Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1046

The latest data from the American Community Survey (2012 to 2016) has placed the suburban and exurban share of the US population (53 major metropolitan areas) at 85.5%. Back in 2000 this number was thought to be around 83.5%.

Since 2010, automobile oriented suburbs and exurbs have also accounted for 90.5% of population growth. The US – and Canada would be no different – is by and large a suburban nation. And the data suggests this isn’t about to change.

The one exception is the New York metro area. From 2012 to 2016, 74% of its growth happened in the urban core. No other major metropolitan area in the US comes close to this sort of urbanity. Below is a chart from New Geography that shows you how NYC compares.

All of the data for this post was also taken from New Geography .

Today I am joining a collective online protest – called Break the Internet  – in support of net neutrality in the United States. I’m not American and I don’t live in the US, and so Congress and the FCC don’t care to hear from me. But I can help spread the word. More than half of the people who email subscribe to this blog are based in the US. You can take action.

Fortunately for us in Canada, the CRTC firmly supports net neutrality . Internet service providers (ISP’s) can offer different packages based on speed and monthly data, but they cannot do this based on content. This is a great thing that many would argue is pro-innovation. But let’s be honest: If the internet environment changes in the US, it would likely have widespread impacts.

For more on net neutrality, here is a Wikipedia series .

Below is a keynote talk by Benedict Evans about what’s going on in tech today and what may happen in the next ten years. It covers: the growth of mobile; S-curves; Google / Apple / Facebook / Amazon (who knew Amazon had so many employees?); machine learning; autonomous vehicles/impact to cities; mixed reality; crypto-currencies; and so on.

For those of you interested in crypto-currencies – and that appears to be everyone these days – it’s interesting to hear how Evans describes their current position at the beginning of the curve:  “The tech works, but what’s the use case?” This is not to say the potential isn’t huge. It is. Automated trust. Distributed and programmable money. But the future is still unclear.

If you can’t see the video below, click here .

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVYDkPidXrU&w=560&h=315]