Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1345

Empire State Building Gay Pride Rainbow by Ahmer Kalam on 500px

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By now, I am sure that all of you know that the U.S. Supreme Court made a landmark ruling yesterday (Friday, June 25, 2015) . In a 5-to-4 vote, it was decided that the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to same-sex marriage.

Here is Justice Anthony Kennedy’s closing paragraph. What a great read.

With this decision, the United States joins the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, Norway, Sweden, and many other countries who already allow same-sex marriages nationwide. And I am delighted to see that happen with Canada’s neighbor.

I am also proud to say that it has already been a decade (2005) since Canada became the 4th country in the world – and the 1st country outside of Europe – to allow same-sex marriages. Not because it had a direct impact on my life, but because it is the right thing to do.

It is the right thing to do because it creates “equal dignity” among all men and women (as Justice Kennedy states above) and because it’s the right thing to do for our economies.

I believe that the strongest economies are the ones that can remain open and tolerant to new ideas and all kinds of people. 

Cities like Toronto and New York ( as I’ve argued before ) became successful precisely because they opened themselves up to new ideas and new people (immigrants).

But many studies show that as people age, “openness” declines. We become less intellectually curious and our preference for variety wanes. Perhaps this is where the expression “set in your ways” comes from and why political orientation often correlates with age.

Thankfully the U.S. wasn’t so set in its ways that it couldn’t provide equal dignity to its citizens.

People often ask me about “my background”. When I’m feeling cheeky, I usually just say that I’m Canadian or that I was born in Toronto (because that’s what I culturally self-identify with). But that’s not what most people want to hear.

The short answer I usually give is Eurasian (European + Asian) or Chirish (Chinese + Irish). Although I recently learned that Chirish means something else to people from Chicago .

But now, thanks to 23andMe’ s DNA test, I can give a much more specific answer. Here’s the full chart:

Now I can say that I’m 50.6% East Asian & Native American and 49.2% European. 

More specifically, I can say that I’m 43.7% Chinese, 2.0% Broadly East Asian, 2.1% Southeast Asian, 1.5% Native American, 1.4% Broadly East Asian and Native American, 16.5% British & Irish, 6.0% French & German, 11.5% Broadly Northern European, 1.7% Iberian, 1.7% Italian, 6.9% Broadly Southern European, 1.5% Eastern European, and 3.4% Broadly European.

But the interesting thing is that I don’t really feel any cultural affinity towards any of the regions or countries listed above (except for maybe France since I grew up going to a French school based off the French schooling system). For me, I identify as being Canadian. That’s more than enough for me.

Now it’s your turn. 

What’s your “background” and how do you self-identify? I think this is an interesting discussion given that we are now an incredibly mobile world. What your DNA says and how you feel about yourself, could be two totally different things.

High speed train by asean leung on 500px

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With the recent talk around downtown Cleveland’s resurgence , I am reminded that for those of us living near the Great Lakes, we are living in one of the most important urban agglomerations in the world: The Great Lakes Megalopolis .

In 1962, French geographer Jean Gottmann wrote a seminal book called, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States . And in it, he described the remarkable clustering of cities in the northeast, running from Boston in the north to Washington D.C. in the south. He called this the Northeast Megalopolis.

The term megalopolis simply refers to a clustering or chain of generally adjacent metropolitan areas.

Then in the 1960s and 1970s, architect and planner Constantinos Doxiadis started writing about the emergence of what he called the Great Lakes Megalopolis. In his mind, a contiguous urban region was forming that stretched all the way from Chicago in the west to Quebec City in the north east. And at its economic center was the city of Detroit.

More recently, Richard Florida, as well as others, have been referring to these urban clusters as mega-regions . And in the case of the Great Lakes, Florida broke the area down into two distinct regions: Chi-Pitts in the west and Tor-Buff-Chester in the east. (I think you can guess how the names were derived.)

According to his research, these two mega-regions have a combined population of almost 60 million people and an economic output equivalent to almost $3 trillion. That places it in line with the Northeast Megalopolis. But according to the Brookings Institution , the output coming from the Great Lakes could be closer to $4.5 trillion.

Whatever the case may be and whatever you want to call it, the Great Lakes Megalopolis is unquestionably an economic and cultural powerhouse. But this has me wondering whether or not we’re doing enough to unleash its full potential.

When I attended Joe Berridge’s talk last week on Toronto as a global city , I asked him how he thought we should be organizing our cities and regions. Do city-states make sense? Should we be rethinking the relationship between provinces/states and cities?

His response was that we should be creating agencies and entities with regional authority (as opposed to fighting to make any constitutional changes). For example, the Toronto region should not have an array of competing transit agencies (as it does today). It should have one regional transit authority that blankets the region. People, ideas, and capital don’t follow borders.

So with that in mind, what opportunities are there for us to unite the metropolitan areas within the Great Lakes Megalopolis?

The first idea that comes to my mind is a high speed rail network that seamlessly connects to each city’s local transit network. Imagine a Great Lakes bullet train that could zip you across the region. It would completely reorganize the spatial landscape.

Here’s an excerpt from a recent report by the Independent Transport Commission called, Ambitions & Opportunities – Understanding the Spatial Effects of High Speed Rail :

There has been a global shift of economic power and influence from nation states to cities and city-regions. Today’s successful cities collaborate across existing boundaries to form polycentric metropolitan regions. As a result cities function in a much less self-contained manner than they did fifty years ago. Longterm trends in the pattern of urban settlement reflect the interplay between opportunities for dispersal afforded by greater mobility, and economic and social forces promoting concentration.

But what else could we be doing to empower the Great Lakes Megalopolis? 

I would love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below. I think there’s a strong case to be made for thinking at the scale of the megalopolis and not just at the scale of our own backyard.