Here are some interesting figures about Venice take from this recent FT article by Chris Allnutt: Tourist visits to Venice last year were estimated to be about 1/5 of what they usually are Short-term rental bookings as of December 2020 were down about 74% year-over-year… Read More
This morning I stumbled up on this conversation between Richard Florida and Ed Glaeser about the post-pandemic city. It’s from September 2020 and that is obvious in some of the comments. Richard Florida (who was in Toronto) remarked that it felt like the pandemic was… Read More
Here are the results from a recent survey by The Harris Poll and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, which asked 1,200 residents from the six largest metropolitan areas in the US how they were feeling about urban and suburban life during this pandemic. (The… Read More
I’m taking the day off from blogging (kind of), but I would be remiss if I didn’t leave you all with something city related. And so here is an article by Bloomberg CityLab talking about how the quality of municipal Christmas trees can serve as… Read More
We’ve all heard stories or know people who have made the decision to leave the city during this pandemic, either temporarily or permanently. Some young people have moved home until things settle down and some people have sold their real estate and bought something outside… Read More
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
“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
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
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
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
