Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1336

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Back in architecture school we used to joke around that to be a great architect you had to have a badass sounding name. This was largely driven by the fact that so many famous architects were/are European and so they had/have more unique sounding names – at least to us.

Think Rem Koolhaas, Bjarke Ingels, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier (actually Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris), Alvar Aalto, and so on.

There are of course lots of great non-European architects and lots of names that don’t sound as badass as the ones listed above. But that didn’t stop of us from perpetuating the belief that you needed a badass name.

So what could you do if your name wasn’t badass enough to be a famous architect? Well we applied the principles of architectural spoonerism . That meant we switched around the first letter of your first name with the first letter of your last name to create a new architectural identity.

Sometimes this worked beautifully, but sometimes it didn’t work at all. In my case, I became Drandon Bonnelly, which is arguably a bit more badass. But the best example is that of my friend Alex Feldman. He became Flex Aeldman. Now that’s badass. He sounds like an architect bodybuilder.

What’s your badass architect name? Let us know in the comment section below. Perhaps we can dethrone Flex as the best one out there.

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As a kid growing up in the suburbs of Toronto, I remember when getting my driver’s licence and getting a car were some of my biggest priorities. 

As soon as I turned 16, I went immediately to get my learner’s permit and then enrolled in a driving school so that I could shorten the time required until I could drive on my own. Every month counted at that age.

It was such an important milestone that people born earlier in the year were seen as lucky. Because someone born in January, for example, could gain their driving independence before someone born at the end of the year even got their learner’s permit. As silly as it sounds to me right now, that spread was huge back then.

But the world has changed and we are at the dawn of a new era: driverless cars. 

Sooner than most people think, we are no longer going to drive ourselves around cities. I absolutely believe this. That means no more steering wheels. No more traffic calming measures on quiet residential streets. Safer streets. Perfect traffic information because all the cars will be networked. And a dramatic increase in urban efficiency. (Relevant post: The tragedy of the commons .)

I can’t wait for this happen.

Reid Hoffman, who is the co-founder of LinkedIn, recently wrote a fascinating article on autonomous vehicles called, Driving in the Networked Age . And in it he argues that cities should be starting to look at banning human-driven cars and generally putting in place policies to support networked autonomous cars. In fact, he sees it as an opportunity for Detroit to reestablish itself as the 21st century motor city.

Again, I don’t doubt that this transition will happen. I think it’s a question of when, not if. But I also think that it’s going to be incredibly important to think about what driverless vehicles will mean for our cities and the built environment. 

It’s once again an example of Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase: The medium is the message . 

Cars as a medium have had a profound impact on the way we live and the way we build our cities. We know this. But the medium is now changing. And while simply taking out the driver may seem like a small change, it is not. Have a read of Hoffman’s article .

I’m excited about the possibilities. I don’t really like driving anymore. But let’s make this second coming of the car more positive for cities than the first. Deal?

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I was recently talking to my good friend Jeremiah Shamess  about the current state of development land sales in Toronto (he does this for a living) and he said something to me that I found really interesting.

He said that because the market is so competitive, you can really only win development sites in one of two ways. Either you’re willing to spend the most money or you see something and have a vision that nobody else sees.

And it was this second piece that really stood out to me because it reminds me of one of my favorite investing frameworks.

Warren Buffet is famous for saying that you should be fearful when others are greedy and you should be greedy when others are fearful. And what I’m about to talk about is really that same core philosophy.

Here’s how venture capitalist Fred Wilson put it (reiterating something that Bill Gurley said):

I saw Bill Gurley say that you can only make money by being right about something that most people think is wrong. His logic was that you can’t make money by being wrong. And you can’t make money by being right about something everyone else knows. So you have to be right about something that most people think is wrong. I really like that framework.

But this doesn’t just apply to technology companies or stocks. It applies to city building, most industries, and probably most things in life if you think about it.

If all you’re doing are things that everyone else is doing, then how can you expect to outperform? You’re going to revert to the mean.

Take, for example, billionaire Dan Gilbert and Detroit. Not everyone believes that Detroit will come back. In fact, I suspect there are probably more people who think it won’t come back, than people who think it will. Otherwise, it would already be back.

But Gilbert is unquestionably long on Detroit  (via Forbes):

As you’ve likely heard, over the past four years Gilbert has become one of Detroit’s single-largest commercial landowners, renovating the city with the energy and impact of a modern-day Robert Moses, albeit bankrolled with his own money. He’s purchased and updated more than 60 properties downtown, at a total cost of $1.3 billion. He moved his own employees into many of them–12,000 in all, including 6,500 new hires–and cajoled other companies such as Chrysler, Microsoft and Twitter to follow.

If/when Gilbert proves to be right about Detroit, then he will have been right about something that most people thought was wrong. And because of that, he will no doubt make a lot of money.