Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1277

When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of Toronto, I never played in the backyard. I played in the streets. That’s where all the kids came together.

We would play baseball in somebody’s driveway, using one of the garage door “squares” as the strike zone. We would play football on corner lots, where it was tackle on the grass and “two-hand touch” on the street. And we would wax our curbs so that we could skateboard them.

None of these spaces were ever really intended for baseball, football, or skateboarding, but we kids repurposed them.

As people, including families, continue to move into urban centers around the world, I have no doubt that the next generation of children will once again repurpose spaces for play. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have work to do when it comes to properly preparing our communities for people of all shapes and sizes.

One of the most interesting design challenges facing us today has to do with our towers.

Architects have long been obsessed with the idea of vertical villages. Le Corbusier’s Unité d'habitation in Marseille had two shopping streets embedded within the tower that were intended to act as public spines. I don’t know how well they did, but it was a highly progressive idea for the time.

Following on this idea, I was recently watching a TED talk with architect Ole Scheeren (thanks Mariane) and I was fascinated by his obsession with breaking down the raw verticality of towers.

His belief was that, yes, cities are and will continue to become more dense through tall buildings, but that most towers isolate rather than connect people. His work strives to do the opposite.

And this one of the big trends that I think we will see more of in our cites. We will see new forms of urban connectedness and a blurring of private, public, and semi-public spaces. Screw Euclidean zoning .

On that note, I am reminded that I owe the ATC community a post on my predictions for 2016. I hope to get that out shortly.

Diagram via Büro Ole Scheeren

Earlier in the week, I came across this post  (via Fred Wilson ), arguing that rapid technological progress is causing systemic deflation in the broader economy.

Here’s a chart that illustrates the author’s point:

What is happening here is that despite advances in technology and increases in productivity, real wages have been stagnant for decades. (This chart is for the US, but it likely applies to many other countries.)

This is an interesting paradox. For a long time, increases in productivity were met with corresponding increases in income. So why the divergence?

The author believes that it’s because the gains brought about by “extreme technological progress” are being unequally applied to the economy. In other words, they do not benefit the majority of people. He then goes on to argue that we could be entering an entirely new macroeconomic era: 

“Economic growth may be over soon, at least in absolute terms. On the other hand that will be at least partially offset by the technological deflation. So instead of the decline of the innovation it will be just the opposite, the explosion of the innovation that will turn the economy to the decline. And moreover, it will not be a tragedy since we will be able to produce higher standard of living with fraction of the GDP today. Few adjustments needs to be done into our economic system to cope with the change for sure.”

When you read things like this it makes the idea of a “ basic income guarantee ” seem far more palatable.

The other chart that stood out to me was this one below, which shows the declining cost of solar panels and the rise of global solar panel installations. 

It’s a great reminder that it’s only a matter of time before we wean ourselves off of oil. And, that we could be headed towards some sort of third industrial revolution where the marginal cost of energy is almost zero. Already about 25% of Germany’s electricity comes from renewables.

On that note, I am going to end with a fantastic interactive chart from The Economist (screenshot below) that outlines oil reserves around the world by country. If you click through to their website , you can then toggle the price of oil (per barrel) to see how much of those reserves are actually viable.

With the price of oil where it is today ($27.88 per barrel as of January 20, 2016), there are only a handful of countries with profitable oil. I am sure you could have guessed which ones.

What will happen if, or should I say when, that oil is no longer needed? 

For those of you who have been reading this blog since last summer, you’ll know that I’m particularly passionate about the Gardiner Expressway East here in Toronto.

Last night a public meeting was held to discuss the 3 alternative designs for what has become known as the “hybrid” option. If you’d like a visual summary of the options, click here .

But essentially as you go from hybrid 1 to hybrid 3, the elevated Gardiner Expressway just gets pushed further north, away from the water. So as you go from 1 to 3, the hybrid option becomes less offensive to the waterfront and its associated public realm, and it opens up more land for development. However, it also becomes more expensive.

Here’s a graphical summary of the costs, which my friend Gil Meslin tweeted out last night:

Evolution of the #GardinerEast options, and their associated costs, in one graphic. #topoli #urbto pic.twitter.com/s8W36UrqtR

— Gil Meslin (@g_meslin) January 20, 2016

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Notice that the boulevard (remove) option, which City Council rejected last summer, remains by far the most cost effective option. At a time when the city is searching for cash, I am surprised that nobody is looking here.

I am also surprised to read that some are commenting on which of the above hybrid options will be the easiest to tear down should we want to remove the Gardiner East in the future. If that’s the lens we are applying, why rebuild it in the first place?

But enough from me. What do you think? Here’s a Twitter poll I created this morning:

What would you like to see happen with the elevated #GardinerEast on Toronto’s waterfront? https://t.co/33XgNY4J33

— Brandon G. Donnelly (@donnelly_b) January 20, 2016

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