Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1014

Last night I casually asked the Twittersphere what the most important condo amenity is, besides a gym. 

That tweet got quite a few responses – everything from rock climbing to a proper facility for realtor lock boxes.

Given the response, I thought it would be worthwhile to be a bit more rigorous in this analysis. So I have created an online survey that you can very quickly fill out by clicking here . 

Here’s how this is going to work:

- You have to enter your email address. Sorry, some friction. I figured that would make the data a bit more reliable. Don’t worry your email is safe.

- You can select a maximum of 3 amenities. One of them can be “Other”, in which case you would then enter in an amenity not already found on the list.

- The order of the amenities in the survey is being randomized so as to avoid any possible it’s-near-the-top-and-I’m-too-lazy-to-scroll bias.

- You’ll be able to see the results of the survey after you’ve responded. I’ll also post the results to this blog so that it’s public and people learn things. Individual emails will, of course, never be published.

Developers should be building what people actually want and will use. Now is your chance to tell us what that is. Click here for the survey.

On March 31, RIBA North (Royal Institute of British Architects North) in Liverpool will be opening the doors on a new exhibition that explores 25 years of award winning work by the developer and self-described “regenerator”, Urban Splash . I love the name of the exhibition. It’s called: “ It Will Never Work .”

Here is a short description of the exhibition:

Urban Splash profess to have started without a plan, purposefully ignoring advice and routinely rejecting accepted development processes. At every step ‘it will never work’ has been a call to action rather than a discouragement.

The company’s maverick presence on the development landscape of the North has changed the way we live, work and play in our cities, and their continued success as 'established innovators’ is helping to shape urban futures.

If you aren’t familiar with the work of Urban Splash, I would encourage you to check them out . When I was first starting out in development and scouring the world for developers that actually cared about design and cities, these guys were on my shortlist.

So I have been a longtime follower and I have developer friends here in Toronto who I know also admire their work. Sadly, I have no plans to be in Liverpool anytime soon. But maybe some of you do.

Taylor Pearson recently compared crypto networks to cities and argued that the best crypto networks, much like the best cities, are formed from the bottom up. 

The example he gives is that of Paris (bottom-up) vs. Brasilia (top-down). Paris is the hugely successful city and Brasilia is the failure of high-modernism.

I appreciate the argument he’s making and I do agree with him on the potential of decentralization, but I couldn’t help but dig into his city example a bit further.

The Paris we all know and love today is the result of an enormous centrally planned urban renewal exercise. Baron Haussmann carved, among many other things, long straight boulevards through Paris’ medieval fabric in order to modernize and rationalize the city.

What makes this top-down exercise different from that of Brasilia’s? Is it simply that Haussmann was constrained by Paris’ existing and decidedly urban fabric?

Because then we could turn our attention to New York City’s gridiron plan of 1811 , which laid out – before the island of Manhattan had even fully developed – a relentless and orthogonal street network from Houston Street all the way up to 155th Street.

Is the difference that Brasilia was planned with suburban sensibilities in mind and Manhattan was not? Or was it the restrictive Euclidean zoning that did it in for Brasilia? 

Whatever the case may be, history suggests that some top-down planning exercises may have worked out just fine. Though to be fair, each of them was not without their share of critics.

Photo by Rafael Leão on Unsplash