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: vertical city

  • [Video] Saudi Arabia’s new 170-km-long vertical city

    I am usually known for my optimism for the future. But I am having a difficult time deciphering whether the new 170-km-long vertical city that Saudia Arabia just revealed (see above video) is a legitimate development proposal, a new metaverse project, or a dystopian spoof about how we’re all going to live in beehives once autonomous everything and artificial intelligence takes over.

    The Line, as it is cleverly called, is intended to form the basis for a new and allegedly livable city called Neom. This is a city that is intended to lead Saudi Arabia into some sort of glorious post-oil future. And the plan is for it to eventually house some 9 million people; all within a 170-km-long mirrored strip that is 200m wide, 500m tall, and accessible end-to-end in 20 minutes via high-speed rail.

    I would love to see the development pro forma for this one (if it even exists), but I certainly don’t need it to determine that this thing is never going to be built — certainly not in its current incarnation.

  • The vertical city

    We often talk about agglomeration economies in terms of their horizontal clustering within cities. But a new paper in the Journal of Urban Economics – summarized here by Richard Florida – has looked at the other dimension: the vertical clustering of economic activity within tall buildings. 

    Here is an excerpt from Florida’s piece in CityLab:

    Economic activity is also sorted vertically, with higher-profile and more profitable firms occupying higher building floors. Law offices are disproportionately represented on the highest floors, taking up more than a third of floor space above the 40th floor, compared to 12 percent of floor space between the second and 40th floors. Finance, insurance, and real estate take up roughly 20 percent of floor space above the 40th floor, compared to 23 percent between the second and 40th floors. Business services, engineering, and miscellaneous other industries are also more likely to take up more space below the 40th floor.

    The other takeaway is that there appears to be a greater rent premium attached to higher floors (vertical movement) than for being located closer to the central business district (horizontal movement). This surprised me. But I also don’t have access to the full paper. Is the dataset just US cities?

    Nevertheless, the idea of a vertical city interests me a lot. And I agree with the authors of the report that, for perhaps obvious reasons, it is far less studied compared to horizontal development patterns.

  • The longest outdoor escalator system in the world

    This morning I took the mid-level escalators down to Hong Kong station so that I could catch the express train to the airport. At over 800m, it is supposedly the longest outdoor covered escalator system in the world.

    If you’ve ever walked the streets of Hong Kong you’ll know that the ground plane can be inhospitable at times. There’s limited space, but no shortage of steep pitches. I can’t imagine having a physical disability and trying to navigate this city.

    So this system must have been a real innovation when it was constructed in the early 90′s. In total it moves up and down about 135m in elevation. That’s about the equivalent of a 45 storey tower. And I got down from the mid-levels and was on a train to the airport within 15 minutes.

    But because the streets here are so narrow it’s a unidirectional system with one line of escalators. They bring people down to the CBD during the morning rush, but then the direction flips and they bring people up the hill for the remainder of the day — until midnight I believe. Living near these escalators is considered a win.

    Hong Kong Island surely isn’t the easiest of environments in which to build and operate one of the world’s most important global cities. There’s relatively little developable flatland. But they more than made it work by being creative and by building up. Hong Kong is not just a tall city, but a truly vertical city.

    Too bad my efficient morning commute was followed by a cancelled United flight. Tomorrow is not going to be a fun day travel.