Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Tag: placemaking

  • How do you make a street less touristy?

    La Rambla is arguably Barcelona’s most famous street. It’s a tree-lined street that runs 1.2 kilometres from the Plaça de Catalunya in the north to Port Vell in the south. Its origin dates back to the 15th century when the original stream was drained and the semblance of a street started to emerge.

    In the centuries that followed, the street came to serve as an important anchor for urban life in Barcelona. It provided a spine of open space within a dense medieval fabric of narrow streets. But alongside the rise of Barcelona as a global tourist destination, the street came to be seen more as a place for tourists than as a place for local urban life.

    This desire to create more “sustainable tourism” is one of the impetuses behind the ~€56 million revitalization project that is currently underway and is expected to be completed in 2027.

    But this raises a fascinating city-building question: How do you actually make a street less, you know, touristy? Tourists like visiting Barcelona and walking on this street, and so aren’t business owners going to just naturally cater to them? And aren’t landlords just going to rent to whoever will pay the highest rents?

    Here’s some of what Barcelona is doing:

    • Transversal flows: This one is fascinating to me. It was found that tourists tend to walk the street longitudinally (up and down), whereas locals tend to walk it transversally. In other words, locals are more likely to cross it coming from one of the surrounding neighbourhoods. The new design now privileges these more local flows.
    • Expanded pedestrian zones: Car traffic is being reduced to one 3.5-metre lane in each direction. This frees up more space for pedestrians, which is expected to help with overcrowding.
    • Room for culture: Dedicated spaces are being created to allow for more cultural programming. This is also part of a broader strategy to elevate the kind of tourism that the city receives.
    • Commercial licensing restrictions: As I understand it, the city is actively working to limit the licenses given out to souvenir shops (and the like) along the street. A meaningful amount of retail is also housed in kiosks and stands within the public right-of-way, where the city has even greater control.
    • Mercat de la Boqueria: One of the main anchors on La Rambla is the publicly owned market. But over the years, the product mix started to skew toward ready-to-eat foods and other to-go products designed for tourists. New restrictions have been put in place, or will be, that cap tourist-oriented offerings at 50%, allowing more space for local shopping needs. Interestingly enough, I have read that the merchants were in favour of this cap because the emphasis on tourist products was driving down margins. You instead want people coming in and grocery shopping for their families.

    These are just some of the initiatives that are being undertaken to rebalance La Rambla and find a more sustainable equilibrium between tourists and locals. It also dovetails with some of the other broader moves that Barcelona has implemented, such as its short-term rental ban and the right of first refusal (ROFR) that it enjoys over certain buildings and homes in order to grow the city’s public housing stock.

    It’ll be interesting to evaluate the effectiveness of these moves once the street is complete. La Rambla has many centuries of history and it has always evolved alongside Barcelona. Today is no different.

    Images from Barcelona City Council

  • Fast fashion is embracing luxury placemaking

    The future of physical retail continues to evolve.

    Recently, we spoke about LVMH’s approach of spending billions on some of the world’s most prime real estate. But the focus on human-centred destination experiences isn’t unique to the luxury segment. Case in point: Zara just opened a new flagship store in Shanghai designed by AIM Architecture (which appropriately stands for Authentic Immersive Matters).

    Located on a major commercial street, the store looks like this and can be generally described as follows:

    • Positioned on a prime open-air main street (versus an enclosed mall).
    • Large amphitheatre-style seating on the ground floor that connects the store to the street and encourages people to linger.
    • Beautiful interiors with not a lot of clothes on display — it has more of a gallery feel.

    It is a clear example of fast fashion adopting luxury placemaking and brand immersion. The point is not to bombard you with clothing options. The point is a human-centred space that gives you an opportunity to experience the Zara brand and then decide if its products might help you better define your sense of self. It’s a media channel, giving you something you can’t get online.

  • Why some of the world’s most valuable real estate is human-centred

    Yesterday we spoke about the growing divide between what I am calling machine-centred and human-centred real estate (feel free to suggest better titles in the comment section below). Machine-centred assets are introverted. By definition, they do not need to engage their environmental context. They are utilitarian spaces optimized for machine efficiency. Human-centred spaces, on the other hand, are extroverted spaces.

    A prime example of this is the approach taken by luxury conglomerate LVMH:

    • Trophy Real Estate: LVMH sees value in prime urban real estate in the world’s top global cities. In 2023, the company spent €2.45 billion on real estate in cities like Paris, London, and New York.
    • Mixed-Use Placemaking: Stores are no longer just stores. They are mixed-use places that blur the lines between retail, culture, food and beverage, hospitality, and whatever else strengthens the core brand.
    • High Street Bias: Between July 2024 and July 2025, JLL found that 59% of new luxury store openings across the US were in open-air, street-level locations. The three most active areas in the US were Madison Avenue, Fifth Avenue, and SoHo.

    A big part of this strategy is naturally about complete control. By owning standalone real estate assets in prime urban locations, brands can decide if they want to clad a 15-storey building in monogrammed Louis Vuitton trunks. But implicit in this desire is a recognition that the human experience is paramount when it comes to luxury. Emotional immersion, physical discovery, and a curated brand story are all part of the offering.

    Physical spaces also provide a platform for signaling identity and status, which is primarily why people buy luxury products in the first place. Machines can optimize for function, but human-centred spaces create the emotion that fuels some of the world’s most valuable real estate.

  • New On the Bench website

    The Project Bench team spent the last several weeks capturing photos and videos of Canada’s largest wine region — the Niagara Benchlands (link is to the official tourism website). And today I’m excited to share that we’ve launched our own new placemaking website called On the Bench.

    The purpose of the site is to help celebrate the region. There’s also some very preliminary information about Project Bench. In our humble opinion, we don’t feel that the Benchlands region receives the attention that it clearly deserves. More people are familiar with Niagara-on-the-Lake and Niagara Falls, especially globally.

    The Bench is a distinct area, with its own unique character and with more — and arguably better — wineries. This v1 website is the start of us working to demonstrate this. So if you’re a local business or community member that would like to collaborate with us on this overall initiative, we’d love to hear from you.

    To join the Bench community and be first to learn more about Project Bench, email subscribe at the bottom of the page, and follow us on Instagram and X.

  • Pink glow

    Here’s a potentially hypothetical question.

    If you were in the market for a 3-bedroom penthouse, and its 1,100 sf wraparound terrace with skyline views just so happened to have an enormous neon-like sign above it, would you consider this to be a feature or a bug?

    The sign does turn off at 11PM, but before then, it creates this awesome/lovely pink glow on the terrace. My sense is that this will be fairly divisive. You’re either going to love it or you’re going to hate it. Which side are you on?

    Let me know in the comment section below.

  • Toronto’s next best photo-op is in the Junction

    Today is a travel day, so I don’t have a whole lot to say. But BlogTO did just publish a story about our Junction placemaking sign: “This intersection is set to become Toronto’s next best photo-op.” I am also happy to report that the sign’s timer has now been installed, which means that, starting today, it will get illuminated each night from sunset to 11PM. (We’re required to shut it off at this time because, you know.)

    So far the response has been overwhelmingly positive. And I truly hope that this installation will become a symbol for the Junction neighborhood. This was our sole purpose for pursuing it. It would also be ironic if something that was so difficult to get approval for ends up being loved by city. Perhaps it’s a lesson that stubbornness can be a good thing when you believe in something.

  • Community living rooms in New York City

    This is a great collection of third places or “community living rooms” in New York City. Simply speaking, a third place is any space where people hang out that isn’t their home and isn’t their place of work. Hence the third moniker. The most typical example is arguably the humble coffee shop. But what is clear from this thread list, is that a third place can take on many different permutations — everything from a bathhouse to an art library with the world’s largest collection of artist’s sketchbooks. What is also clear is that these are the kinds of spaces that really define a city. They create a sense of place, they give us community, and they help us with our sense of self — because they allow us to think things like, “I am the kind of person who hangs out and enjoys independent bookstores in the East Village.”

  • The fast-foodification of cities

    Greg Isenberg recently wrote about what he refers to as the fast-foodification of everything — including cities. His arguments are that (1) we have reached peak sameness (Toronto is largely indistinguishable from, say, Sydney) and (2) the best brands and companies going forward will be local, unique, and community-driven.

    I don’t know how to assess whether we have reached peak sameness, but I do know that, whatever we are experiencing right now, is at a minimum 100 years in the making. The International Style (of architecture), which emerged after WWI, is exactly what the name suggests. The intent was to fashion an approach to architecture that worked anywhere in the world. Location, climate, and context were all irrelevant.

    This approach has been widely criticized for the reasons you might expect and for the reasons that Isenberg outlines in his post. But sameness is not exclusively the result of European architects who wanted to eschew ornament and local flourishes. As the world continues to globalize and become “smaller”, there is an inevitability to this growing and continued sameness. Business wants economies of scale.

    But there is no question that, more than ever, people are craving unique and local experiences and places. And if you can create that in our globalized world, you are going to win.

  • The tricks with masterplanning

    Alex Bozikovic of the Globe and Mail recently made a good point in one of his articles about how challenging it is to properly “placemake” when it comes to large-scale masterplanned projects. This blog post is not at all intended as a commentary on any one project, but I would like to acknowledge that, for a variety of reasons, places do often need time, layers of history, and some patina on them in order to really settle in. When you build big, it can be easy for things to end up feeling sterile.

    It is also true that tastes can change over time (as we have talked about before), though you could argue that this change is driven by the settling in process. Spaces start to get rethought, reconfigured and recast, and that can make them more desirable.

    But it’s not just about time. What else is going on here that makes masterplanning so tricky? Four things immediately come to mind. If you have any others, please share them in the comment section below.

    One, a lot of the old stuff that we love is now illegal and no longer possible. Here is a great example from Paris that I wrote about. But there are countless others. Another example from Toronto might be the corner retail stores that used to dot our residential neighborhoods. In my opinion, these are wonderful additions. They create urban vibrancy. But today they are generally legal non-conforming uses.

    Two, great urban experiences often happen at the micro scale. Things like the perfect patio with a great view of the street and full afternoon sun. Or that intimate side street lined with beautiful homes. These are some of the moments that make cities great. But when you’re masterplanning at the master scale, it is perhaps easier for more of these intimate details to get lost.

    Three, any new community needs to be seeded. Cities and communities are nothing without people. And so what will be the anchors? What will bring people here? How are we going to animate its streets and public spaces? These can be tricky problems to solve and they often take time (and density).

    Four, masterplanning likely equals fewer feedback loops. I recently came across this great line from Chris Dixon: “Composability is to software as compounding interest is to finance.” Composability is the ability to mix and match software components. And the idea here is that open source software allows new software to get built on top of existing stuff (just like interest on top of interest). This way the world never needs to solve a problem twice.

    I’m not sure what the pithy line should be for city building, but cities also compound. We are constantly building on top of the efforts of others, except when we’re largely not, and we’re designing a whole bunch of new stuff all at once, as is typically the case with masterplanned projects. This isn’t inherently wrong, but building a community from scratch will always be more difficult than adding on to one that is already successful.

  • Neon and space

    At this point, it is well known that I am a big fan of neon. It is something that we have obviously worked to incorporate into our Junction House project through things like our rooftop placemaking sign (it’s actually LED), our collaboration with local artist Thrush Holmes (his work incorporates neon), and the neon popup gallery that we hosted last year in collaboration with the Downtown Yonge BIA and Neon Demon Studio. So it was no surprise that a friend of mine sent me an ArchDaily article this morning talking about how neon lighting shapes architecture.

    What I like about the piece, and the pictures it includes, is that it emphasize the spatial qualities and potential of neon. For a lot of us, neon has come to represent brash advertising. Neon is bright. That was and is great for advertising. But that association has been changing. Even cities like Hong Kong, which have for so long been synonymous with neon, are starting to lose that form of advertising. I’m not saying that loss is a good thing. But I do think that we are now seeing neon being used in completely different ways. It has become more creative. It has become architectural.

    Below is an excerpt from the ArchDaily article that speaks to this same idea. But what you really want to do is shoot over and look at all of the photos.

    Yet because neon is so fundamentally associated with signage, which can feel limiting or kitschy for some architects, it is often neglected. Rudi Stern writes further that “Unfortunately for many architects, neon is the last shoddy pink ‘pizza’ sign they have seen, and they summarily reject a medium that offers great promise as a spatial and environmental element.” Thus, despite its historical and commercial associations, neon has the potential to be even more than retro symbols or cosmopolitan phrases. Abstract designs, atmospheric colors, and the kinetic properties of light combined can completely alter a space even without references to a historical aesthetic or explicit messages. In the images of the With.It Home below, BodinChapa Architects have used neon in a non-representational way to create a stunningly memorable James Turrell-esque room that is simultaneously tranquil and radiant. Neon light has the power to completely transform a room even if used in as simple a way as lining the corners of the ceiling, due to the unique properties of light in conversation with the sense of space itself. If architects can move past its commercial associations and investigate its relationship to architectural space, neon can become an even more powerful atmospheric element than it is already.

    Photo by Yuiizaa September on Unsplash