As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about infill housing and overall urban densities, let’s look at some basic math. The City of Toronto has an estimated population of 3,025,647 (as of June 2023) and a land area of 630 square meters. That means that its… Read More
Toronto has a lot more CCTV cameras than I would have thought. According to this (2022?) data from Comparitech, there is estimated to be about 19,236 cameras installed around the Greater Toronto Area. With a population of around 6.31 million people, this translates into a… Read More
This is one of my Christmas gifts. And it is, of course, exactly the sort of thing that gets me excited. Thank you Bianca. You clearly know me. I am endlessly fascinated by cities. I keep a running list of places I want to explore… Read More
I went out this morning to grab coffee from around the corner and, on my way back home, I ran into two people in the elevator that, from what I could glean, had hit the same button in the elevator and then struck up a… Read More
Despite having somewhere around 4,000 employees and being valued at upwards of $15 billion (2021 figure), CloudKitchens remains an incredibly secretive company. In 2020, it was reported that they had spent over $130 million in the preceding two years on properties in about two dozen… Read More
I tweeted this out last night while watching old reruns of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown series. This was a great show. If I were to give everything up and become a YouTuber, this is the kind of travel and food channel I would want to… Read More
I just discovered this set of maps (via Brian Potter) looking at the largest cities in the world from 100 CE all the way through to today (well 2015 CE). Here are what the two bookends of this map series look like: It is an… Read More
“The city has to be for everybody, not just for the very few.” –Paulo Mendes da Rocha Brazilian architect, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, died this past weekend. He was 92. Though he hadn’t really completed many buildings outside of his home country, his work and… Read More
Who needs to travel when you have, this? This, is a site called Drive & Listen, which allows you to drive around cities — well, watch vides of people driving around cities — while listening to local radio stations. It’s oddly fascinating in an I-spend-hours-on-Google-street-view… Read More
Azeem Azhar’s recent newsletter, titled “Don’t call time on the megacity: cities will learn and adapt,” is a reminder of the tensions that cities face. There are forces of attraction. And there are also forces of repulsion. Cities all around the world continue to create… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 