Toronto’s Director of Urban Design, Harold Madi, recently did a 20 tweet series on boulevards. And since today is Gardiner East day, it seems appropriate to share it with you all. Thanks to Shawn Micallef for using Storify to put it all together neatly. If you can’t see all the tweets below, click here.
Tag: paris
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The world’s top 10 cities for prime property
This morning I read through a real estate report called Luxury Defined. It’s a look at the global luxury real estate market across “the world’s top 10 cities for prime property” and about 70 regional and resort destinations.
It’s interesting to look at the trends and see how high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) are choosing to allocate their funds in residential real estate. Here are some of the charts and diagrams that caught my eye as I was going through it (you may need to zoom your browser in):
If you’d like to download the full report, click here. It’s free, but you’ll need to enter your name and email address.
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The unfinished city
Earlier this week I attended a talk at the University of Toronto called Data Innovation and City Governance. It was by Mark Kleinman who is from London, but is now a Visiting Scholar at the Munk School of Global Affairs.
The topics covered would have been familiar to anyone who is a regular reader of this blog (the power of open data, the knowledge economy, etc…), so I’m not going to repeat it all here. But I did want to touch on one of his impressions of Toronto, which is that this is a city that is “never finished.”
What does that mean?
The opposite of a city that is never finished would be a city like Paris that feels a bit like a monument that is now done and shouldn’t be touched anymore. It’s a city that almost feels too precious to intervene in. This is obviously not the case for all of Paris, but I think you get the point.
Toronto, on the other hand, is a city that is constantly building, changing, and renewing itself. There are often layers upon layers of new interventions being applied, which gives you the impression that the city will never be done. It’s constantly in flux.
Some of you may not appreciate this kind of “messy” urbanism, but I think it gives cities a kind of entrepreneurial resiliency (resiliency is a hot topic right now in urbanist circles). Cities are an ecological system. And the most resilient ecological systems in the world are the ones that are able to adapt to constant change.
So in my view I look at this as a feature, not a bug. The only constant is change.
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Real Scenes Documentary — a look at New York’s electronic music scene [Video]
I just stumbled upon a fascinating documentary series called Real Scenes. Each film explores “the musical, cultural and creative climate” within a particular city.
Below is Real Scenes: New York (click here if you can’t see it below). It’s an inside look at the underground music scene that has developed in Brooklyn, but that is at the same time being threatened by development and rising rents. Disclaimer: There’s a lot of f-bombs and a lot of hating on gentrification.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDtf0uIUPuE?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
I’ve only watched the New York video from this series, but I plan to watch each and every one of them. The other cities are Tokyo, Johannesburg, Paris, Berlin, Detroit, and Bristol.
What’s fascinating about these short documentaries is that they give you a glimpse into a particular undertone within each city – one that would otherwise be hard to get if you weren’t living there and engrossed in the scene.
It’s also interesting to see how some people view change within cities.
To some, transforming a neighborhood from one that looks like a “bomb went off” to something more pristine, is a good thing. But to others, it’s the worst possible outcome. It all depends on your frame of reference.
Now, how do I get them to make a Real Scenes: Toronto? 🙂
Image: Resident Advisor
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Where Uber operates and where it’s banned
Earlier this month, Bloomberg published this map showing where Uber operates and where it’s been banned (or is being challenged). You can click on the map for a larger version.
Uber operates in about 250 cities across the world. But it’s being challenged in a lot of them, including Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Toronto, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Berlin, as well as others.
I don’t want to dismiss any of the safety concerns that have arisen lately, because those are very serious and they need to be addressed. Life safety is paramount. But I continue to believe that banning a service that many people clearly want to use isn’t the right solution.
On top of that, I think it could lull many of the local taxi communities into a false sense of security about the future. Uber is moving incredibly quickly. UberX launched in Toronto in September of this year. And UberPOOL – their new carpool service – is likely next.
With these releases, Uber is working towards a specific vision for the future: Their goal is to eliminate the need for private vehicle ownership. Should they be successful, this will not only impact taxis, but also car manufacturers and urban mobility in its entirety.
So as difficult as it might seem right now, I think urban leaders would be better served trying to figure out how to harness these innovations. Cities have been trying for decades to get people out of their cars. Uber wants to do the same.
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Being exemplary
Yesterday morning I had coffee with a good friend of mine and fellow city geek. We don’t connect nearly as often as I’d like, but when we do we always have great conversations about cities and about Toronto.
One of the things he asked me was whether I was still loving Toronto. And I responded by saying absolutely. We then both agreed that there are a lot of exciting things happening in the city right now.
But I qualified this statement by saying that I wish we were bolder. I wish we took more chances. Because while it’s great that we’re doing things like building more bike lanes and intensifying our growth centers, lots of other cities are doing those things as well.
To be a leading city, you have to be prepared to do things that other cities think are wrong or won’t work and that are truly remarkable. Whether you’re city, company, or an individual, following trends is never enough.
Take for example the dramatic anti-pollution measures that were recently announced by Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo:
By 2020, no diesel fuel at all will be burnt within Paris. Regular cars will be banned outright from its more polluted roads, which will be open solely to electric and hybrid vehicles. Meanwhile, the city’s most central districts (the first four arrondissements) will be barred to all but residents’ vehicles, deliveries, and emergency services, transforming Paris’ Right Bank core into a semi-pedestrian zone. As a counterbalance, the number of cycle lanes will be doubled by 2020, while the city will fund an extended electric bikeshare scheme to encourage more people to get on two wheels. “I want us to be exemplary” Mayor Hidalgo has declared.
That’s how you win hearts: by being exemplary.
As always though, I’m incredibly optimistic about the future. Toronto has a new leader at its helm and I know that there are a lot of passionate people in this city who care deeply about its future. I am certainly one of them.
Image: Not my actual coffee (via Flickr)
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Thoughts on megacities in the developing world
Without a question, we are living in an urban era. More people now live in cities than anywhere else on the planet and I’ve repeatedly argued that cities are our most important economic engine. As a result of these demographic and economic shifts, we’re seeing megacities at a scale the world has never seen before. Below is a list of the top 35 largest urban areas in the world.
The top urban area is Tokyo-Yokohama, with a population of roughly 37.5 million people. That’s almost the same as the state of California and is more than the entire population of Canada, which sits at just over 35 million people. London, which, during the 2nd half of the 19th century, would have been the largest urban area in the world is now the 29th largest.
But at the same time, London arguably remains the most important global city–a title that can only really be rivalled by New York. Which raises an important distinction. One that Aaron Renn clearly identifies in this recent article for New Geography: Just because a city is a megacity, doesn’t mean it is or will ever be a global city. In fact, Renn argues that many of the world’s largest megacities will never “turn the corner” and become leaders of the global economy.
For that to happen, he believes that the city needs to belong to a country on the rise:
Moscow was the capital of the Soviet Empire. New York and Los Angeles came of age when America was the rising, and ultimately dominant, economic colossus. It’s the same for Paris and London, two borderline megacities, which rose as imperial capitals.
But how much of this is driven by the country and how much of it can be driven by the city itself, upwards? Could it be the city that ultimately empowers the country to rise? I ask these questions because Renn frames his argument as if “national hyper growth” is the only prerequisite that will allow the struggling and underdeveloped megacities to pull themselves up and into the developed world.
But the problem is that there’s no clear path to prosperous maturity for these megacities. They are so huge, and their problems so immense that they are difficult to even conceptualize, much less do something about. The amount of needed infrastructure provision alone – water, sanitation, drainage, transport, telecom, electricity, parks, schools, etc. – is staggering. And that doesn’t even touch arguably more difficult problems like corruption and good governance. Absent national hyper growth – a la Japan or Korea – of a level that creates a plausible claim to being the world’s rising economic power, or the proceeds of empire, it seems unlikely any of these cities will ever succeed. By contrast, smaller cities have a much more addressable problem space.
Now, I don’t disagree that the problems in these cities seem almost insurmountable. I’ve been to places like Dhaka, Bangladesh. I’ve witnessed first hand the challenges facing megacities in the developing world.
But to assume that these cities are lost causes without the nation itself lifting it up, seems almost self defeating and overly pessimistic. It also strikes me as a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. Because if cities are our economic engine, then “national hyper growth” seems difficult without also getting our cities right.
What comes first?
Yes, there are and will be reforms that need to happen at the federal level but, at the same time, I think there’s a lot that can and should happen from the ground up. Perhaps that’s part of the reason Singapore has been so successful. As a city-state, its reforms were both top down and bottom up.
I want to believe that with the right reforms, policies, and leadership, any country can create a framework in which its cities are able to thrive. And that it’s not just the result of imperial rule or some other circumstance. From good and transparent governance to developed financial markets, there are many things that cities need to truly prosper. But when you get it right, the results can be remarkable.
Chart: Demographia
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Is there an urban planning pendulum?
Take a look at this tweet I came across yesterday:
A different way of thinking, a century apart. pic.twitter.com/GoxUQs0bB4
— Darren Proulx (@dnproulx)//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
On the left is a picture of some crowded and dense city at, I presume, the turn of the 20th century. And on the right is a picture, today, of your generic suburban city with lots of cars, a broad street and auto-oriented signage everywhere.
As the captions say, the city on the left is what modernist architects like Le Corbusier and powerful city builders like Robert Moses were trying to fix. What we ended up with, as a result of these efforts, is the city on the right. Now, today, we–architects, planners and urbanists–are all trying to correct what we see as a huge misstep in the way we designed and built cities.
But is it really an anomalous misstep or is it simply a preferential pendulum that swings back and forth from generation to generation? One generation thinks cities are dirty and evil and that they need to be evacuated. And then the next generation loves them and wants to move back into them, which is what’s happening today.
Dogma–particularly when it comes to cities–takes a long time to percolate through the system. Le Corbusier was espousing his city building ideals of “towers in parks” in the 1920s. That’s when he proposed to demolish 2 square miles of Paris (Plan Voisin) and turn it into what most people today would think looks like a New York public housing project.
But for these new ideas to take hold, young architects, planners and builders first need to become indoctrinated in school or wherever they’re learning the ropes. Then, they need to get out and start practicing and mature to a point where they’re starting to influence and control substantial city building decisions. That’s why, I think, Le Corbusier’s ideas of the 20s really only became widely accepted as planning principles in the post-war years.
Because of this though, I sometimes wonder if I too am just following the natural cycle of changing tastes. When I went to architecture school, we were taught that public transit is more efficient than private cars, density is good for the environment and for economic development, and that Le Corbusier was generally a crappy city builder. And if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that that is generally the view I take here.
But when I ask myself this question, I think of a few things. First, if you look at the urbanization of ancient cities, they were always organized around strong public spaces. The desire for human beings to be able to walk around, conduct business and socialize with each other is not a new phenomenon. And our post-war planning ideals put a strain on that.
Second, take a look at the world and what’s happening. The majority of people now live in cities and we’re continuing to urbanize at a frenetic pace. Shenzhen in China went from a population of just over 300,000 people in 1979 to over 10.5 million people today. That is the pace of urbanization that city builders need to deal with. It’s unprecedented.
And to even begin to make that manageable, I don’t think we can continue to build cities like the ones on the right side of the picture, above. It’s unsustainable both environmentally and from a mere space planning standpoint. There simply isn’t enough room.
So call me a product of the times, but I just don’t see our current planning goals as one side of a swinging pendulum. I see them as a return to what cities have always been about: a place for people to interact, socialize and generate wealth.
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Video: Paris in Motion
If you only watch one video on the internet today, then I suggest you watch this one called Paris in Motion (Part 2). It was created by Paris-based photographer Mayeul Akpovi and it’s a beautiful time-lapse rendition of the City of Light. If you can’t see the video below, click here. Make sure you fullscreen it and turn your speakers on.
//player.vimeo.com/video/50467187
The video really does a great job of capturing the energy of the city. I think cities should consider commissioning videos like this in order to market themselves. If you enjoyed it, I recommend also checking out Part 4 of Paris in Motion.
Thanks to the Urbanophile for sharing this video series. That’s how I found out about it.
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The 2013 Anholt-GfK City Brands Index
When most people think of brands, I suspect that they think of companies, products and services. But what about the brand of your city? As cities continue to compete for talent in the global economy, brand is becoming a hugely important differentiator.
I just stumbled upon the Anholt-GfK City Brands Index and here’s their 2013 ranking:
1. London
2. Sydney
3. Paris
4. New York
5. Rome
6. Washington D.C.
7. Los Angeles
8. Toronto
9. Vienna
10. MelbourneThe study looks at 6 key dimensions: presence, place, pre-requisites, people, pulse and potential.
What do you think of the above list?
Here’s a bit more information on how the index was prepared:
“The Anholt-GfK Roper City Brands Index measures the image of 50 cities based on more than 50 questions related to perceptions of their Presence, Place, Pre-requisite, People, Pulse and Potential. For the 2013 study, a total of 5,144 interviews were conducted in Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Russia, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States. Adults age 18 or over who are online are interviewed in each country. Using the most up-to-date online population parameters, the achieved sample in each country has been weighted to reflect key demographic characteristics including age, gender, and education of the online population in that country. Fieldwork was conducted from May 8th to May 23rd, 2013.”
