Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1070

2003/2004 was roughly the time period when I started to become interested in development as a career. My good friend Rick Sole and I used to talk about it all the time in architecture school. How do we break into this space? There are no formal paths, like law for instance, and so we felt like we had to create our own opportunities.

What I ended up doing was creating a list of every developer that I felt was doing cool and interesting work. I didn’t know enough about the industry at the time to assess other things and so that was really my only criteria. Do they care about design in their projects? I then started cold emailing and cold calling.

Not everyone got back to me, but many did and some agreed to meet with me. This was at a time when I had zero experience and I was frankly not very valuable as a hire. So I am incredibly grateful to all of the people who said yes and took the time to speak and meet with me.

As you go through your career, this curve eventually flips. You go from having no experience and begging people to meet with you to having experience (and other things you can offer people) and people now wanting to meet with you. Generally people want to meet when they think they can gain from you.

But the best way to build a relationship is to start when you don’t need anything. I will never forget the people that met with me when I had nothing to offer them. And you can bet that I will always have all the time in the world for them.

I’m not going to claim that I respond to every one of my cold emails. I definitely do not. But I respond to as many as I can and I try and pay it forward with some time. You could say it’s playing the long game, but it’s probably also the right thing to do.

How do you approach relationship building?

This past summer , an IGA store in Montreal’s Saint-Laurent borough erected “the largest organic green roof garden in the country.” It is about 25,000 square feet and it has a soil depth of only 150mm. 

They also claim that it’s the first supermarket in Canada to sell produce grown on the roof of the actual store. The brand: Frais du toit, or fresh from the roof. There’s even a livestream in the vegetable aisle showing you how the goods are doing overhead.

I would be curious to know what their yields are like and what they are charging for the produce. But it’s certainly a praiseworthy initiative.

Below is a quick video that will give you an idea of what the roof looks like. If you can’t see it, click here .

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z69ScyHCfU&w=560&h=315]

The Gehl Institute has just launched (in beta) something called the Public Life Data Protocol. It was developed by the Institute, as well as by Gehl (the practice), the Municipality of Copenhagen, the City of San Francisco, and Seattle’s Department of Transportation.

The goal of the protocol is to improve the way in which we collect, share, and compare public space information. It is about improving public life in public spaces.

To do this, they have proposed a series of metrics that measure everything from “posture within the space” to “objects brought into the space.” They also propose spatial metrics that help to analyze public life in relation to its physical context.

Gehl is a real leader in this space. I commend them on opening up their methodology and working to create “ a common language for people data .” Great data will only help us to build more human-centered cities.

To download a full PDF of the protocol, click here . 

Photo by Thaddaeus Lim on Unsplash