Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1190

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.

Yesterday evening I was in Hamilton, Ontario for an adaptive reuse building tour that was put on for the 2016 OPPI Symposium (Ontario Provincial Planners Institute). 

Hamilton has lots of these sorts of projects underway. The city has a rich history and, because it never saw the development pressures that cities like Toronto saw from the 70s to 90s, many of these buildings now remain ready to be reused. That’s my theory at least.

I was told that last year downtown Hamilton delivered about 600 residential units. This may not seem like a lot, but keep in mind that the number was zero for a very long time. In fact, just seeing a crane up in the air is exciting for those who lived through that period of inactivity. I can’t fully relate to that.

But it’s not just development that is going on. It’s city building. 

The city is creating new cultural spaces and developers such as Core Urban have carved out niches working on boutique-scaled “pain in the ass” heritage projects. How’s this for commitment: Core Urban has been awarded heritage builder of the year 3 times, but they have yet to work on a designated heritage property.

I’ve said before that I think there’s a new breed of developer emerging in cities today. Hamilton is no exception. And that’s very exciting for this region.

If you’re interested in Hamilton, check out the blog Rebuild Hamilton . It’s written by Thomas Allen who I think of as Mr. Hamilton. It’s a phenomenal resource for architecture and city enthusiasts.

The photo at the top of this post was taken by me within the proposed Beasley Park Lofts by Stinson Developments .

This week I picked up the Philips Hue lighting system . For those of you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a connected home lighting system. All you need are a Philips Bridge (which hooks up to your wireless router); a smartphone; and whatever bulbs, lightstrips and fixtures you want to use with it. It also works seamlessly with the Apple Home app .

At first I was a bit nervous that it would turn my place into a cheesy nightclub . But as soon as I powered it on and started messing around with the Hue app, I was blown away by the quality of the light and the options. There are settings for reading, to simulate a sunset, and so on. You can schedule routines, such as a bedtime lighting scheme, and you can even color match a photo to find exactly the light you want.

After playing around a bit, I then sent out an obligatory tweet saying that I was now hooked on and obsessed with the Philips Hue lighting system. Trust me, it’s really cool. My friend Andrew then responded saying that he doesn’t get it. Why would anyone want a color of light besides “white?” To me, this is like asking: Why would anyone want to see a beautiful sunrise or sunset? The sun should just appear or disappear using one consistent color.

In a city like Toronto where most of us in the winter will wake up when it’s dark and come home from work when it’s dark, I have always believed that we should be more creative and daring with the way we light our city, our buildings, and our public spaces. We don’t want to be kitschy about it, but there’s an opportunity to maximize our darker months and enhance the overall urban experience.

The CN Tower is a perfect example. Its night lighting has completely changed how we view it and has become a beacon for what is going on in this city. I can see it clearly from my elevator lobby and I always look to see what color it is. I’m not great at picking out when it’s  Rett Syndrome Awareness Month , but I can usually tell when there’s a game going on.

Now my place is certainly not the CN Tower. And there’s only one CN Tower in the world. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get fun and creative in other ways within the shared walls of the public realm. We should do that. Let’s not be so conservative.

If any of you have great examples of urban lighting, please share it in the comments below. Perhaps we can all use it as inspiration to make a change.