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: the new yorker

  • The Tour Montparnasse just turned 50 and people still hate it

    We have spoken about Paris’ Tour Montparnasse before on the blog, and spoken more broadly about the city’s discomfort with tall buildings. The Tour Montparnasse is the only skyscraper within the city limits of Paris. If you include the Eiffel Tower, it is one of only two really tall things, though this will soon increase to three with the addition of Herzog and de Meuron’s new trapezoidal-shaped tower (now under construction).

    The Tour Montparnasse turned 50 this year and so people are now writing about it again. In my opinion, this recent piece in the New Yorker, by Colin Marshall, is particularly thoughtful. Here are two important points that he makes. The first has to do with the fact that kind of old usually isn’t enough when it comes to architecture. You need buildings to be really old before they get fully appreciated:

    Architectural fashion treasures hundred-and-fifty-year-old structures but derides fifty-year-old ones; hence the works of brutalism that have faced the wrecking ball in recent years. “The destruction of brutalist buildings is more than the destruction of a particular mode of architecture,” Jonathan Meades says, in his television documentary “Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry.” “It is like burning books. It’s a form of censorship of the past, a discomfiting past, by the present. It’s the revenge of a mediocre age on an age of epic grandeur.”

    The second point is maybe an obvious one:

    Aberrations like the Tour Montparnasse only underscore how much Paris remains Haussman’s city, its core frozen in a nineteenth century whose built environment can be restored, and in some cases discreetly renovated, but which—so the severity of the restrictions implies—can never fundamentally be improved upon.

    This is, however, a crucial point. Because it directs to why the Tour Montparnasse is so jarring to many, or perhaps most. It is jarring because it is so obviously different from its surrounding 19th century context. It is clearly not that. But as Marshall points out, one way to address this would be to simply add more 21st century context throughout the city.

    Of course, this is easier said than done. It would require a new mental model — one that accepts that the built form of Paris is not static and can be allowed to evolve. We’re not there yet. But maybe the current renovation of Tour Montparnasse, or the city’s new triangle tower, will give people a fresh set of eyes when it comes to buildings taller than 37 meters.

    Photo by Maeva Hemon on Unsplash

  • How to spend city money

    This is an intriguing idea:

    Many cities around the world practice some form of participatory budgeting, but even among those that do, Cascais [Portugal] is an outlier. It spends prodigiously through the system: in Paris, five per cent of the city’s annual investment budget has been allocated to participatory projects in recent years, but in Cascais, more than fifteen per cent of the budget flows through the program, and the percentage can float higher if voter turnout rises. Cascais is surprising in another way: its mayor, Carlos Carreiras, is both a champion of participatory budgeting and a member of a center-right political party. Participatory budgeting is often considered a tool of the left, but its role in Cascais suggests that it could have a broader appeal; part of the theory behind it is that citizens can be better than officials at knowing how money should be spent.

    Of course, it won’t solve all of our problems:

    Even in the best of circumstances, participatory budgeting faces some structural limitations. Citizens can’t use it to raise the minimum wage, for instance, or to reconfigure affordable-housing policy, or to ban single-use plastics. As it stands, the approach “will never change the destiny of a poor neighborhood,” Giovanni Allegretti, a senior researcher at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, told me. Allegretti noted that participatory budgeting is mainly a competitive process involving limited resources with no long-term strategy; it doesn’t eliminate the need for other policy interventions. But when it functions effectively, participatory budgeting can give direct political power to those who might otherwise have very little of it.

    There is something very compelling about empowering people to come up with new ideas, compete with others for the best ones, and then participate in public decisions. It also strikes me as a possibly efficient way to force: “We only have this much money to spend. What should we spend it on? Spending on this means not spending on that. Time to make a decision.”

    And now it has me wondering: If we asked Toronto whether it wanted to spend over $1 billion to rebuild the Gardiner Expressway east or spend it on other things, what do you think it would say?

    For the rest of the above article, click here.

  • City stereotypes

    The New Yorker recently published a “daily shout” on Instagram called, How You Know You’ve Made It, by City. It is essentially a series on city stereotypes, and it’s pretty funny. Sorry Cleveland. If you can’t see the embed below, click here.

  • What’s in a name?

    Picking a name for someone or something can be a daunting task. I have never had to name a newborn baby (though I’ve witnessed lots of people go through that process). But I am often involved in the naming of new buildings. Sometimes that process involves sitting in a room with a list of possible names in front of you, and having to decide which one is optimal. I don’t love this approach. Nowadays, I find it’s better to have the name naturally emerge early on in the development process, well before there’s an actual brand and identity for the project. You want it to accurately embody the vision for the project, the site’s history and context, and you want to know that it has some durability over time. Or at least, that’s the goal.

    On a related note, the New Yorker recently published an interesting piece on why your name matters. In the middle of the 20th century, research suggested that our chosen names were hugely impactful to life outcomes, and that more typical names were better than unusual ones. The theory was something known as the implicit-egotism effect, which basically states that we like things, including names, that most resemble ourselves. We want familiar. Which to me, immediately suggests that this effect must depend on cultural context. What is considered “typical” obviously changes depending on where you are in the world.

    Our thinking has advanced since then. More recently we have found that it’s not the name itself that creates the better life outcomes. Because if you control for a child’s background and upbringing, any sort of name effect seems to disappear. However, names do in fact signal who we are. They imply certain things. Many of us have heard about the studies that use resumes with different names to test how people respond. Names just aren’t inherently deterministic. You probably aren’t more likely to become a doctor simply because of your name.

    Although, I’m not sure that takes much of the pressure off of picking the right one.

  • The post-Wall techno music of Berlin

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    I’ve written about Berlin many times before on this blog. It’s such a fascinating case study for me because of its history, its urban development patterns, and its famous techno scene.

    Last month, Nick Paumgarten wrote a piece in the New Yorker, called Berlin Nights, where he dives into the city’s club culture and its reputation as the cradle of techno music. 

    But in doing that, he is necessarily forced to talk about the once divided city and its unique “post-Wall” condition. When the Wall came down, the East became – as a result of its under-utilized built form – a breeding ground for the pent up energy and creativity of the West.

    Here is an excerpt that speaks to the importance of those empty spaces and sparsely populated neighborhoods:

    The post-Wall abundance of derelict building and excess housing was decisive. “Empty spaces allowed there to be a club culture,” Robert Henke said. “With no empty space, you get a closed-at-2 a.m., restrictive-alcohol culture.” At first, the reclamation seemed slapdash, improvisational, anarchic, as squatters took over buildings and neighborhoods and set off a period of cultural ferment. But the powers that be had been dreaming up developments for years before the Wall came down, and now—amid a boom in real-estate speculation and investment (everyone spoke of the Swedes)—empty space, and the sense of wildness that comes with it, has become harder to come by. “Flats are getting more expensive,” Hegemann said. “But we still have many free spaces. This is the secret for why Berlin is still alive.”

    And here is the story of one such building:

    Some empty spaces have completed their life cycles. One afternoon, I visited the old Reichsbahnbunker, a five-story fortress of reinforced concrete built by the Nazis in 1942 as an air-raid shelter. The Soviets turned it into a jail for P.O.W.s. Then it was used to store bananas and other tropical fruit. It was abandoned. In the nineties, it became an infamous techno night club, the Bunker. No ventilation, no fire exits. The government eventually shut it down. In 2003, an advertising executive and his wife bought the building and converted it into a museum to house their collection of contemporary art. They also built a glass-and-steel penthouse on the roof, to house themselves. Now the collection is open to the public, by appointment only. I joined a tour one afternoon. The guide, a young art student with a sweet monotone, took us into a cell-like space featuring giant manipulated photographs of the night sky, by Thomas Ruff, and explained that it had been the original dark room of Berlin. “It was very extreme,” she said. “It was hot, damp, loud, and dark. It was said to be the hardest club in the world. I’m sure you can imagine the things.” She gave a coy smile.

    If you’re interested in cities and/or electronic music, the essay is well worth a read.

  • Why can’t cities reach equilibrium?

    The October issue of The New Yorker has an interesting piece called: Naked Cities – The death and life of urban America.

    I find the article ends up rambling a bit, but I like the idea presented right at the beginning. The idea that cities can never really find equilibrium. They’re either dying, or victims of their own success.

    Here’s that paragraph:

    Cities can’t win. When they do well, people resent them as citadels of inequality; when they do badly, they are cesspools of hopelessness. In the seventies and eighties, the seemingly permanent urban crisis became the verdict that American civilization had passed on itself. Forty years later, cities mostly thrive, crime has been in vertiginous decline, the young cluster together in old neighborhoods, drinking more espresso per capita in Seattle than in Naples, while in San Francisco the demand for inner-city housing is so keen that one-bedroom apartments become scenes of civic conflict—and so big cities turn into hateful centers of self-absorbed privilege. We oscillate between “Taxi Driver” and “The Bonfire of the Vanities” without arriving at a stable picture of something in between.

    I like this because there’s truth to it. But at the end of day, this is just one of the many challenges facing great city building. 

    To solve the problem of affordable housing you could just be a city in decline. But that’s not much fun. So the better option, however difficult it may be, is to figure out how to manage the negative externalities associated with winning.