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: singapore

  • The paneláks of Prague

    At the beginning of this year (which seems like eons ago), I wrote about a CityLab series that Feargus O’Sullivan was doing on the vernacular home designs of a handful of European cities. Cities like London and Berlin.

    Well, after a brief pause, that series is back in the form of a CityLab “storythread.” It’s now called, “The Iconic Home Designs That Define Our Global Cities.” In it, he explores the various floor plans, housing typologies, and tenures that you might find around the world. Everywhere from from Singapore to Reykjavik.

    The most recent article is all about Prague’s communist-era apartments. Apparently people call these paneláks because they were initially built using some sort of collection of prefabricated panels. They were a quick and dirty housing solution for a city and country that were rapidly urbanizing starting in the late 1950s. (See, prefab works.)

    But what I find most interesting about the story of these paneláks is how their reputation seems to have changed and evolved over time. They proved to be a far more adaptable form of housing than you might initially think, going from written off and ready for demolition, in some cases, to then becoming a form of aspirational housing.

    Part of this allegedly had to do with a handover from state ownership to private ownership, which maybe goes to show you that architecture and design, alone, aren’t enough when it comes to housing innovation. You really need to consider the whole picture.

    But regardless, it is clear to me that tastes do change, and housing is no exception. Renewal is an integral part of urban life. And one generation’s trash might be another generation’s treasure.

    Photo by Jakub Matyáš on Unsplash

  • Examining the solar potential of cities

    The MIT Senseable City Lab recently asked: How does urban morphology affect the solar potential of cities? If you assume that transparent photovoltaic cells are on the way and that building facades are soon going to become a place where we generate solar energy, then this is actually a pretty interesting question. Are some built environments naturally better suited than others?

    To answer this question, they looked at the “urban surfaces” of ten cities, including New York, Singapore, Toronto (pictured above), Hong Kong, Paris, as well as others. These surfaces included roofs, facades, and ground planes.

    What they, not surprisingly, discovered is that you need a lot of exposed facades to get the numbers up. And so the cities that come out on top in terms of annual solar irradiation are cities like New York and Singapore. They have a lot of tall buildings, but they also fluctuate in height, giving greater exposure to the facades.

    All of this is potentially relevant because — if building facades become a big deal for solar — it could start to inform how we plan our cities. In fact, I would go so far as to bet that, over the long-term, solar energy will have a greater impact on urban morphologies than this current pandemic.

    Image: MIT Senseable City Lab

  • How temperature impacts the transmission of COVID-19

    The Financial Times published the following chart last night. It shows the cumulative number of COVID-19 cases around the world, across the number of days since the 100th case in that particular country. The message here is that most western countries appear to be on a similar trajectory. (The grey dotted line represents a 33% daily increase.) Whereas in Asia, and in particular Hong Kong and Singapore, they have seemingly managed to slow the spread.

    Now, there are a number of possible explanations for the outliers; everything from stricter quarantine rules to more rigorous testing. There’s also an argument that Hong Kong and Singapore were better prepared as a result of the SARS outbreak in 2002. (More on these explanations, here.) But the other factor at play seems to be climate.

    A recent study (by Jingyuan Wang, Ke Tang, Kai Feng, and Weifeng Lv) has concluded that, like the flu, the transmission of COVID-19 appears to be significantly impacted by both air temperature and relative humidity. In their research, they looked at the reproductive number (R), or the severity of infectiousness, for all Chinese cities with more than 40 cases between January 21 to 23, 2020. (Large-scale government interventions began on January 24, 2020 and would have therefore skewed the numbers.)

    What they found was that for every one degree Celsius increase in temperature and every one degree Celsius increase in relative humidity, the reproductive numbers drop by 0.0383 and 0.0224, respectively. Air temperature, in other words, has more of a positive impact on containing spread than relative humidity — which feels right. That is also apparent when you look at the above charts. Take note of Korea, Iran, and Italy near the top left corner of the temperature chart.

    If you’d like to download a full copy of the research paper, click here.

  • Have three, or more if you can afford it

    At the beginning of this year, Singapore expanded its preschool subsidies and improved its support for assisted reproduction and fertility treatments. The goal: more Singaporean children. According to the World Bank (via the Wall Street Journal), Singapore has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world at about 1.14 children per woman as of 2018. This is down from about 3 in 1970, when the government was actually worried about the opposite problem — too many children.

    Of course, this trend is not unique to Singapore. This is generally the way the winds are blowing in the developed world. Young people are spending more time on education, career, and travel. And they’re delaying marriage (or not getting married). On top of this, family-sized housing has become fairly expensive in most big cities. The fastest solution is to ramp up immigration, but many countries, including Singapore, have concerns about what this does to the “national identity.”

    So there seems to be a preference for throwing money at the problem and promotional material with slogans like this one: “Have three, or more if you can afford it.”

    Chart: WSJ

  • Social and physical segregation in Singapore

    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 all anonymous) from 1.8 million cellphone users in Singapore (2011) to map who interacted with who. Pictured above is one of those mappings.

    What they discovered was evidence of a “rich club effect.” In other words, the richer the person the less likely they were to interact with people outside of their socioeconomic band. The study calls this their communication segregation index.

    A similar phenomenon was noted as people moved around Singapore. (This is the study’s physical segregation index.) People tend to spend time in spaces alongside people with similar socioeconomic attributes. However, they did notice that this tends to wane during the day as people move around the city — presumably for work and other such things.

    I think it would be interesting to get a bit more granular about the findings in order to try and see, among other things, if certain public spaces are more successful than others at encouraging a broader socioeconomic mix. And it’s probably only a matter of time before we start using tools like this to plan our cities. For more on the study, click here.

    Image: MIT Senseable City Lab

  • A comparative analysis of global cities

    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 intended to help us better understand how different cities around the world are performing.

    Depending on how you’re consuming this post, the text may be difficult to read. So here’s what each column represents, moving from left to right:

    • Current population in the administrative city (millions)
    • Current population in the urban agglomeration (millions)
    • Average hourly population growth of urban agglomeration 2015 to 2030 (people per hour)
    • Administrative city area (km2)
    • Average density of built-up administrative area (people/km2)
    • GDP per capita in urban area ($, PPP)
    • Percentage of country’s GDP produced by the metro region
    • Population under 20 (%)
    • Murder rate (homicides per 100,000 inhabitants)
    • Percentage of daily trips made by public transport
    • Percentage of daily trips made by walking & cycling
    • Car ownership rate (per 1,000 inhabitants)
    • CO2 emissions (tonnes per capita)

    If you’d prefer to download a full PDF of the chart, click here.

  • Hong Kong GDP as a % of mainland China GDP

    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 China had a population of about 1.23 billion people. But Hong Kong punched well above its weight class and its GDP as a percentage of mainland China’s GDP was about 18.4% (see above). In other words, Hong Kong represented about 0.53% of the population, but almost 1/5 of China’s economic output. Today, well as of 2018, this number has declined to 2.7% (again, see above). Hong Kong still possesses a number of structural benefits compared to mainland China, but its position as a global financial center is not guaranteed.

    Graph: Investopedia

  • Prime residential pricing in 10 global cities

    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 price of a prime property and the top price achieved in that market.

    The most expensive market is Hong Kong. The average price of a prime property in 2018 was USD 4,251 per square foot (or USD 45,760 per square meter) and the top price achieved was in 2016 at USD 28,154 per square foot (or USD 303,051 per square meter).

    Using the 2018 average, a 350 square foot studio apartment would run nearly USD 1.5 million (or almost CAD 2 million), assuming there are “prime” studios available in the market. Remember, we are talking about the top end of the market.

    If you’d like to download a copy of the full report, you can do that over here.

  • Building the perfect city

    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, Joe hones in on what is working and what is not working.

    No city is perfect.

    I found myself folding the top corner of the page on numerous occasions. I did this every time I came across an interesting takeaway or stat, such as this one here: “Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, recently observed that Europe has 7 per cent of the world’s population, 25 per cent of its GDP, and 50 per cent of its social expenditures.”

    However, the thread that really stood out to me is one about individuals. We all know that great things happen as a result of great teams. But as Joe profiles the various city building initiatives that he has come across throughout his work and travels, a common theme seems to emerge.

    From Jane Jacobs to Lee Kuan Yew, there’s often a determined individual who is set on making something happen, or set on stopping something from happening, as is the case with Jane Jacobs and Toronto’s (proposed) Spadina Expressway.

    This is not meant to discredit the value of teamwork. We all know that is essential. Instead, I think it speaks to the power of individual passion, conviction, and tenacity — all of which are ingredients required to build a perfect, or almost perfect, city. Wonderful things don’t just happen on their own.

    Photo by Fraser Cottrell on Unsplash

  • Hong Kong vs. Singapore

    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 the country — to places like Singapore — and to setup new overseas bank accounts so that they can be ready to transfer, should the situation gets worse.

    In fact, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) even asked the country’s financial institutions not to prey on the wealthy in Hong Kong during this period of uncertainty. They want to avoid the perception that Singapore is trying to capitalize on the situation. Of course, it remains to be seen how much all of this is here-say and how much of it will actually translate into a meaningful transfer of wealth.

    Hong Kong has a significantly larger private wealth base, with about 853 individuals worth more than $100 million. This is more than double the number in Singapore (figure from Credit Suisse). But the current demonstrations have people questioning what will happen to Hong Kong in 2047 when the constitutional article committing Hong Kong to a capitalist way of life is set to expire.

    The flows of capital can be fickle.

    Photo by Florian Wehde on Unsplash