Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1359

“If the decision ultimately of the council is to support the hybrid I think frankly it’ll be a major step backwards and you’re going to miss a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I’ll be very frank, we’ll be the laughingstock of the world.” 

-Paul Bedford, former chief planner of Toronto

As many of you I’m sure know, I have been a vocal and passionate supporter of removing the eastern portion of the elevated Gardiner Expressway in downtown Toronto. I have written about it so many times that a lot of you are probably sick of hearing about it.

I’m sorry if that’s the case. But it’s a hot and important topic in Toronto right now. We’re just over 3 weeks away from City Council finally making a decision. That is scheduled to happen on June 9th and/or 10th. 

For the most part though, I was pretty confident that we would ultimately make what many of us believe is the right decision. But then this past week Mayor John Tory went public in his support for the “hybrid” option , which is basically to rebuild the elevated expressway in a slightly different configuration. And that really upset me.

Here’s what that looks like (versus the remove option shown at the top of this post):

Have we learned nothing from our past city building mistakes?

Since that announcement, I went on Twitter every night this week to check out the discussions that were happening around #GardinerEast . And every night it got me so worked up that I then had trouble falling asleep. I have since stopped reading about the Gardiner East before bed.

But rather than just get frustrated, my friend (a fellow city builder named Stephen Job) and I decided to do something about it and create a petition using Change.org.

It is a petition that we will ultimately be sending to Toronto’s entire City Council prior to their June 9 meeting and we hope that you will consider signing it and sharing it with your network – regardless of whether or not you happen to live in Toronto. (Although it’ll certainly help if you’re a taxpayer and voter in the City of Toronto.)

We just finished getting it up and you can check it out and sign it by clicking here .

Images: Toronto Star

How do you create and maintain a thriving high street in this era of increasing online shopping? This was one of the questions that Monocle asked at its recent Quality of Life Conference in Lisbon and here’s a video with its recommendations. Click here if you can’t see the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox2WJwDbuIo?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

I’ve been following and checking out Kickstarter pretty much since the beginning. But it wasn’t until last night that I backed my first project. 

After doing that, I immediately started thinking about urban projects that might be able to also get crowdfunded using Kickstarter. How could it be used for city building? A Kickstarter project, after all, just has to be something with a defined scope and a clear end goal.

Not surprisingly, this has already been happening for many years now.

A great example is +Pool in New York, which is an initiative to build a publicly accessible floating pool that also filters river water. The project launched in June 2011 and by July 2011 they had raised $41,648 USD to build and test different filtration techniques .

Today, the project is still moving ahead and they are now offering up the opportunity to buy and have your name engraved on tiles within the pool. If I lived in New York, I would be all over this.

But what’s powerful here is the ability for crowd-based platforms (like Kickstarter) to both get radical new ideas off the ground and to empower local communities to affect change. Here’s a quote from PSFK :

It’s very difficult to get funding for these ‘out there’ ideas that regular systems might not support. Creators have to take risks and be imaginative, as well as put their ideas out there and let the public decide. There are no traditional guidelines on crowd-sourced platforms—they’re much more meritocratic. You can think in big scope and that changes what gets made and who can access it. Anybody with a couple of doubles can voice what they want to be built, and in that way we see the entire community having a huge say in the design world.

And when I see projects and platforms like this, I can’t help but wonder if (when) city building is going to become even more decentralized. 

Last night I was also at an event – being put on by Ryerson University’s City Building Institute – called Bridging Divides: What Can Cities Do? And one of the suggestions that came up was that Toronto needs more local and granular community councils ( there are currently 4 ) in order to bridge some of the divides that are happening in our city.

But in a world where it’s possible for each and every person in a city to not only have a say but to quickly say it from their smartphones, why can’t we go even more local? Instead of 4, 10, or 90 community councils, why can’t we have everyone more engaged?

I think we’re headed in that direction.