Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1189

You can have one of the best records in the league or you can be slumping right before the post-season, and none of that matters when the month of October hits. Such is baseball. And such is life.

What does help, though, is being bold. The Blue Jays got lucky on Sunday night with Odor’s throwing error . But Donaldson was also willing to take a chance and make a run for home plate. It paid off in a big way. His instincts were right.

I found the above image on social media without a source. If I’m pissing anyone off by posting it here, let me know and I’ll take it down. I just love how it captures the exact moment – with the ball still in the air – when Donaldson proclaims victory.

Baseball will always be a special sport for me. I have never been a big hockey fan and the Raptors didn’t exist until the mid-90s. So as a kid growing up in Toronto, I played baseball and watched the Jays.

So here’s to more October baseball. The playoffs are always such a fun time in the city. It has a way of cutting through our differences and uniting us all around a common dream. That doesn’t always happen.

In the words of Mike Bloomberg, then mayor of New York: “We’re the level of government closest to the majority of the world’s people. We’re directly responsible for their well-being and their futures. So while nations talk, but too often drag their heels, cities act”. Whereas diplomacy is carried out for the state, paradiplomacy is executed for the population.

Rodrigo Tavares has an interesting article up at the World Economic Forum talking about the rise of foreign policy and international relations at the local level. The argument is that as cities rise (and they are certainly rising) paradiplomacy is inevitable.

He admits that the diplomatic networks tend to be stronger for regions who have “flirted with sovereignty.” Regions such as Quebec, Catalonia, and Scotland are given as examples. However, this shift is by no means exclusive to them. Lots of examples in his article .

It is also manifesting itself very differently compared to at the national level. And that’s part of the advantage. One example is London & Partners , which is an arm of the City of London that sells consulting services to other cities and nations who want to replicate its successes. Do nations do this?

I have argued before on this blog that our governance structures do not accurately reflect today’s urban reality . Rodrigo’s article is a reminder that we continue to underestimate the role of cities in the global economy.

I’ll end with this chart from his article:

The Market Street Prototyping Festival is just finishing up in San Francisco. The festival, which is now in its 3rd year, is centered around urban interventions that can be rapidly prototyped and tested. The goal is to discover new ideas that could be used to transform and improve Market Street – the city’s civic spine. It is a joint effort of both the San Francisco Planning Department and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Here is a list of all the prototypes. You can “like” projects, but I wish they would have made it easier to filter and see which ones are the most popular.

One project that I liked is Vote With Your Feet . It consists of two doorways and a single crowdsourced YES/NO question above it. You vote by choosing a doorway. Once you walk through, you are then shown the results. Here’s a Boomerang video of it in action. I like it because it provides a frictionless way to acquire lots of ground-up feedback. Imagine placing something like this at the exit of a busy train station or transforming the existing doors.

Tactical urbanism can be a great mechanism for investigating and instigating positive change. This is hugely important considering how slow moving and bureaucratic city building can be. It’s not the same format, but NXT City here in Toronto has similar ambitions. They source new ideas for our public spaces from young people. I am thrilled that both of these initiatives exist.