Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1445

Earlier this week, Toronto City Council approved the equivalent of 755 storeys of new development, a lot of which will end up in the downtown core. The translates into 6,887 new housing units and roughly 4 million square feet of new commercial space. The Globe and Mail called it the Manhattanization of downtown .

If you’d like to go through the complete City Council meeting agenda, you can do that here . (I warn you though, it won’t be an exciting read.)

One notable project that was approved is 50 Bloor Street West , which is a 71-storey mixed-use building in Yorkville adjacent to and on top of Holt Renfrew (It includes a $6 million Section 37 contribution ). I mention this one because it’s impressively tall and because it’s a project that I was involved with when I was at Morguard. Watch for Yorkville in the coming years, there’s a lot in the pipeline.

While I think this is all incredibly exciting, our chief planner, Jennifer Keesmaat , is entirely correct in pointing out that all of this highlights the desperate need for better infrastructure, the most critical of which is a relief subway line that cuts across downtown.

But to be clear, this isn’t a question of just planning for growth. This is a question of planning for growth and making up for decades of infrastructure disinvestment. That’s the position we’re in today, which means we have a lot of hard work to do. Though I’m confident we’ll get it done.

The other thing that this level of intensification should highlight for you is that public transit, and other forms of mobility such as biking and car sharing, have to be central to our goals. It’s simply infeasible for everybody to be driving around in a car. We’re currently demonstrating how efficient that ends up being.

So as Toronto continues to intensify, I think we’ll quickly discover that traffic and private cars aren’t the answer or even the right question to be asking.

Image: Flickr

Can you believe that it’s already been one full year of Architect This City? Well it has. I wrote this quick post on August 28, 2013 and it kick started a yearlong discipline of writing something everyday (usually) about cities.

In celebration of this one year anniversary, I thought I would open up the kimono and provide a full look at what one year of regular blogging looks like in terms of the numbers, as well as in terms of the benefits that I feel I derived from it. So here goes.

Below are my pageviews from Google Analytics (the number at the top of the Y-axis is 10,000). As you can see, it’s been a slow and steady climb:

Here are the top 10 countries that read Architect This City (also from Google Analytics):

Here are the 5 most read posts from the last year (notice a trend?):

1. Transitioning from architecture to development

2. How Toronto became cool

3. What real estate developers do and why I became one

4. The future of the architecture profession

5. A new model for the architecture profession

And here’s where I sit in terms of followers and subscribers:

• Twitter ( @donnelly_b ): 1,364 followers

• Facebook ( ATC Page ): 152 likes (relatively new addition)

• Tumblr: 2,592 followers

• Email Subscribers : 871

When I started blogging, I already had a few hundred Twitter followers, but probably less than 100 Tumblr followers, and absolutely 0 email subscribers. Interestingly enough, it took almost 11 months to get to 250 Tumblr followers, but only another 3 days to break the 2,000 mark. So these things definitely snowball.

But the numbers really only tell one side of the story.

Over the past year I’ve had the privilege of meeting a ton of great people as a result of me putting myself out there publicly. In fact, it has now reached the point where I just can’t keep up with all the requests for coffee. I hate saying no (or forgetting about the email), but there’s only so much time in the day. Regardless though, I’m always flattered and entirely grateful that somebody actually wants to hear what I have to say. So I try and take as many meetings as I can.

Blogging everyday is certainly a lot of work. But it’s no different than keeping any other routine (like going to the gym) and there are countless benefits to doing so. If you’ve ever thought about starting a blog, I would encourage you to give it a try. Once you get rolling, it actually becomes hard to stop.

As I approach one year of ATC and as people like Lockhart Steele (founder of Curbed  and Eater ) return to personal blogging , I wanted to share something that’s been on my mind for almost this entire last year. And that is, should ATC just be a personal blog or should there be some greater end goal?

Right now it’s a bit of a hybrid. It’s hosted at brandondonnelly.com, but along the way I created a somewhat independent Architect This City brand . The most obvious option is to continue to grow ATC and turn it into something like Curbed , This Big City , or Sustainable Cities Collective . In fact, a good friend of mine emailed me a few weeks ago and asked me why I’m not doing that.

But to do that would require a lot more time and many more posts a day. It would also mean more restrictions on what I can, or should, write about. Personal blogs are, well, personal. Branded blogs typically require a focus. Today I live comfortably in between both of those worlds. I write almost exclusively about city building, but I introduce many personal touches. Architect This City has become my personal brand.

In many ways, I feel like this tension is a natural one. With the rise of social media and the belief that “ everybody is their own media company ”, more and more people are finding themselves debating whether or not they should position themselves personally online or create an independent brand.

At the same time, blogging is evolutionary. It’s a laboratory. And most of the benefits are entirely indirect. Writing helps you get your ideas on “paper” and sort through them publicly. And sometimes that leads to unexpected outcomes. I mean, in the case of Lockhart, he started blogging about his Lower East Side neighborhood and that gave birth to Curbed, which he then sold to Vox Media .

So as much as I try and plan out where I think blogging everyday could take me, it’s also good to sit back, enjoy the ride, and just see where it takes me.