It’s great to be back in Philly. I have a real sense of nostalgia around this city. Last night my friends took me to a popup beer garden on South Street put on by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. Before the popup garden, it was just… Read More
dupont survivor by Josemaria de Churtichaga on 500px I was on CBC radio this morning talking about the revitalization of Dovercourt Village and Geary Avenue in Toronto. The funny thing about this topic is that it’s one I actually held off writing about. I’ve been… Read More
Back in 2011, blogTO ran an article calling Geary Avenue one of the ugliest streets in Toronto. And it’s certainly up there. It’s an industrial street with a mixture of different building types (lots of autoshops), giant power lines running along the south side of… Read More
I’ve written about the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco before. It’s an infamous neighborhood in the center of the city that has for decades resisted gentrification (which was the topic of my post). But as the technology sector continues to urbanize, many fear that it’s… Read More
After yesterday’s post on Belval in Luxembourg, I started thinking more about authenticity. I ended the post by talking about some of the industrial elements – blast furnaces and so on – that will be preserved in the neighborhood and argued that those types of… Read More
When I was working on my startup Dirt last year, one of the things we spent a bit of time figuring out was how to classify buildings according to neighborhood. Now, at first blush, this may seem like a fairly easy thing to do. You simply locate… Read More
In reading a recent Financial Times article called, Are creative people the key to city regeneration?, I was reminded of a famous line from the late urbanist Jane Jacobs: “New ideas need old buildings.” What she meant by that is the following: Cities need old buildings… Read More
I was planning to write about something else today, but then I saw Fred Wilson’s post on revitalizing urban cores and I had to switch topics, because I think he makes a great point about turning around declining cities: I’ve been asked by civic leaders from… Read More
Yesterday when I was researching for this post on Lean Urbanism, I came across a really interesting way of describing and classifying the groups typically involved in the emergence of a new neighborhood. It came from New Urbanist Andres Duany, who explained the process, here,… Read More
The term “lean” is well known in technology and startup circles. Thanks to people like Eric Ries and Steve Blank, it’s become all about starting up lean and not investing a lot of time and money before you’ve really tested your business assumptions in the… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 