Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1105

“Like the United States, and thanks to the United States, MIT gains tremendous strength by being a magnet for talent from around the world. Faculty, students, post-docs and staff from 134 other nations join us here because they love our mission, our values and our community.” -L.Rafael Reif, MIT President

The MIT Senseable City Lab recently analyzed nearly 20 years of ethnographic student data in order to visualize the origins of its international faculty, students, and researchers from 1999 to the present.

The above chart may be a bit small (larger version here ), but it shows all students (undergraduate, graduate, and visiting/others) by country. The top 5 countries are China, India, Canada, South Korea, and France.

To give you some sense of the math, there are 3,808 international students at MIT as of 2017. 888 of them alone are from China – mostly at the graduate level (688 out of the 888). So China represents almost ¼ of MIT’s international student population.

Another thing that stood out for me was the drop off in Canadians in 2009. You can see that “V” roughly in the middle of the chart. Canada went from 233 to 144 students. I wonder if this had something to do with the economic climate at the time. Not sure.

Click here  to see all of the visualizations. 

Note that you can toggle by region and country, as well as by “Trump’s EO Countries.” That feature, as well as the quote at the beginning of this post, should give you an immediate appreciation for some of the motivations behind this exercise.

Images: MIT Senseable City Lab

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) recently restored and published a “documentary travelogue” of New York City from 1911. 

It was originally filmed by a Swedish company, called Svenska Biografteatern, that went around the world filming noteworthy places such as Niagara Falls, Paris, Monte Carlo, and Venice.

Not surprisingly, New York City is a vibrant and bustling place at the beginning of the 20th century. But it somehow feels serene. Maybe it’s the soundtrack. It’s also interesting to think that this was filmed only 3 years before World War I broke out.

I particularly enjoyed seeing all of the streetcars (trams) and elevated rail running through the streets.

Below is a screenshot of a young girl – clearly bored and/or disinterested – being chauffeured down Fifth Avenue in what was almost certainly a fancy convertible at the time.

MoMA doesn’t allow you to embed the video, but you can watch it here through July 14. It’s 9 minutes and, if you’re a city nerd like me, I think you’ll really enjoy it. The street life footage kicks in around the 3 minute mark.

Screenshot Images: MoMA

Joe Cortright of City Observatory recently published a post about the types of policies that cities should be looking to adopt in response to autonomous vehicles. It’s called: Pricing roads for autonomous vehicles .

Many have argued, including urban economist Edward Glaeser, that autonomous vehicles are going to be positively disastrous for cities. Once you remove the labor costs associated with the driver and the overall price per kilometer plummets because of pooling/technological advances, we are going to see an huge surge in demand – well beyond the capacities of our roads.

Of course, there are solutions. We can accurately price the roads, which is something that more cities should be doing today even before autonomous vehicles arrive. Here is an excerpt from Cortright’s article:

“With modern electronics, and especially with autonomous vehicles, position and speed is monitored with great precision. There is no reason why they [drivers] should not pay for exactly the amount of roadway that they use. And we know that the cost of the city’s roadway varies substantially across space and over time. Use of road capacity in less dense neighborhoods at off-peak hours imposes nominal costs on the city’s road budget. In contrast, peak hour use of city streets and arterials, particularly in and near the city center, imposes huge costs on the city and its residents. Those who use the system at peak hours in congested locations should pay the costs associated with creating, maintaining, and where necessary expanding that infrastructure.”

This isn’t a novel concept, which is why when Toronto was looking at a flat road toll I argued here on the blog that it was a step in the right direction but that it was too blunt a tool. 

It’s a moot point now because sadly the province ended up pandering and rejecting the plan , but we should have been considering something that could achieve the above objectives. It needed more finesse.

But in all likelihood our cities will have to face that reality sooner rather than later.