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: swimming

  • Olympic athletes will — probably — be able to swim in the Seine

    Since the modern Olympic Games were revived in 1896, no city has ever hosted swimming events in an urban river. Too poopy. But Paris, as we talked about, hopes to be the first. Starting on July 30, the Seine is scheduled to host the swimming portion of the triathlon competitions.

    Except, it will depend on water quality. Today’s training sessions (scheduled for Sunday, July 28) were cancelled because water tests showed that the Seine is currently below acceptable standards. This is due to heavy rain over the last few days, which I guess overloaded the city’s storm network.

    So what is clear is that — 36 years after then-Mayor Jacques Chirac first promised to clean up the river — the city has only been able to successfully achieve this, sometimes. It’s not an easy task.

    According to Bloomberg, the clean-up efforts have already cost €1.4 billion. This was spent on doing things like constructing a 50,000 m3 holding basin (about the size of 12 Olympic-sized pools) under the Gare D’Austerlitz. This now holds storm overflow during heavy rain events, in lieu of it going into the Seine.

    But this doesn’t provide any guarantees as evidenced by today’s cancelled training sessions. Presumably, it just makes it less likely for overflow stormwater to get dumped into the Seine. So a cynic might ask: Why bother with all of this?

    Well, for one thing, swimming in a river in the middle of a major global city is just plain cool. Look at how the Swiss do it. But another reason could be that you want to create one of the greenest cities on the planet. And if that’s the case, then seeing athletes swimming in the Seine is a pretty powerful image.

    It shows progress.

    Photo by J Shim on Unsplash

  • Der Wickelfisch

    A colleague in the office recently introduced me to a Swiss invention called the Wickelfisch (or baby fish). Below is a video showing you how they work. They’re so neat. So Swiss. And I obviously just ordered one. They’re available via this US company for $12-20, depending on the size.

    The video is of people swimming in the Rhein. Because swimming downstream in rivers — and ending up in a different location — is so popular in Switzerland, the Whickelfisch was invented as a way to keep your clothes and belongings dry. It also acts as a flotation device.

    I’m not planning on floating down the Don River anytime soon, but a Wickelfisch looks like the perfect bag to bring to the beach. Especially if you don’t want to leave your stuff unattended to while you go for a swim.

    Of course, the other neat thing about this video is that it shows you how awesome it is to have clean and swimmable water running through the middle of a city. Most people I know are afraid to swim in Lake Ontario out of fear they might grow a 6th toe.

    That’s too bad.

  • Going swimming (and being transparent)

    I woke up this morning to this view:

    image

    I then went for a swim. The water tends to be on the cooler side in the Georgian Bay, but with the weather we’ve been having it’s pretty perfect right now.

    At this point I’m thinking about a beer and some reading. I have Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty sitting in my car. It’s next in the queue.

    I am telling you all of this simply to be transparent. 

    Recently I had someone caution me that I should be careful about being too public and too open. I won’t get into specifics, but I was told that sometimes it’s better to just fly under the radar.

    I recognize that there have to be limits to transparency, but as a rule of thumb I subscribe to the opposite approach. When possible and when appropriate, I would rather be more, rather than less, transparent. 

    This blog is who I am. It’s indicative of how I think. And it discloses what I’m doing. So I don’t see a lot of downside. What you read is what you get. You’ll know if we should be friends and/or do business together.

    After I wrote about what I’m doing next I had a bunch of emails come in from various people telling me what they’re doing and, in some cases, suggesting that we work together. Some people had development sites that they thought I should take a look at. And some people immediately asked if I was hiring.

    I am grateful for each of those emails. But I also know that they’re an outcome of openness and transparency.

  • The new Regent Park

    Yesterday morning I went for a swim at the new Regent Park Aquatic Centre. I used to swim regularly when I was in grad school in the US, but it fell off when I moved back to Toronto and there wasn’t a convenient place for me to walk to. Having to drive to a gym or to a pool can really cut hurt how often you’re able to go.

    In any case, the pool was fantastic. On the west side of it are glass sliding doors that face the park. And since yesterday was such a beautiful day, they were all open while everyone was swimming lanes. The wooden ceiling also gives the space a nice, warm feel.

    The biggest surprise for me though was the universal change rooms. I had never been in a co-ed change room before – or one that was completely open and visible to the pool (there are small private rooms so you can actually change). For families, it makes a lot of sense. Everyone can go in together and it’s easy to watch your kids in the pool from within the change room.

    After my swim, I rode my bike around Regent Park and tweeted this out:

    What’s happening in Regent Park is incredibly exciting. To me, it feels like a return to the fundamentals of city building. They’ve reconnected the old street grid – which had previously been removed to create the old “towers in a park” scheme – and they’re clearly working towards a proper urban neighborhood with retail at grade and buildings pushed right up against the street.

    A big measure of success, though, will be how animated the streets become and how well the retail does. Because all of that isn’t quite there yet. But we’re on our way. And already I feel like we’re about to forget what the old Regent Park used to be like. Toronto may have lived with that neighborhood for over 60 years, but future generations will barely know it existed.

    Image: Shaigil

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