Tag: paris

• Is cycling an inferior economic good?

  Across most global cities, higher household income tends to correlate directly with higher rates of car ownership, solo car commuting, and vehicle miles travelled. So, one could argue, as many do, that cycling is what economists call an inferior good, meaning that as incomes increase, demand for cycling decreases.

  But this isn’t perfectly true. Data from the US — an obviously car-dominated place — has shown that bicycle demand is actually U-shaped. A 2013 community survey showed that the poorest quartile of Americans accounted for 39% of bicycle commuting, whereas the wealthiest quartile accounted for 20%. It was the people in the middle who biked the least.

  In the case of the poorest quartile, it is out of necessity; for the wealthiest quartile, it is a choice, often for health, environmental, and overall efficiency reasons. Cycling saves time and money.

  It could also be the case that the wealthy are able to live closer to work in more walkable communities, and so biking becomes a more tenable option. Irrespective of the reason, it casts doubt on the argument that cycling is truly an inferior good.

  I actually think that the more fundamental cause is our built environment. If you design a place for cars, then of course, as people make more money, they’re going to choose the more convenient option and drive more. It’s what you’ve been optimizing for.

  On the other hand, if you design for transit or cycling, then you start to break this relationship with income.

  Consider that in some of the wealthiest arrondissements in Paris, private vehicle commuting is less than 10%; that in Manhattan, the majority of households do not own a car despite having incomes that far exceed the US national average; and that in Copenhagen, high-income earners in the city centre cycle at the exact same rate as low-income earners.

  Wealthy people will always optimize for convenience. In a car-centric city, that means driving. But this doesn’t mean that cycling is an inferior good; it just means we’re building inferior cities.

  2026.10.13

• Fruktkiosk

  I’m a big proponent of urban kiosks for two reasons: 1) they can animate and anchor public life without a big footprint (see Lisbon) and 2) they can offer a low-cost option for small entrepreneurs to start something up. It can be a form of fast, low-friction real estate in an industry where most interventions are anything but fast and low-friction.

  For example, when we were in Paris last month, we were walking back to our hotel one evening after dinner and I naturally thought to myself, “We need crêpes.” So, I checked what was on our route home and I found a little kiosk aptly called Le Kiosque. They had crêpes, and the place was busy with lots of people speaking French.

  

  

  It’s located between the Grand Palais and a park on the Champs-Élysées, so if it were not for this kiosk, there wouldn’t have been anything available to us in this area, and we would have risked returning crêpe-less!

  These kiosks, as we have seen in Lisbon and other places, can also be downright beautiful. Here’s a fruit stand in Stockholm designed by DinellJohansson architects. It’s green, it has an awning and lights, and a nice yellow sign on the top. I’d share a photo here, but I don’t want the photographer to get mad at me, which sometimes happens. So click the link.

  Stockholm, like Toronto, also experiences snow and winter. It shows you that these urban interventions are weather-agnostic. Cities are missing a big opportunity by not allowing and/or encouraging more urban kiosks.

  2026.10.04

• The great Parisian bike boom

  Okay, so this dataset isn’t the most recent, but it’s interesting nonetheless. At the end of 2023, Le Monde reported that Paris had seen a doubling of cycling traffic compared to the year before. For a typical week and based on 128 sensor locations across the city, this is what that increase looked like between October 2022 and 2023:

  

  But the data gets even more interesting when you compare it to vehicular traffic. Here’s vehicular traffic vs. cycling traffic for three principal boulevards in the city, namely l’avenue de Flandre, le boulevard Voltaire and le boulevard Magenta:

  

  These three boulevards were chosen because they all have bi-directional lanes for both cars and bikes, meaning they roughly privilege both forms of mobility equally. And what you are seeing in the above chart is that bike traffic exceeds car traffic by fairly large margins during peak weekday periods.

  This is a mobility accomplishment that benefits both cyclists and drivers.

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  Charts via Le Monde

  2026.10.02

• How efficient core design unlocks small-footprint infill housing

  

  In today’s edition of How Does Europe Build Such Nice Social Housing?, let’s look at this 8-home project in Pantin (outside of Paris) by Atelier Fuso. (Credit to Philip Oldfield for the tweet that alerted me to the project.)

  First, some stats. The project is 6 storeys (R+5 in European nomenclature), so it’s exactly the kind of housing scale that is contemplated on an as-of-right basis along Toronto’s Major Streets. It has 394 m2 of residential area and 34 m2 of ground-floor commercial. So, about 4,607 square feet of total area. Interestingly enough, this is less than the total area of most infill multiplex projects in Toronto. That tells us the site is compact.

  Second, I’d like to draw your attention to Atelier Fuso’s drawings:

  

  

  They combined all of the project’s elevations and plans into single drawings, which is a neat way of showing you the relationship.

  Lastly, let’s look at the project’s costs. The architect’s website shows €1.6M. Whenever I see a cost figure like this, I always assume it’s just the hard costs, and it excludes softs. Whatever the case, €1.6 million to CAD = C$2,544,160. Divided by 4,607 square feet = $552 psf. That feels high for just the hard costs. Are the soft costs less or more than here? I don’t know.

  But once again we are reminded that part of the reason Europe is able to build such nice mid-rise buildings is that they’re able to build on extremely compact sites. And the reason they’re able to build vertically on such compact sites is because they’re able to design building cores that look like the one shown in the above drawings.

  Urban housing like this is comprised of leasable and non-leasable areas. The former generates revenue, and the latter does not. The more developers are able to optimize and reduce the non-leasable areas, such as the core, the more they can build small. That’s a positive thing for cities.

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  Image and plans from Atelier Fuso

  2026.10.01

• The empty icon

  

  This week at Paris Fashion Week, Saint Laurent’s creative director Anthony Vaccarello presented an open-air show in front of the Eiffel Tower that is widely rumoured to be his last show at the fashion house. (Too bad.) The set was opulent cinema. Everything was gilded — in an elegant way, not the gaudy Trump way — including the clothes themselves.

  The overall set was intended to pay homage to the historic ballroom of the Hôtel InterContinental, where Yves Saint Laurent himself used to famously present his collections. And suspended above the runway was an enormous gold chandelier that effectively created an “urban ceiling” for the space. Here’s the full show if this at all interests you.

  But this is not a post about fashion.

  One of the things that stood out to me was the obvious relationship between the glittering Eiffel Tower and the enormous gold chandelier. It’s a good example of how you don’t necessarily need walls to frame an urban space. The hanging chandelier was all that was needed to turn a public plaza into a private salon.

  At the same time, I was struck by how sexy and glamorous Paris always manages to make what is effectively a piece of raw industrial architecture. The Eiffel Tower was immediately popular with the general public at the 1889 Exposition Universelle because of its awe-inspiring stature, but elites derided it for its lack of Parisian taste. So how then did it become so synonymous with French high culture?

  One theory is that it’s because the tower is generally useless.

  In 1964, French theorist Roland Barthes wrote an essay where he argued that the Eiffel Tower became the ultimate global symbol precisely because it means basically nothing in itself, which is why it can be so easily imbued with other symbolic meaning. The Louvre is art. The Arc de Triomphe commemorates a military victory. And Notre-Dame is religion.

  The Eiffel Tower, by contrast, is empty. It’s more or less a hollow skeleton of iron. Barthes called this an “empty signifier.” In other words, it’s a blank canvas — one that has come to symbolize everything from 19th-century industrial progress to 21st-century luxury fashion. Its greatest strength may be its uselessness.

  It can be hard to predict when something might resonate in the way that the Eiffel Tower has. The so-called cultural elites certainly didn’t get it at the time. But cities desperately need these urban symbols, and what they come to mean ultimately depends on the urban context and positioning we choose to create. It’s malleable.

  Take, for instance, the CN Tower in Toronto. There is nothing inherent to its concrete form that prevents it from symbolizing high design or civic sophistication in the way the Eiffel Tower does. The difference is in the curation: at its base, we put an aquarium; Paris brings out gilded Saint Laurent.

  Saint Laurent’s show this week was equal parts marketing for the fashion house and for the city.

  2026.09.30

• Density by necessity

  

  A blog reader sent me this article by Adam Clermont arguing that “Hong Kong was a 15-minute city before the rest of the world knew what to call it.” It’s great. He was right. I did find it interesting, so much so that I subscribed without really looking at what I was subscribing to.

  Here’s an excerpt:

  There are things Hong Kong does not do well. The apartments are small. Mine is small. I have made peace with this in the way that a man makes peace with anything, which is to say, incompletely and with occasional resentment. The rents are obscene. The air quality on bad days could strip paint off a Renault. Nobody is moving here for the spaciousness. But the fifteen-minute city crowd keeps talking about access, about proximity, about the ability to live a full urban life without depending on a car. And on that score, Hong Kong is not a case study. Hong Kong is the answer key that the rest of the world keeps trying to peek at while pretending they came up with it themselves.

  His overarching argument compares Hong Kong to Paris. While Paris was busy talking and planning to be a 15-minute city — by redesigning its streets and removing space for cars — Hong Kong was already busy doing it, by accident and out of necessity.

  While it is certainly true that Paris has undergone a deliberately planned urban transformation over the last decade or two, it’s worth pointing out that we’re talking about two of the most dense cities in the developed world.

  Hong Kong is, of course, on another level of hyper density, but Paris, as we like to talk about on this blog, is also sneakily dense, despite its mid-rise heights.

  The fact that both cities might be described as so-called 15-minute cities places them in a rarified universe, regardless of how deliberately or accidentally they may have ultimately gotten there. Not all cities have the benefit of density, and Paris already had lots of 15-minuteness before it became a buzzword and it started planning for it.

  Adam has a line that “density is not a problem to be solved but a feature to be exploited,” and I would agree with this. However, the broader problem to be solved is how do you create this feature in the first place, if you don’t already have it?

  Modern cities are typically not as dense. It is almost universally true that high urban densities are the result of necessity — physical constraints and/or economic gravity. Hong Kong is an island with no place to go but up. The same is true of Manhattan.

  Paris is not an island, but it hemmed itself into practical equivalents over the centuries through fortified walls. Even today, the boundary of Paris proper is the Boulevard Périphérique, which sits where the city’s last defensive walls were built in the 19th century.

  Dhaka, to throw out another example, is hemmed in by major waterways that flood every year like clockwork. Naturally, the city focused development on higher, safer ground, though there are informal settlements that have found ingenious ways to navigate its precarious waters.

  Density may be a feature to be exploited, but it tends to happen best when there’s no other choice. That’s why Hong Kong is so good at it. The real problem to be solved is getting there when it’s not the only option.

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  Photo by Antonio Sokic on Unsplash

  2026.09.24

• How built form (not more lanes) solves traffic congestion

  

  I snapped this photo while we were in Paris a few weeks ago. We were walking down the street in the 7th and I noticed this mother (I’m presuming) picking up her daughter from the library. The daughter (I’m also presuming) got on the back of the bike and then they took off down the street. She also happened to be wearing a beret, which only added to the whole experience.

  When I posted this photo on Twitter, I got some of the comments I would expect. Some people called the mother (we’re all presuming) irresponsible for not wearing a helmet and for not forcing her passenger to wear one as well. Okay, maybe the child is of the age where one is technically required. But another way to look at it might be that it’s a testament to how safe they feel on the roads of Paris.

  My implied point was that this could have been a minivan ride. The solution to traffic congestion is not optimizing around the car; it is getting people out of them. Paris proper has about 2 million people compared to Toronto’s 3 million. But the footprint of the former is about one-sixth the land area, making it, on average, about 4 times more dense. And yet, Paris feels counterintuitively less congested, and easier to get around.

  The answer, and solution for all cities looking to get people moving, lies in its built form, its rail network, and what you see pictured above.

  2026.09.20

• Travel isn’t always pretty

  

  Sometimes there’s an elevator down to the metro, but more often than not there isn’t. 

  Sometimes there’s AC, but oftentimes there isn’t.

  Sometimes Vivienne is peacefully sleeping in her stroller or carrier, but sometimes she’s having a diaper blowout meltdown and screaming loud enough that passersby start giving concerned looks.

  Traveling can be positively inconvenient at times. We’ve never traveled with so much paraphernalia before. We’ve never had to keep breast milk chilled on ice and think about bottle expiries while navigating busy metro trains with no room for our stroller. 

  But in my mind it’s like exercising. It’s work, especially with kids, but it changes you for the better. We also want Vivienne to grow up to be adaptable, resilient and patient in the face of hot, urine-soaked transit elevators and the like.

  As Anthony Bourdain once said:

  “Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”

  We finished our week in Paris, walking and taking transit everywhere. We didn’t step into a car once. We averaged just over 10k steps a day, which is significantly lower than what we would have done sans baby, but it’s still respectable. 

  Seeing the data on my watch and my surging step count reminded me how sedentary my life has gotten over the last two years while working from home (at least from a steps per day perspective).

  It’s unacceptable and I need to make some life changes when I get back to Toronto. But for right now, it’s time to head south.

  2026.09.07

• Raw meets refined

  I love how Saint Laurent’s creative director, Anthony Vaccarello, has taken a form of brutalism — corduroy-imprinted concrete and generally raw and exposed materials — and elevated it to high fashion. It’s a perfect example of “raw meets refined.” And you’ll find this approach in its stores all around the world, including in Toronto on Bloor Street. For me, it’s also a great microcosm of Paris. This is a city with a deep, rich history, but one that isn’t afraid to disrupt that history and look forward when it makes sense to do so.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  2026.09.06

• We are now in a post-camera world

  

  This is a wall of 20th-century filmmaking equipment captured at the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé. For background, Jérôme Seydoux is a French businessman and movie producer (and the grandfather of French actress Léa Seydoux). Pathé is the second-oldest operating film company in the world. It was founded by the Pathé brothers in the late 19th century. (For architecture fans, the Fondation itself was designed by Renzo Piano. Note: Full architecture tours only happen once a week.)

  

  

  Seeing this taxonomy of equipment and reading about its market adoption reminded me that technologies change, but human impulses tend to remain remarkably static. Film cameras at the beginning of the 20th century were made for industry. They were expensive, bulky, and required teams of people. But as you’d expect, by the middle of the century, these devices became more affordable and suitable for individual use. This gave rise to amateur filmmakers and eventually, you could say, proto-influencers.

  The introduction of smartphones made creation even easier and social media platforms completely changed the game of distribution, turning content creation into an even bigger business. But in the end, the human desire to capture, create, and share remains the same. Today, however, the game is fundamentally changing. AI eliminates the need for handheld devices and physical models and locations. Now you can just prompt. The possibilities are endless.

  As I was walking around the Fondation and reading about how it took a year to cast the right female lead for L’Amant (Jane March was eventually found in the suburbs of London), I couldn’t help but think about how AI completely collapses this process. Today, there’s no need to look; you just need to describe exactly what you want. Invariably, this is going to feel like some kind of loss to purists. Isn’t this artificial?

  We are now in a post-camera world. But what will never change is our desire to tell stories.

  2026.09.05