Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1458

Most people would agree that branding is a powerful and important exercise in the world of business. We recognize that brand equity is something that pays dividends in the future.

When you walk around a city with a Starbucks, Tim Hortons, or some other coffee cup in hand, you are sending signals about who you are as a person and consumer. So, you could argue that you’re consuming the cup, as much as you are consuming the coffee.

But one area that still feels like it’s in its infancy is place branding. That is, the branding of nations, regions, cities, and places. I’ve talked a lot about the business of cities  and how impressions are created around cities , but I’ve never explicitly talked about place branding.

However, it is an area on the rise. Monocle has written extensively about the importance of nation branding and there are firms, such as Vancouver-based Resonance, that now specialize in the strategy and branding of places.

Here’s a short 5 minute video that they prepared talking about place branding and their approach to it. If you can’t see the video below, click here .

//player.vimeo.com/video/66920801

But at the same time, there are more grassroot ways in which a place brand can emerge. Think about the number of times Jay-Z has referred to himself as the Brooklyn boy or Drake has promoted Toronto in one of his videos. It’s hard to measure the impact of these sorts of things, but I am sure there is one.

Here’s another example – a 4 minute video of Drake talking about why he loves Toronto. Click here if you can’t see it below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3TrbGEJbio?rel=0]

Recently, you may have heard that Drake is about to give Toronto a new moniker : The 6. Some think it is in honor of our two main area codes 41 6 and 6 47, and I think that’s probably a good guess.

But whatever the reason, I thought it was an interesting exercise in place branding. So I decided to partner with Toronto-based design firm Badd Press and make a “The 6” t-shirt (shown at the top of this post). You can get yours for $30 by visiting shopATC .

Yesterday a colleague at the office sent around this Globe and Mail article talking about a Vancouver family of 4 (plus one cat) who live in a 1,000 square foot loft near downtown that they purchased in 2003 for $269,900. There weren’t really any photos of the place, but the article makes it sound like they have 3 beds crammed into one room. (I wonder how the parents ever manage to have sex. There are better ways to lay out 1,000 sf.)

In any event, the point of the article is that there’s a growing number of families who are clinging to the downtown lifestyle that they’ve grown accustomed to and are refusing to follow the path of a conventional suburban house – regardless of how tight their current quarters might be. It’s happening in Toronto ( here’s an article from the Toronto Star and here’s a post I wrote) and it’s happening in New York :

A recent New York Times article on a similar trend noted that the number of white professionals with one or more children living in one-bedroom condo units in that city had jumped by almost a third between 2000 to 2006. Prof. Andrew Beveridge, from Queens College of the City University of New York, said the pattern was showing up in other expensive American cities. In Toronto, the 2011 National Household Survey showed there are about 72,000 families living in 71,500 units in buildings with five or more storeys – undoubtedly many of them the new, tiny condos proliferating there.

To some this might sound crazy. I mean, why would a dual income family–such as the one in Vancouver–subject themselves to a smaller space when they could easily afford a bigger place somewhere else? Isn’t that the dream – to have a big house?

The answer is that these families are considering–in addition to the direct costs of a bigger place–both the indirect costs of living further away from the core (such as longer commute times) and the inevitable lifestyle changes that would happen should they move out from their downtown neighborhoods. The urban lifestyle is different.

But what I find interesting about this phenomenon is that if this trend continues (and I think it will), we’re going to have a new generation of people in North America who grew up in apartments, condos, and lofts, and don’t have the same biases around single family houses and suburban living. To them, an apartment will be a perfectly normal place to raise a family.

After yesterday’s post about Toronto , I had a friend ask me on Facebook what it is exactly that I think happened to make this city so much cooler . Was it because of one iconic building like Toronto’s new City Hall? Was it because of our recent condo boom? Or was it something else? What changed exactly?

My response was that it’s a generational thing. Let me explain.

Toronto used to have the reputation of being a boring and staid city, and that’s because it was a boring and staid city. In the immediate post-war years, Toronto was overwhelmingly Protestant and the immigration policies at the time were specifically designed to exclude anyone who wasn’t white and from Western Europe or America. If you were Asian, Southern or Eastern Europe (especially Jewish), then you were at the bottom of the entry list.

Here’s how Prime Minister Mackenzie King felt in 1947:

Prime Minister Mackenzie King reflected the national mood when he observed that “the people of Canada do not wish to make a fundamental alteration in the character of their population through mass immigration.” Discrimination and ethnic selectivity in immigration would remain. “Canada is perfectly within her rights in selecting the persons whom we regard as desirable future citizens. It is not a ‘fundamental human right’ of any alien to enter Canada. It is a privilege. It is a matter of domestic policy.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, Canada started to slowly open up, but only because it needed to. It was in need of labour to fuel its robust post-war economy. Reluctantly, Canada began to look for workers in places like Italy. Initially, Canada had hoped to attract more northern and Germanic-like Italians, but with the European economy picking up, it was the southern Italians who came in the greatest number. In the 1950s, Canada’s Italian population jumped from around 150,000 to 450,000.

But this influx of espresso drinking Catholics was hard for Toronto to adapt to at first. They were so alien compared to Toronto’s population at the time. They wanted to do weird things like eat outside on patios, and that just wasn’t the way we did things here in Protestant and conservative Toronto. We ate inside. That’s where food belonged.

In the 1970s, multiculturalism finally became a federal mandate  and Toronto’s population took off , quickly surpassing that of Montreal. In the end, we were left with the most multicultural city on the planet.

My best friend’s father – who’s also in the real estate development business – once told me that when he first moved to Toronto in the 1970s the real estate business was virtually run by two groups of people: Italians and Jews. In other words, the people building our city were the people that we were once afraid to let come here in the first place.

But in their quest for wealth and a better life (I have so much respect for people who are able to build something from nothing), these new Canadians also reshaped Toronto both physically (through building) and socially (by doing crazy things like eat outside on patios). They were not only building new lives for themselves, they were also rebuilding Toronto. They helped us grow up and not be so stuffy. And I absolutely believe that we’re a better city because of it.

However, I think the true impact of their efforts is happening right now through the next generation – their children. Millennials and Generation Xs (at least the younger ones) don’t remember when Italians were considered aliens. They remember growing up with martini bars on College Street (which is the original Little Italy for those of you unfamiliar with Toronto). They know a different and cooler version of this city.

But most importantly, those subsequent generations are now old enough (and have a lot more generational wealth behind them) to reshape this city even further. And with much deeper roots here, they have the passion to do just that. When I went to graduate school in the US, my parents were afraid I would never come back. That’s what they told me. But the more I traveled and the more I lived outside of Toronto, the more I wanted to come back.

Just like those early wave of pioneering aliens who got us to dine al fresco and taught us that if we shop on Sundays we’re not going to go straight to hell, I feel like I too want to shape this city. I want to make it even better. No city is perfect, but if there’s something you don’t like about Toronto, then here’s my advice to you: Go change it. I can tell you it’s possible, because new immigrants with no money managed to do it.

The first person who can tell me (in the comments below) which restaurant the patio shown above belongs to will get a free Architect This City t-shirt . If you’re from Toronto, this should be an easy one.

Note: Most of the stats for this post were taken from this great research paper .

Top Image: Wikipedia