Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1414

Yesterday evening I went to the Toronto Christmas Market in the Distillery District. I had actually never been before, but it was something that I had been meaning to check out for a few years now. And it was wonderful. If you’ve never been, I would highly recommend you go. This past weekend was the opening weekend and it runs all throughout Advent until Sunday, December 21st.

For those of who might not be aware, the Christmas Market festivity is a longstanding tradition that originated primarily in German-speaking Europe. Accounts of a “December market” were found as early as the end of the 13th century. The Toronto Christmas Market is a slightly more recent tradition (it’s only about 5 years old), but it was already selected as one of the world’s best.

But Christmas carollers and hot toddies aside, the Market is also a fantastic opportunity to see the Distillery District in all its glory. Every time I visit the Distillery, I can’t help but feel how lucky we are to have a district like this in the city. The architecture and scale of the place is incredible and – alongside the Toronto Islands and Kensington Market, sometimes – it’s pretty much the only car free zone we have.

However as someone who lived near the Distillery District in its early days, I remember how much of an “island” it was when it first opened. It felt disconnected from the rest of the city and the only way to get people there was to hold a special event. The retailers and galleries struggled and many didn’t last.

With all the condos that have been built, literally on top of the neighborhood, that has changed dramatically. Today the area has become much more balanced as a mixed-use community. But the real tipping point, I think, will come next year when Toronto hosts the Pan Am Games and the West Don Lands neighborhood starts to come online just to the east of Cherry Street.

Now all of a sudden the Distillery District won’t feel like the edge of downtown anymore, it will feel more like the middle of it. As my friend Alex Bozikovic of the Globe and Mail pointed out to me this weekend, the Pan Am Games are going to put the east side of downtown on people’s radars. And I would completely agree. Once that happens, the Distillery District will finally start to reach its maximum potential.

Startup guru Paul Graham writes really interesting essays . Judging by the date stamps on his website, he’s been easily doing it for more than a decade. And he’s gotten really good at it – everyone in the startup community reads them. Whenever he posts one, I know I read it. No question. 

His most recent essay is called: Mean People Fail . And in it, he argues that the structural changes that have happened in our economy have also meant a reversal in the correlation between “meanness” and success. I know that might sound a bit funny, but hear him out:

For most of history success meant control of scarce resources. One got that by fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically in the case of Gilded Age financiers contending with one another to assemble railroad monopolies. For most of history, success meant success at zero-sum games. And in most of them meanness was not a handicap but probably an advantage.

That is changing. Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum. Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things.

That has always been the case for thinkers, which is why this trend began with them. When you think of successful people from history who weren’t ruthless, you get mathematicians and writers and artists. The exciting thing is that their m.o. seems to be spreading. The games played by intellectuals are leaking into the real world, and this is reversing the historical polarity of the relationship between meanness and success.

This makes sense to me. But the other reason I find this interesting is because I’ve wondered before if I should be more of an asshole in my professional life. Some people are really good at being assholes. I’m not. It’s not in my nature. When I manage and work with people, I’d rather try and create intrinsic motivation as opposed to using some form of brute force. In my view, the latter burns social capital.

So if you happen to be of the same mindset, you might like to hear that you’re probably sitting on the right trend line. Don’t be mean.

One of the most interesting things about cities is that as they grow their “ urban metabolism ” also tends to increase. People become more productive. Economic output increases. It becomes easier to hail a cab (which is a test I like to use). And, according to this recent article by CityLab , people walk faster.

Yes, research has shown that there’s a correlation between population size and the speed in which people walk. And some of the studies go as far back as the 1970s – like this one from psychologists Marc and Helen Bernstein :

In many ways, this makes intuitive sense. Life in the big city is a fast paced one. But why exactly do people start literally walking faster? The most probable answer seems to be, quite simply, that time is money. Subsequent research from the 1980s and 1990s  has revealed that the best predictor of fast walking is economic output.

When a city grows larger, they wrote, wage rate and cost of living increase, and with that the value of a resident’s time. As a result, “economizing on time becomes more urgent and life becomes more hurried and harried,” Walmsley and Lewis suggest. (Source: CityLab )

The first thing that crossed my mind when reading all of this is that there must be some sort of upper limit. Humans don’t just keep walking faster and faster as the city in which they live in grows bigger. If that were the case, the mega cities of the world – such as Tokyo – would have people sprinting around all the time. But that’s obviously not the case.

So this is a topic that could probably use some more data. And I would imagine it would be a lot easier to collect today given that we all now walk around with mobile sensors in our pockets (our smartphones). And pretty soon we may have mobile sensors on our wrists (smart watches).

I would certainly like to see more data on this. The idea of an “urban metabolism” has always interested me.

Image: Dundas Square, Toronto via Flickr