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… Read More
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… Read More
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… Read More
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… Read More
The Knight Foundation recently published a report looking at what attaches people to the place in which they live. To get this information, they surveyed over 11,000 Americans, some of which live in urbanized areas and some of which just live in metro areas across… Read More
Being a sports fan is like having a bipolar disorder. The highs are high. And the lows are low. But right now — with the Toronto Raptors having clinched their first ever NBA Finals appearance — we are all on a high. Though the job… Read More
Over the past few weeks we’ve been talking about the future of the mall on this blog. It’s a topic that I’m very interested in. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published an article talking about the trend of converting retail/shopping facilities to logistic centers. Here’s… Read More
Resonance Consultancy – they do brands and strategies for places and products – has just released a new report called: World’s Best City Brands – A Global Ranking of Place Equity. With all of these sorts of rankings, it really depends on the research methodology… Read More
I was recently asked: How do you go into a neighborhood, build new, and not erase and/or sterilize what makes that neighborhood interesting in the first place? Gentrification is a controversial topic in city building. Too often I think we ignore what happens when we… Read More
After yesterday’s post on Belval in Luxembourg, I started thinking more about authenticity. I ended the post by talking about some of the industrial elements – blast furnaces and so on – that will be preserved in the neighborhood and argued that those types of… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 