees as evidenced by today’s cancelled training sessions. Presumably, it just makes it less likely for overflow stormwater to get dumped into the Seine. So a cynic might ask: Why bother with all of this?
Well, for one thing, swimming in a river in the middle of a major global city is just plain cool. Look at how the Swiss do it. But another reason could be that you want to create one of the greenest cities on the planet. And if that’s the case, then seeing athletes swimming in the Seine is a pretty powerful image.
At the beginning of this month, the Government of Canada issued this direction, setting out the requirement for all public servants to be “in the workplace” at least three days per week. To ensure some flexibility, it also specified that it didn’t have to be exactly this schedule. But the intent was that public servants would need to spend a minimum of 60% of their regular schedules, in the workplace, whether measured on a weekly or monthly basis.
Immediately, the Public Service Alliance of Canada reacted and said that it would be filing “unfair labor practice” complaints: “We will be using every recourse we have available to fight this mandate,” PSAC national president Chris Aylward said, arguing that the surprise policy update was “anti-worker” and “fundamentally breaks the trust of workers and unions with the Trudeau government.”
Now, I understand that there are a whole host of legal considerations with a mandate like this. If remote work has, for example, become an implied term of these employment relationships, then it might be difficult for any employer to call these people back. Thankfully, I am not a lawyer. And so I don’t think this way. It is probably also the case that I’m now in my middle adulthood and have old school views on this topic.
Because in my mind, this is the government saying, “hey everyone who works for us, we’d like you to come into the office at least three days a week so that we can work together as a team, collaborate, and hopefully innovate.” And this is employees saying, “no way, that’s totally unfair! How dare you demand we come into the office that much?” Like, since when did going into work become such a problem?
At the same time, Canada is suffering from an existential productivity problem. This country has seen no productivity growth in recent years. And if you compare us to other developed countries, we are near the bottom. Even France — which is stereotypically famous for its relaxed work culture and its ban on after-work emails — is more productive than were are!
This needs to change or we will remain a deeply troubled country. And like everything, it’s going to require work.
This evening in French class we discussed a Parisian apartment type called the chambre de bonne. The direct translation is “maid’s room”, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. A small one-room apartment that is found on the top floor of bourgeoisie apartment buildings. Indeed, nearly one-third of Paris’ entire supply of chambres de bonne are in the wealthy 16th arrondissement.
Their original function was to house servants. The reason they were on the penthouse floor is because, when they emerged in Paris in the 1830s, the elevator hadn’t yet been invented. And so this was the least desirable floor. The people staying in these rooms typically worked for the people living on the lowest floors in the same building. That’s where you wanted to be. Fewer stairs.
Fast forward to today, and it is estimated that Paris has somewhere around 114,000 chambres be bonne (also known as chambres de service). They are also occupied by a broad cross section of different people:
But it means living small. The smallest allowable size for an apartment in Paris is 9 m2 (area) or 20 m3 (volume). Meaning, even if the surface area is under the 9 m2 threshold, it might still be able to pass as livable if the ceilings are tall enough. But under these figures, and the place can’t be rented. And supposedly, about half of Paris’ chambres de bonne do not meet these minimum thresholds.
These requirements are immediately interesting to me — not only because they’re much smaller than what we allow in Toronto — but because most people don’t think of real estate in terms of volumes. Ceiling heights, yes. But when have you ever seen or measured the volume of an apartment? It’s clearly appropriate in this instance given that many of these apartments sit under sloping rooflines.
But the most interesting question, I think, is whether this housing type is functionally obsolete. On the one hand, Paris is an expensive city, and these apartments represent what is likely the most affordable housing option. Go on YouTube and you’ll find lots of students giving tours of their compact room-apartments. On the other hand, census data shows that occupancy within his housing type has been steadily declining since at least the 1960s:
Based on these figures from 2011, only about 17,300 chambres de bonne are occupied as a principal residence. This doesn’t seem like a lot for a big city like Paris. (It’s around 1.25% of its entire housing supply based on my rough math.) The rest of these apartments appear to be vacant, ineligible for renting, or serving as a secondary space for owners in the same building.
This represents an ~85% vacancy rate, which begs the question: Is there something more productive that Paris could be doing with all of this under-utilized penthouse space? Though perhaps it’s helpful to start with: would you live in 9 square meters or 97 square feet? This is smaller than the minimum size of a parking space in Toronto.
In 2023, there were 379,000 babies born in Italy. This is down from 393,000 babies in the prior year and represents a new record low. Already in 2022, the number of births was noted as being the fewest since Italy’s unification in 1861. The result is a “demographic winter.” Of course, this challenge is not unique to Italy. It is happening in most developed countries. Korea, for example, has a fertility rate somewhere around 0.72 babies per woman. Because of this, there are a lot of people in the world trying to figure out how to encourage more births.
Meloni, herself a mother of a single child, has said it is a priority for her government to increase the birth rate and encourage women to have more babies “for the simple reason that we want Italy to have a future again”.
So what’s causing this?
One seemingly logical explanation could be that the employment rates for women and men are basically the same now. Fewer women are staying at home and so there’s less time to have and raise children. In fact, the opposite is true. If you look at fertility rates across Europe, high birth rates tend to correlate with high employment rates for women. I guess families need to be able to afford children. Here’s an excerpt from a Guardian article (c. 2015) on the topic of fertility:
The map of the fertility rate in European countries more or less overlaps with that of women in work. In countries with relatively buoyant populations, such as France and Scandinavia, women play an important part in the labour market. According to data for 2010 published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the employment rate for women aged 24 to 54 in work was 83.8% in France, 84.4% in Finland, 85.6% in Denmark and 87.5% in Sweden, barely lower than the equivalent figures for men. In contrast, in southern Europe and Japan the share of women in work was much lower: only 64.4% of them had a job in Italy, 71.6% in Japan, 72.2% in Greece and 78.3% in Spain.
Staying on the theme of being able to afford kids, another possible explanation might be that kids are expensive and so you need strong family-friendly government policies to help support them. While this I’m sure helps, there’s data to suggest that the correlation between these policies and birth rates is actually fairly weak. That’s why, even though many developed countries have expanded such policies, birth rates continue to fall. Here’s a graphic by John Burn-Murdoch from FT:
So what the hell is it then? Well there is another possible explanation and it is that it’s more of a cultural thing. In the above article, John makes the argument that a number of other more important factors are leading to declining birth rates. Namely, more people are choosing to live alone, and not as a couple. Priorities have shifted, where family formation is no longer seen as central to a fulfilling life. And more young people are generally anxious. (He doesn’t get into why but I’m sure that it’s possible to blame TikTok.)
But what really stood out to me was this graphic:
Since the 1960s, parenting has gotten systematically more intense for parents. The average number of hours per day spent by mothers on “hands-on parenting activities” has grown significantly in most developed countries. However, there is one clear exception: France. It turns out that the French are, at least based on this data, less likely to be so-called helicopter parents. Parenting is less hands-on, kids get more freedom and — perhaps because of this — France has the highest fertility rate in Europe at over 1.8 babies per woman.
This is not to say that France’s family-friendly policies aren’t doing something as well. I would imagine they are. But the above makes intuitive sense to me. If you create an environment where the threshold to be considered a good parent is constantly becoming more duanting and more life-consuming, it’s no surprise to me that more and more people are simply saying, no thank you.
This is the chalet that our group has been staying in for the last week:
We’ve been calling it a tree house. It is 5 levels in total. And you circulate through the house using a spiral staircase in the center of it. It’s space efficient, but there are a lot of stairs.
The site is downhill from the road, which, as we have talked about before, creates a more challenging build than uphill from the road.
You enter the chalet on the third level, which itself houses 2 bedrooms. One floor below and one floor above also have 2 bedrooms, meaning there are 6 bedrooms in total. On the lowest floor is an indoor hot tub, a shared parking garage, and a shared ski/snowboard room.
Every mountain house needs, at a minimum, two things: a fireplace and a hot tub. Ideally the latter is outside.
As is typical in the mountains, the main living space is on the top floor (level 5 in this case). You want this for the views. If you’re building into a sloping site, the lowest floors are usually somewhat constrained.
We did the same thing with Parkview Mountain House. But it does mean that you circulate through the more “private” spaces within the house before reaching the more “public” ones. This is the opposite of what happens in most homes.
The underground parking garage is accessed by way of a small parking elevator that lowers you down two floors. Initially this seemed excessive, but it is a shared elevator/garage. The chalet is semi-detached chalet, if you will, and so this was probably the only way they could get enough parking on the site. Assuming our attached neighbor is of a similar size, that’s 12 bedrooms.
It also creates an important pathway so that people don’t need to bring their skis and snowboards through the house.
Every site has its challenges and that is especially the case in the mountains.
This is a photo taken from the base village of Val Thorens. I took it while we were sitting on a massive terrace in the middle of it. But what stood out to me even more than the terrace itself was the buildings that frame it. They are all about 8-9 storeys, have no step-backs, and were clearly orchestrated to create a defined “street wall.”
These framing buildings can be just as important as the public spaces themselves; they form the “walls” of the public realm and create a sense of enclosure. In this case, the buildings also follow a similar aesthetic. They were designed to pay homage to traditional Savoyard architecture, which is known for its use of local woods and stones.
The other thing I find noteworthy is that all of this is only about 50-some years old. Val Thorens the resort opened in 1971. And it only became an idea sometime around 1969 when Pierre Schneblelen — an engineer and developer — decided that he wanted to build Europe’s highest ski resort. (The base of the resort sits at 2,300 m and the peak elevation is 3,230 m.)
As time passes, it’s easy to take these kinds of places and experiences for granted. But they only exist because someone, at some point, had a vision. And when that vision was initially presented, it was probably perceived by many, or by most, to be crazy. That’s just how these things go, and so I like reminding myself of that.
