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: urbanism

  • Cities grow — or should grow — like forests

    One of the themes that we like to talk about on this blog is that cities are chaotic living organisms. We often like to fool ourselves into thinking that everything can be neatly organized and that we can plan for all of the possible outcomes, but we know this is impossible.

    Cities will always evolve in ways that we couldn’t predict and, in fact, this is exactly what we want, even if it can feel somewhat uncomfortable. We don’t want to suppress potentially positive outcomes unnecessarily; we want the potential of cities, and their residents, to be unencumbered to the greatest extent possible.

    Some of the common names for this are bottom-up planning or organic urbanism. And at its core, it is an acknowledgement that the master planners and builders at the top do not have all the answers, and never will. The only way to arrive at optimal outcomes is to instead allow individuals, small entrepreneurs, and local actors to create, innovate, and scratch their own itches.

    I was reminded of all of this when I came across this tweet by David Miet over the weekend, arguing that cities grow — or should grow — like forests. David is co-founder and CEO of an organic urbanism group out of France called Villes Vivantes.

    They work with individual property owners and local municipalities to unlock gentle, incremental housing supply, whether that be accessory dwellings or the conversion of under-used sites and buildings.

    This is not a scale that big developers generally care about, but I would encourage you to check them out, because it is a scale of housing that is good for cities. Bottom-up planning and intervention is a key ingredient in good city building.

  • London pedestrianized Oxford Street

    London did it: they pedestrianized Oxford Street. The section between Orchard Street and Great Portland Street is now closed to all traffic, including buses, cars, taxis, bikes, and scooters. And already, it looks like this. (For reference, here’s the post I wrote at the beginning of the year when London first approved the plans.)

    Pedestrianization is a much-debated topic in urbanist circles. Toronto has, for instance, very few pedestrian-only streets and has debated pedestrianizing Kensington Market for as long as I can remember. But with London and Oxford, the street was widely acknowledged to be in decline and that created the political consensus to do something.

    I can’t wait to see the data once it becomes available, but even before then, here is my prediction.

    Pedestrianizing Oxford will prove to be an economic and urban success for the city. Other cities will then look to London and say “See, we can do that too!” But the critics will respond with “Yeah, but we’re not Oxford Street in London. We simply don’t have the infrastructure. Where will people park? The businesses will suffer!”

    And they will be right, though not for the reasons they think: Not every city is willing to be bold.

  • Toronto’s grand bargain gave us nodes instead of neighbourhoods

    Stephen Velasco maintains a wonderful set of models for Toronto showing existing, under-construction, and proposed/approved developments. Here’s his website and here’s an aerial he recently shared showing a large section of the city overlaid with subway and LRT stations.

    What is abundantly clear from this visualization is the “grand bargain” that has guided development in Toronto for over two decades: we won’t touch most of the low-rise residential land in the city, and instead we will create high-rise pockets next to transit.

    This was the path of least political resistance, and while building on top of and next to transit is obviously sound, the extreme density cliff we encouraged created several urban economic and city-building distortions.

    Land became artificially scarce, even though there’s lots of room within the boundaries of Toronto. And high density became our only option, eliminating many other housing typologies for Torontonians. But perhaps most importantly, it created an urban fabric of dense nodes that in many cases aren’t actually urban.

    What this means is that most of the city remains unwalkable, without urban amenities, and clogged with car traffic. The way to better use our existing transit infrastructure, create more amenity-rich communities, and reduce Toronto’s dependency on the car is to flank these isolated tower clusters with more evenly distributed density.

    Towers on top of stations are, of course, good, but there then needs to be a gradient of 4-12 storey buildings across the surrounding avenues, major streets, and interior residential streets.

    The good news is that we’re moving in this direction. It’s just going to take time for us to firmly strike a new grand bargain. But in my view, this city-building approach is going to guide the next two decades of development in Toronto.

    Aerial visualization by Stephen Velasco

  • Not every neighbourhood wants to be urban

    Many cities today treat local retail the way medieval towns treated tanneries: as an offensive nuisance that must be segregated from where people live. This has led us to our current debate over whether small-scale retail should be allowed deep inside residential neighbourhoods. It’s allowed, sometimes.

    The detractors like to get people excited by suggesting that this will lead to all-night raves, multinational chains, or streets being overrun with cars. But of course, that is not what we’re talking about.

    There are lots of case studies that we can point to. Japan, for instance, has a national zoning code that permits small-scale shops, home offices, and cafes in even its lowest-density, residential-only zone. From there, all subsequent zones work cumulatively, meaning more intensive zones generally inherit all previous uses. The result is a land-use approach that is default mixed-use.

    Of course, there are also lots of examples that we can point to here in Toronto, and that’s because corner stores used to be a part of our daily life. But these remnant examples are generally found in the oldest, and most urban, parts of the city, and rejected in the inner suburbs.

    It is no surprise that Toronto is once again divided on this issue and across its typical built-form lines. This division runs deep, and it will almost certainly resurface when Torontonians head to the polls this Monday.

    At the end of the day, corner stores and local retail are an inherently urban sensibility. It is about not having to get into a car to grab a coffee or a soft washed-rind French cheese from Haute-Savoie. But we know that not all communities want to be urban.

    One resident’s feature is another’s bug.

  • Why Waymo’s arrival in Toronto is our chance to price the roads

    Today, Waymo announced that it has started training its vehicles on the streets of Toronto, with the goal of welcoming riders in 2028. This is exciting. I wish the timeline were shorter, but whatever, I’ll take it.

    “Expanding into Canada marks an important milestone in Waymo’s global journey,” said Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana. “Toronto is one of the world’s great cities — innovative, diverse, and forward-looking. We’re proud to bring the Waymo Driver to Canada’s largest city and to partner with the vibrant business, arts and cultural communities that share our commitment to safer streets and more accessible mobility.”

    But I also agree with Matt Spoke of Toronto Standard that this is a perfect opportunity to start talking seriously about congestion pricing. As we all know, road pricing is generally unpopular until it’s implemented and people see the benefits. To date, this obstacle has blocked Toronto from taking serious action around traffic congestion.

    Autonomous vehicles are different. I think it would be politically pretty easy to levy congestion charges strictly on autonomous vehicles. Most people aren’t going to care about “the machines.” And it would be the proactive thing to do.

    Based on the safety data we have on AVs, none of us should be driving cars anymore. This means it’s only a matter of time before AVs become the majority of vehicles on the road. I will bet you that my daughter will never drive her own car (unless she becomes an old-school motorcar enthusiast).

    Implement road pricing for AVs today and nobody will notice. But in 10 years, it will be viewed as positively clairvoyant.

  • The viral housing photo that triggered provincial overreach in Alberta

    Here’s a polarizing photo of the backyard of a house in Edmonton flanked by two multiplexes under construction. For additional drama, it was also taken with an ultra-wide lens, which is evident from the stretched-out walkway in the foreground. But even still, it is indeed a photo of a single-family house between two larger multi-unit buildings.

    When I first saw the photo, via this tweet, I actually read it all wrong. What I thought was the concern — underutilized residential land — was not the concern. The concern was too much housing. More specifically, too much infill rental housing.

    So much so that one of the next tweets I saw was the premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, using this exact photo to say that the province would be coming over top of Edmonton to overturn its multiplex permissions and return the city to the “density and height rules that were in place before 2024” along with “common-sense minimum parking requirements.”

    This, in my opinion, is provincial overreach (which sadly happens here in Toronto too) and a shortsighted approach to city-building. Now, I don’t know the address of this house (I tried to find it), nor would I be familiar with the area, but I do know that cities all across North America are taking an important and critical look at their low-rise neighbourhoods.

    We know that many of them are unaffordable, car-oriented, and actively losing population. To turn back the clock and return to parking minimums is to restrict housing supply and signal that Edmonton is not yet prepared to be an urban leader in the 21st century. Alberta likes to tout its “free-market” brand, but of course this move is anything but.

  • The great Parisian bike boom

    Okay, so this dataset isn’t the most recent, but it’s interesting nonetheless. At the end of 2023, Le Monde reported that Paris had seen a doubling of cycling traffic compared to the year before. For a typical week and based on 128 sensor locations across the city, this is what that increase looked like between October 2022 and 2023:

    But the data gets even more interesting when you compare it to vehicular traffic. Here’s vehicular traffic vs. cycling traffic for three principal boulevards in the city, namely l’avenue de Flandre, le boulevard Voltaire and le boulevard Magenta:

    These three boulevards were chosen because they all have bi-directional lanes for both cars and bikes, meaning they roughly privilege both forms of mobility equally. And what you are seeing in the above chart is that bike traffic exceeds car traffic by fairly large margins during peak weekday periods.

    This is a mobility accomplishment that benefits both cyclists and drivers.

    Charts via Le Monde

  • Density by necessity

    A blog reader sent me this article by Adam Clermont arguing that “Hong Kong was a 15-minute city before the rest of the world knew what to call it.” It’s great. He was right. I did find it interesting, so much so that I subscribed without really looking at what I was subscribing to.

    Here’s an excerpt:

    There are things Hong Kong does not do well. The apartments are small. Mine is small. I have made peace with this in the way that a man makes peace with anything, which is to say, incompletely and with occasional resentment. The rents are obscene. The air quality on bad days could strip paint off a Renault. Nobody is moving here for the spaciousness. But the fifteen-minute city crowd keeps talking about access, about proximity, about the ability to live a full urban life without depending on a car. And on that score, Hong Kong is not a case study. Hong Kong is the answer key that the rest of the world keeps trying to peek at while pretending they came up with it themselves.

    His overarching argument compares Hong Kong to Paris. While Paris was busy talking and planning to be a 15-minute city — by redesigning its streets and removing space for cars — Hong Kong was already busy doing it, by accident and out of necessity.

    While it is certainly true that Paris has undergone a deliberately planned urban transformation over the last decade or two, it’s worth pointing out that we’re talking about two of the most dense cities in the developed world.

    Hong Kong is, of course, on another level of hyper density, but Paris, as we like to talk about on this blog, is also sneakily dense, despite its mid-rise heights.

    The fact that both cities might be described as so-called 15-minute cities places them in a rarified universe, regardless of how deliberately or accidentally they may have ultimately gotten there. Not all cities have the benefit of density, and Paris already had lots of 15-minuteness before it became a buzzword and it started planning for it.

    Adam has a line that “density is not a problem to be solved but a feature to be exploited,” and I would agree with this. However, the broader problem to be solved is how do you create this feature in the first place, if you don’t already have it?

    Modern cities are typically not as dense. It is almost universally true that high urban densities are the result of necessity — physical constraints and/or economic gravity. Hong Kong is an island with no place to go but up. The same is true of Manhattan.

    Paris is not an island, but it hemmed itself into practical equivalents over the centuries through fortified walls. Even today, the boundary of Paris proper is the Boulevard Périphérique, which sits where the city’s last defensive walls were built in the 19th century.

    Dhaka, to throw out another example, is hemmed in by major waterways that flood every year like clockwork. Naturally, the city focused development on higher, safer ground, though there are informal settlements that have found ingenious ways to navigate its precarious waters.

    Density may be a feature to be exploited, but it tends to happen best when there’s no other choice. That’s why Hong Kong is so good at it. The real problem to be solved is getting there when it’s not the only option.

    Photo by Antonio Sokic on Unsplash

  • How built form (not more lanes) solves traffic congestion

    I snapped this photo while we were in Paris a few weeks ago. We were walking down the street in the 7th and I noticed this mother (I’m presuming) picking up her daughter from the library. The daughter (I’m also presuming) got on the back of the bike and then they took off down the street. She also happened to be wearing a beret, which only added to the whole experience.

    When I posted this photo on Twitter, I got some of the comments I would expect. Some people called the mother (we’re all presuming) irresponsible for not wearing a helmet and for not forcing her passenger to wear one as well. Okay, maybe the child is of the age where one is technically required. But another way to look at it might be that it’s a testament to how safe they feel on the roads of Paris.

    My implied point was that this could have been a minivan ride. The solution to traffic congestion is not optimizing around the car; it is getting people out of them. Paris proper has about 2 million people compared to Toronto’s 3 million. But the footprint of the former is about one-sixth the land area, making it, on average, about 4 times more dense. And yet, Paris feels counterintuitively less congested, and easier to get around.

    The answer, and solution for all cities looking to get people moving, lies in its built form, its rail network, and what you see pictured above.

  • The Venice syndrome — or is it?

    We were walking through Old Nice today and we stumbled on a fresh pasta shop called Clé aux Pâtes (highly recommend). I went in to grab supplies for dinner and then started chatting with the friendly lady behind the counter. She explained to me that all of the pasta is made on-site every morning and that the shop has been there since 1932.

    I then made a comment that their customer base must have changed considerably over the decades. Underlying this statement was an assumption that it is now mostly tourists. But she corrected me and said that lots of locals also shop there. I then turned to look at the line behind me and, for what it’s worth, there was French being spoken.

    But I left thinking about the composition of the neighbourhood. Old Nice is made up of several statistical areas. The oldest and densest is called Vieux Nice-Sainte-Réparate. It’s just under 50,000 square metres, which is about the size of the Distillery District in Toronto. As of 2022, it had a total full-time population of 1,187 people. This works out to a respectable figure of 23,912 people per km2.

    However, the area’s population has been in decline since at least 2007, when it had 1,798 people. The obvious culprit is more hotels, short-term rentals, and secondary homes. I had Gemini review the area’s census data, and it estimates that only somewhere between 35-45% of the area’s housing serves as primary residences.

    This data would suggest that Old Nice is another example of what has been called the “Venice syndrome.” Tourism is now the trade, leading to a decline in population. But it’s interesting to think about the extent to which the area may also serve as an open-air mall for locals. That’s a more resilient place to be. Of course, all I have to go on is a pasta anecdote.