One of the things that I don’t think we are doing a good job of here in Canada is promoting our COVID Alert app. Most of the people I talk to don’t seem to have it installed on their phones. And most of the people… Read More
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All posts tagged “pandemic”
Learning from the Spanish Flu
“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” -Georg Hegel Back in March, I was reading everything I could find about COVID-19 and about pandemics. Eventually that tapered off. But this week I decided that it was time to go back and… Read More
The resilient city and road pricing
Joe Berridge’s recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail is a good reminder — in the face of a whole lot of uncertainty — about the resiliency of our cities. Those previous decades saw a surge of people and jobs locating downtown, with consequent… Read More
What is it that I believe?
Back in 2008, I was living in the United States. And at that time, during the financial crisis, I remember people positing that the US wouldn’t be able to build another commercial office building for at least the next twenty years. That’s how bad things… Read More
Pandemic-era hand sanitizer
I have been trying (albeit not very hard) to come up with the best way to describe the stinky hand sanitizer that is going around these days. Then today somebody in the office described it as bad tequila and I immediately thought, “yup, that’s exactly… Read More
Home listings are up 96% in San Francisco
A recent market report from Zillow has found that urban and suburban housing markets in the US haven’t actually diverged all that much as a result of this pandemic. Despite what you might be reading in the news, Zillow’s national listing data does not seem… Read More
The many forces shaping our cities
Richard Florida has a three-part essay over on Bloomberg CityLab about the forces that are currently shaping American cities. In part three, he argues that this pandemic will likely accelerate many of the trends that were already underway — families will continue to like the… Read More
Sidewalk Labs, Uber, Lime, and the demise of urban density
Today I am going to talk about 3 things that recently happened and/or that are on my mind. Sidewalk Labs pulled out of Toronto. I think this is sad. A lot of people have said that they’re surprised, but not surprised. The official reason is… Read More
Cities and contagion
The Penn Institute for Urban Research has just launched a new initiative called, Cities and Contagion: Lessons from COVID-19. The inaugural piece is a special edition of its Urban Link publication. But going forward, the initiative is planned to include not only publications, but a… Read More
How to respond to the coronavirus
I just finished watching this TED talk with Bill Gates. For those of you who are up on their TED talks, this is not the one from five years ago where Bill predicted a pandemic and told us all that we were nowhere near ready.… Read More
