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: tokyo

  • Distributed Japanese capsules

    Japanese Metabolism was a post-war architectural movement that was based around the idea that cities and buildings should be able to grow and transform just like other organisms. There are other elements to the movement, but this was at its core. And perhaps the best example of the Metabolism movement was the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo (pictured above).

    Constructed between 1970 and 1972, the 13-storey tower consisted of two structural elements and 140 self-contained / prefabricated capsules that were hung off the building’s cores.

    The original intent was that these capsules could be removed and replaced over time and that the building could evolve just like any other organism might. But that never really happened and, coming on the end, only about 30 of the 140 capsules were apparently still being lived in, with the others being used for various purposes, such as storage, or not at all.

    And so after a whole lot of debate, the building was disassembled earlier this year, which isn’t quite the same as a straight demolition. The pods were removed and then the core came down.

    But a number of the pods have been salvaged. The architect’s family took 4 pods and created an Airbnb retreat a few hours outside of Tokyo. And a longtime resident in the building decided to quit his job, acquire 23 of the capsules, and dedicate his life to now getting these things into museums and other commercial settings.

    I don’t feel like it’s my place to comment on whether disassembling the tower was a good idea or not. But I do think there’s something poetic about an icon of Metabolism having its capsules removed, restored, and then sprinkled around various places. Wasn’t that always kind of the intent?

    Photo by Roman Davydko on Unsplash

  • Swimming in the Seine

    There is an ongoing debate about the value of cities hosting the Olympic Games. And that’s because this is usually how it works: You, the host, spend a lot of money (Tokyo 2021 was over $25 billion), it feels really good during the games while the world is watching you on TV, and then everyone leaves and you have a big bill to pay.

    As I understand it, this has generally been the case for almost all of the games. One rare exception is Los Angeles in 1984, which supposedly managed to make over $230 million from hosting. In pretty much every other case, the rough value was, at least in theory, things like exposure, ego, and hopefully a bunch of assets that will remain useful to other people once the games are done.

    But as I have argued a few times before, perhaps the most important hard-to-quantify benefit is this: Hosting the Olympics creates an immutable city-building deadline. Because, what could be worse than not being ready when your global guests show up?

    A perfect example of this is what Paris is now trying to do with the Seine ahead of the 2024 Olympics. The goal is to clean up the Seine so that it’s actually safe enough for the athletes to compete in it. That would obviously be really cool for the games, but it would also be a wonderful legacy for Paris.

    Would Paris still be doing this if it weren’t hosting the games? Perhaps. Paris has a habit of doing some obviously good things. But I bet it wouldn’t be moving nearly as quickly.

  • [Book] Emergent Tokyo — Designing the Spontaneous City

    I just ordered a copy of this book. So I haven’t read it yet. But I did just read this Q&A with the authors (and it clearly piqued interested). The central idea is that Tokyo — which is a massive city that is famous for somehow being both massive and exceedingly livable — is the product of something that the authors refer to as emergent urbanism.

    What they mean by this is that Tokyo’s order, functionality, and livability is actually largely the result of emergent bottom-up actions, rather than top-down central planning. This isn’t to say that some top-down planning isn’t required for things like parks and transit. You still need some of that. But this is to say that Tokyo’s approach to urbanism is very different from what you’ll find in cities likes Paris and many others.

    Here’s an example of what I’m talking about (taken from the above Q&A):

    This is going to sound wild to anyone who lives in the US, but for any two-story rowhouse in Tokyo, the owner can by right operate a bar, a restaurant, a boutique, a small workshop on the ground floor — even in the most residential zoned sections of the city. That means you have an incredible supply of potential microspaces. Any elderly homeowner could decide to rent out the bottom floor of their place to some young kid who wants to start a coffee shop, for example. When you look at what we call yokocho alleyways — charming, dingy alleyways that grew out of the black markets post-World War II, which are some of the the most iconic and beloved sections of the city now — it’s all of these tiny little bars and restaurants just crammed into every available space.

    What’s fascinating about all of this is that we’re talking about a kind of self-organizing urbanism. One that goes against everything that traditional city planning stands for. Using the above example, instead of saying that retail should go here, bars should go here, and residences should go only over here, Tokyo is basically saying you can do whatever you’d like.

    If you’d like to open a tiny 4-seater bar that only serves Long Island iced teas to people wearing cosplay outfits on neon pink plastic chairs, you are free to do that. Oh, and by the way, we’re also going to make it a lot easier and cheaper for you to get a liquor license. This might sound chaotic, but it works for Tokyo. And it’s evidence that maybe a lot of our cities would be better off if only we let them be what they want to be.

  • What might Toronto learn from this infill rental project in Tokyo

    This is a lovely little infill rental project in Tokyo by ETHNOS (architect) for Real Partners (developer):

    The building is 4 storeys plus a rooftop terrace. From the plans, it looks like there are 8 units, all of which are two-storey suites.

    The A and B suites are accessible from the ground floor. For the A suites, you enter at grade, and then go down into the first basement level. And for the B suites, you enter at grade and then go up to your second level. One of the entrances (suite B-3) is via an exterior walkway.

    The middle of the ground floor is the lobby entrance and there’s a single elevator that services the second and third floors (it then drops off for the fourth floor). On the second level is a co-working space, and so the upper C suites (these sound fancy) are all accessible from the third floor.

    The fourth floor and fifth floor terraces are all accessible from within the C suites, which means that the only real common area corridors in this building are on the third level. And it looks like they wanted this particular corridor to have a view to the street, because they could have easily reduced it even further to increase the building’s overall efficiency.

    What is also interesting to look at this building’s dimensions. Based on the above section, the floor-to-floor heights are 2500mm, which is low compared to the 2950/3000mm that is typically used here in Toronto for new reinforced concrete builds.

    In terms of the overall building, it is only about 10m deep and it is less than 10m tall if you exclude the stair popups on the rooftop terraces. For context here, our Junction House lot is about 30m deep and the build is about 30m tall, so actually a similar kind of box proportion.

    But let’s scan more of Toronto.

    If you move away from designated “Avenues” (which is where Junction House sits) and look at some of our other major streets (which is something the City of Toronto is in fact doing), you can sometimes/oftentimes find even deeper lots.

    Below is a random area that I quickly panned too on Dufferin Street — these single-family house lots are around 36m deep:

    Now obviously Toronto is not Tokyo and Tokyo is not Toronto. But my point with all of this was to demonstrate just how much space we actually have within our existing boundaries, should we ever feel the need to increase our overall housing supply.

    As I have argued many times before, I think one of the greatest opportunities to quickly do this sits along our majors streets.

    Architectural drawings: ETHNOS

  • Do the best cities have a lot of immigrants?

    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 make, except that I would naturally have to add in some equal parts around architecture, planning, and real estate.

    The responses to my tweet were of course mixed. Some people agreed and some people didn’t. And a few people provided examples of great cities that aren’t particularly known for their openness to new entrants — places like Tokyo. This kind of response is not at all surprising given how divisive this topic has always been throughout history.

    But here’s what I was thinking:

    1/ There are some obvious current case studies. Consider places like Toronto and Miami, where foreign born residents now make up the majority of the population. These are two fast growing and dynamic cities that wouldn’t be anywhere near as interesting without their immigrant populations. Certainly the food wouldn’t be as good.

    2/ Many of the most beautiful cultures in the world are the result of different cultures coming together. Brazil is one example that comes to mind. Throughout history they have been one of the largest recipients of immigrants in the western hemisphere. Sadly, Brazil was also the last country in the western world to abolish slavery.

    3/ Rome and Tokyo were cited (in the comments) as two great cities that frankly aren’t all that diverse. According to Wikipedia, less than 10% of Rome’s population is non-Italian. But Rome, while nice, is provincial these days. And Tokyo, while awesome, has a bit of a demographic problem.

    4/ Even if you think a place doesn’t have a lot of immigrants and maybe isn’t all that diverse, it is still probably the result of diverse cultures coming together at multiple points throughout history. Maybe because of immigration. Or maybe because of something bad like war. Think of the Moors from northern Africa who crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and conquered the Iberian Peninsula.

    5/ An openness to new people could signal and probably does signal an openness to other things. And since we are living in a world that thrives on innovation and new ideas, being open strikes me as being a fairly good and useful characteristic to have.

    6/ Lastly, I come from a family of immigrants. I self-identify as being entirely Canadian. But I had to come from somewhere (multiple places, in fact). And so it strikes me as being odd and entirely selfish to want to block the flow of people now that I’m here and established.

    What are your thoughts?

  • Slime mold may be better than us at transportation planning

    So slime mold, which is a fungus-like single-celled organism, has a tendency to build highly optimized networks across its food sources. In other words, if you scattered a bunch of food on a surface and then dropped in some slime mold, it would naturally create an interconnected web of linked veins across this surface. And this web would be based on the shortest and most efficient paths of travel between the various food sources.

    I am mentioning this odd factoid because ten years ago researchers in Tokyo used this naturally occurring phenomenon for the purposes of trying to improve transportation planning. What they did was map out greater Tokyo. They then placed oat flakes (i.e. food) in spots that correspond to the various cities and urban centers that surround the city. Alongside this, they blocked off the areas where transportation networks do not typically run, such as through mountains and into the water. They then dropped in some slime mold, wet the surface, and watched it grow.

    What they found was that the resulting network was remarkably similar to Tokyo’s actual rail network. The slime mold had found the most efficient routes, eliminated redundancies, and generally discovered the optimal way in which to connect its food sources. And if you think about it, this is basically what transit networks are supposed to do. They should connect clusters of people in the most efficient way possible.

    It has been a decade since this slime mold transportation discovery was first publicized, and it would seem that it hasn’t really caught on as an invaluable planning tool. So I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that we should take out a map of every major city in the world, plot its population centers, drop down some oat flakes, and then let slime mold tell us all the ways in which we are screwing up and over-politicizing our transportation planning efforts.

    Thank you to Angus Knowles for making me aware of this study. Angus writes an occasional newsletter about cities and housing, over here.

    Image: LiveScience

  • Largest cities in the world from 100 to 2015 CE

    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 interesting reminder of just how centralized the world was around the Mediterranean and parts of Asia, and also how nothing is guaranteed. As recent as 1900, cities like Manchester and Philadelphia were among the top 10 largest cities. Today they aren’t even close.

    For the full map collection, click here.

    UPDATE: The data behind these maps has been called into question. Look out for a follow-up post.

  • Which building or structure would you say best symbolizes Toronto?

    I tweeted this out last night:

    blogTO then picked it up and it got quite a bit of engagement.

    Some people, okay a lot of people, used it as an opportunity to be tongue in cheek and respond with things like: cheaply built condos, boarded up Starbuckses, Hooker Harvey’s, Drake’s house in the Bridle Path, the crumbling Gardiner Expressway, and that McDonald’s at the northwest corner of Queen and Spadina (this one is no longer a contender for me now that they’ve gotten rid of their walk-up window).

    Of course, there were also a lot of the usual suspects: The Sky Dome, The Gooderham Building (our miniature Flatiron Building), Casa Loma, The Royal Ontario Museum (specifically the expansion by Studio Libeskind), “New City Hall”, The Royal York Hotel, Honest Ed’s, The St. Lawrence Market, Robarts Library (University of Toronto), and a bunch of others that you might find displayed on the seat screen on your next Air Canada flight.

    But I’d like to unpack the initial question a bit more. Because what does it really mean for something to be a symbol of a city? And is there an important distinction between the symbols that resonate with locals on a personal level and the symbols that get exported around the world as a city’s brand and identity? Indeed, one of the criteria in most global city rankings is a prominent and recognizable skyline. Icons are important.

    Let’s consider an example. I agree entirely with Sean Marshall that “New City Hall” is a deeply symbolic building. Built in the early 1960s after decades of work, New City Hall was the outcome of an international design competition. And it was decidedly modern at a time when Toronto really wasn’t that modern. Montréal was the biggest and most global city in the country and multiculturalism hadn’t yet become a federal mandate. And so New City Hall symbolized our genuine ambitions to becoming something more.

    But does the rest of the world care? If you were to ask somebody my question on the streets of Rio de Janeiro or Tokyo, what would they say? What would they remember? The thing about most tall buildings or other city symbols is that they become abstractions. They turn into pictures on social media — like logos of a company. But maybe that’s all we can reasonably ask of the world. Maybe all that really matters is that a symbol has local significance; it’s then up to us to export it and tell that story to the rest of the world.

  • Construction starting at One Delisle

    Two quick project announcements today.

    One, the sales gallery for One Delisle has now officially closed in preparation for demolition and construction (above is a photo from moving day). None of us expected it to close so quickly after only having launched sales in May, but of course this is a good problem to have. We are now just waiting on our demolition permits to arrive, which we expect will happen sometime between the next few days and several weeks. The official groundbreaking ceremony will happen early in the new year once we have a clean/flat site to work with. Shoring and excavation works after that.

    Two, we just announced a partnership with Technogym for Junction House. Our team was all in the office one day and I asked a question about who makes the best performing and most design-forward gym equipment. Technogym was immediately mentioned and so we reached out. They’ll now be equipping the entire fitness center at Junction House and the plan is to make it a longer-term relationship. If you aren’t familiar with Technogym, you can check them out here. They were the official supplier for the recent Olympic Games in Tokyo, as well as 7 other Olympics, which I suppose is something.

  • A single room with a single book, Tokyo

    This recent post by Benedict Evans talks about the firehose that is the internet. To illustrate this point, he gives the example of unread emails. If you were to look at your phone right now, how many unread emails would it show?

    My work email account is mostly read because reading and responding to emails is one of the ways that I manage to remain gainfully employed. But my personal email currently has 27,230 unread emails. Most of these are newsletters and emails from people wanting to somehow optimize this blog or help me reach 1 trillion followers on Instagram.

    Whatever the purpose, it’s almost impossible to keep up. And since having unread asymmetric emails of little consequence doesn’t bother me in the slightest, I let it go.

    This is one way to deal with the firehose — acceptance. And in Benedict’s post he makes the argument that maybe the push that we are seeing toward the metaverse is exactly that — full acceptance. “When software eats the world, it’s not software anymore.”

    But the opposite way of dealing with information overload is extreme simplification. And there is something so beautiful about minimalism in a world of too much.

    Today I learned about a bookstore in Tokyo called Morioka Shoten (shoten = bookstore). It is located in Ginza (pictured above) and the proposition is “a single room with a single book.” The bookstore consists of, you know, a single room and at any given time there is only one book for sale.

    Each book is available for six days, after which time a new book is made available. In addition to selling one book at a time, the single room shop is used for things like events and exhibitions.

    It’s a radical idea and perhaps it is best suited to Japan. But maybe we all need things that slow us down and focus our attention on only a few things or even a single thing. Maybe we need it to offset the information firehose.

    Image: Morioka Shoten