A recent study by the MIT Senseable City Lab has used cellphone data to map both social and physical segregation within Singapore. To start, they used residential sale prices as a proxy for socioeconomic status. They then used call and text records (presumably it was… Read More
Since 2005, LSE Cities (London School of Economics) has been collecting comparative data on how global cities perform in terms of key spatial, socioeconomic, and environmental indicators. This is their latest data matrix: To be clear, it is not a ranking of cities. It is… Read More
I was talking about this with my friend Evgeny Tchebotarev last night: The transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong (also known as the handover) happened at midnight on July 1, 1997. At the time, Hong Kong had a population of about 6.5 million people and… Read More
The below graphs are taken from a recent (June 2019) report by Knight Frank on “prime” residential pricing across the world. They define “prime” as generally being the top 5% of each market by value. What these graphs show are the spread between the average… Read More
Over the long weekend, and across a couple of flights, I read Perfect City by Joe Berridge. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Each chapter focuses on a different world city, starting with the one and only Toronto. From New York to Singapore and London to Belfast,… Read More
There’s now evidence to suggest that the political crisis in Hong Kong may be having an impact on capital flows. Bloomberg, as well as others, reported today that wealth managers in Asia have been receiving a heightened number of requests to transfer assets out of… Read More
The latest project out of MIT’s Senseable City Lab examines the “sensing power of taxis” in various cities around the world. Looking at traffic data, they determined how many circulating taxis you would need to equip with sensors if you wanted to capture comprehensive street… Read More
Below is a list of the 44 cities found in the 2018 Global Power City Index by the Mori Memorial Foundation’s Institute for Urban Strategies. The index ranks the major cities of the world according to their “magnetism”, which they generally define as a city’s… Read More
In Edward Glaeser’s book, Triumph of the City, he argues that the average temperature in January is the single best variable to predict which U.S. cities have grown the most over the last century. Indeed, from July 2015 to July 2016, 10 of the 15… Read More
During the recent election here in Toronto, mayoral candidate Jennifer Keesmaat raised the idea of this city region, maybe, becoming its own province. It wasn’t the first time this idea has been floated, but it once again didn’t stick. Earlier this week, Richard Florida spoke… Read More
