Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1187

This past summer I wrote about the 8 storey mural (by street artist PHLEGM) that was about to go up on the side of a Slate building at the corner of Yonge + St. Clair in midtown Toronto.

Well, that mural is now complete. It’s been in the news a bunch over the past couple of months, both locally and internationally. designboom (they’re allergic to capital letters) wrote about it last month.

In case you missed all that press and/or you’d like to learn more about the process, here is a video that the STEPS Initiative published last week. It’s 5 minutes. If you can’t see the video below, click here .

[vimeo 185861345 w=640 h=360]

The STEPS philosophy of creating public art in unlikely urban spaces is a hugely interesting one. It’s really the antithesis of the white-walled art gallery.

I am in New York right now and I spent the day riding around on a Citi Bike looking at architecture. Atop two wheels is such a fast way to get around.

The first stop was the new transportation hub at the World Trade Center. Here’s a photo of the Oculus:

The main station house (above) is absolutely breathtaking, but the exterior (in particular the entrances) felt a bit unresolved to me.

Here’s a photo of 56 Leonard by Herzog & de Meuron:

People call it the Jenga tower.

And here’s a photo of a building on Broadway in Soho:

Look at how the overhangs fold down and adjust the window dimensions so that it matches the building to the left. Bigger windows towards Broadway. Smaller windows as you move inward. I thought this was really neat.

And now back to New York City. See you tomorrow.

The following paragraph is a great way to describe urban cycling and to explain how our built environment can explicitly invite certain behaviors:

“If you want people to drive, build more automobile infrastructure. If you want people to bike, build better bike infrastructure. In San Francisco, as in most US cities, we’ve treated the idea of bike infrastructure as secondary to optimizing traffic flow, and have wound up protecting parked cars with bike lanes instead of the opposite. Because of this our bike lanes are plagued with double-parking. While enforcement is an important piece of the puzzle, we usually fail to admit how inviting a striped space between parked cars and traffic appears to an Uber driver. Our built environment invites a driving behavior that causes cyclists to spend much of their commute pushed into traffic, encouraging a culture of every-man-for-himself cycling behavior, adding to the discouraging perception that bikes are for the young and fearless only. This perception is elevated by the fact that bicycling deaths in San Francisco are hovering at least four times higher than the average rate in Copenhagen, a city with ten times as many cyclists.”

This snippet is from a blog post written by Alex Schuknecht  (urban designer with Gehl). In the posts he also contrasts the cycling cultures of San Francisco and Copenhagen – two cities of similar size and density, but with fundamental differences. It’s a good read.

Many of us probably assume that we are agents of our own lives. We decide what we do and when we do it. We’re our own boss. That’s at least how I want to feel.

But the built environment is distinct from the natural environment in that we design it. It is not a given. And the environments we collectively choose to fund and build will ultimately have a significant impact on the way we “choose” to live our lives. 

This gets back to the first line of the above quote: build more of this; get more of that. It’s also related to the startup mantra: “ you make what you measure .” If all we’re measuring is traffic flow, then that’s the kind of city we will make. And that’s certainly be done.

I don’t think a lot of us think in these terms. But we should.