Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 141

Bianca's maternal lineage is Portuguese — specifically the Azores.

Sinfully though, she had never been. But that is changing right now . We're all here, and I was fortunate enough to get an invitation. Thank you! One thing I didn't appreciate until recently is that a large majority of the Portuguese in Toronto (70%?) are of Azorean descent, particularly from the island of São Miguel (which is the largest and where we are right now).

This is the result of a major wave of immigration that occurred between the 1950s and 1970s, where Azoreans came for economic opportunity and to fulfill a labor shortage in Canada. This strong connection between Canada and the Azores can be found all around the island. In fact, the first restaurant we walked into had this plate prominently displayed on the wall:

As soon as I saw it I said to the owner, "I like your license plate!" And she replied with, "thank you, yes, Toronto!"

I've also been spotting Canadian flags all around the island, including this hybrid Portuguese-Canadian one:

São Miguel is a beautiful place with stunning landscapes, warm and welcoming people, and incredible food. (If you've had lapas grelhadas before you'll know that it's an optimal delivery mechanism for butter and garlic.) I'm excited to share my photos with all of you, both here on the blog and on Globizen's Instagram page . Unfortunately, I forgot to bring the card reader for my Fujifilm, and so my best photos will have to wait until I'm back in Toronto.

Stay tuned.

Bond — which is a San Francisco-based VC firm with a cool website — just published this 340-page report on Artificial Intelligence . One of the authors of the report is Mary Meeker. She has been called the "Queen of the Internet" thanks to a 20-year run of presentations about the state of the internet, and her perceived ability to identity new trends early. So people are paying attention to this report. Her last one was in 2019 and I mentioned her 2018 report on this blog, here .

At this point, it's boring to say that AI is ushering in "unprecedented" global change. Everyone sends around snippets from ChatGPT. I incorporate some sort of AI-powered tool all the time in my daily workflow. And we've started using it on our development projects to help with tedious things like design coordination. Eventually we'll probably stop calling it out as "AI" and just refer to it as the things that computers and the internet can do.

But I think it's valuable to point out that this has been a really long time coming. The report talks about an "AI winter" from 1967 to 1996. That's a long time to stay motivated and interested in something that doesn't seem to be gaining traction. And it's a reminder that crypto is still early. Even though I also use blockchains every day and I've already transitioned (or am transitioning) a lot of my online life, including this blog .

Of particular relevance to this community is probably the fact that AI is also going to have a meaningful impact on our built environment. One of the sections in the report is called "Physical World AI," and it talks about how quickly data centers are now being built (compared to housing) and how Waymo (using AI) has taken something like 27% of the ride share market in San Francisco in the span of just 20 months.

This transportation product is now scaling, and cities have always responded and remade themselves according to new mobility innovations. This time won't be any different.

Cover photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I came across this tweet the other night showing Toronto's Yonge Street.

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In the foreground are small, two-storey main street—type buildings. And behind them are tall buildings. This is very Toronto. What you're seeing here is a condition that occurs all around the city. Though in many ways, it feels counterintuitive. I mean, shouldn't the tallest buildings be right on the main street?

In my opinion, this condition is happening for at least two reasons.

The first is that Toronto's historic main streets tend to have a fine-grained lot fabric, which means they're more challenging to assemble for larger developments. Assemblies are a complex art, and they get exponentially more difficult the more property owners and feuding siblings you add into the mix. So the path of least resistant is larger and chunkier sites.

The second reason has to do with context. We tend to want to preserve the feel of our historic main streets. One Delisle is an example of this. The podium of the tower is scaled to exactly match what was there before — an Art Deco-style facade from the 20s that will return to the site.

However, we didn't have this same constraint on its other elevation (Delisle Avenue) and so we fought not to have your typical podium + setback tower. Instead, we wanted a street level experience that had more presence and urban grandeur.

This, to me, is an important distinction to consider. Are we setting height back because of history and context? Both of which are important. Or are we setting it back because we're pretending to still be a provincial Anglo-Protestant town? Sometimes it seems like it's because of the latter.

Cover photo by Yi Wei on Unsplash