Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1332

This evening I had a fascinating conversation with Subhi Alsayed of Tower Labs . If you haven’t yet heard of Tower Labs, I would encourage you to check them out. Here’s their mission statement:

Our mission is to facilitate the adoption of green building products, technologies and practices through pilot and demonstration projects in highrise buildings; and accelerate the evolution to a low-impact, sustainable urban environment.

What they do is test out new green building technologies in one-off condominium suites. And since they were founded by both MaRS and Tridel (which is one of, if not the largest condo developer in Toronto), they have plenty of opportunities to do just that.

This is important because the real estate industry is notoriously slow at innovating. I’ve written about this many times before. Whenever you try and introduce something new, there’s always a lot of change management that goes along with it. The construction trades, to use one example, need to get their heads around it. And until they do, they’re going to charge a premium for it.

So by creating a one-off test case, everybody gets to see how it works, how it is built, and, most importantly, how it actually performs in the real world.

One of the projects that they’re working on is something called NetZED , which stands for Net Zero Energy Dwelling. As the name suggests, it’s a condominium suite that produces as much energy as it consumes. 

The way it works is by trading energy. At night when the sun isn’t out and the panels on the roof aren’t able to produce energy, the suite “borrows” electricity from the building. But during the day when the sun is out, the suite powers itself and then returns any borrowed electricity to the building. Click here to learn more about the suite. It’s being built in the Aqualina Condos on Toronto’s waterfront.

I find all of this incredibly exciting. Not only because they’re working towards a more sustainable future, but also because they’re applying their efforts towards the multi-family building typology (towers). Given that most of the world now lives in cities, this is an important building typology to make even more sustainable.

Image: Tower Labs

On Monday of this past long weekend, I went for a quick bike ride over to the Beaches , up to Little India, and then back down to the St. Lawrence Market. 

The ride along Lake Shore and through the Beaches is one of my favorites. Minus a few awkward twists and turns as you leave the East Bayfront, it’s generally smooth sailing. It feels a bit like a bike highway.

It took me about 24 minutes to get to the beach, which means I was traveling on average just over 20 km/h. If you lived in the Beaches and worked downtown, that would be a perfectly reasonable commute in my mind.

And it’s for reasons like this that Munich is looking to invest in a huge network of bike highways. They’re calling it a Radschnellverbindungen – which I might start ambitiously calling some of the bike paths in Toronto – and the idea is to connect the city with all of the suburbs.

Below is a map of the routes they’re looking at. The purple lines are “suitable routes” and the blue lines are corridors they’ve looked at it. If I’m wrong in my translation, blame Google.

They are still in the feasibility stage, but the idea is for each bike path to be 4 meters wide and have no cross streets or traffic lights – essential a highway for bikes.

And if you think this all sounds like a pipe dream, check out this video of the recently opened Cykelslangen (Cycle Snake) in Copenhagen.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iypvbe6J6Qs?rel=0]

Would you commute to work on your bike if you had a highway, just like cars do?

https://500px.com/embed.js

This October 8th and 9th (2015) in Toronto , CityAge will be hosting a summit at the MaRS Discovery District called, Build the Future. The goal is to explore the future of Canada’s economic powerhouse.

Here’s a little bit about CityAge :

CityAge is a platform for ideas and business development, designed to enable new partnerships among the business, government and societal leaders who are shaping the 21st Century.

Founded in 2012 in Vancouver, Canada, our events have taken place, or are scheduled, in New York City, Hong Kong, Toronto, London, Los Angeles, Seattle, Edmonton, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Ottawa, Vancouver and The Waterloo Region in Canada.

To date more than 4,000 leaders in business, government and society have attended a CityAge event.

I’ve seen the draft agenda and list of speakers for the event, and if you enjoy the content on this blog, I think you’ll also really enjoy this CityAge summit.

But even better is the fact that if you’re a young professional (under 35) and a reader of Architect This City, you can use the code YOUNGPRO to attend for just C$195.

You’re welcome. I hope to see you there :)