Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1479

If you’re a regular reader of Architect This City, you’ll know that I’m a supporter of congestion and road pricing . Any valuable good or service, such as a road, that’s offered for all intents and purposes as free, will never be able to keep up with demand. You need to price it.

However, the political risk associated with implementing something like this has made it such that few cities around the world have done it. London and Singapore are the two most common examples.

The more populist solution is to simply build more roads and highways, even though study after study shows that this doesn’t work. If it did, we would have already solved the problem of traffic congestion. And we most certainly haven’t.

Which is why I’m excited about a new startup that recently launched called Urban Engines . Their solution is twofold. It’s based on incentives and on treating people and cars in cities as sensors that feed back data into their network. Here’s a brief video. If you can’t see it below, click here .

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaCp5Tl-uAc]

The data piece is almost a no-brainer (provided they can get the data). The more data we can collect about the way people and cars move in a city, the more they’ll be able to optimize and manage the flows. The possibilities are endless.

But what I found really interesting is their incentives based approach. Typical road pricing methods are, one could argue, a punitive approach. As traffic increases so does the price of the road. (I like to look at it as efficient pricing.)

With Urban Engines, their approach is the opposite: it’s to reward people–through money and lotteries–for driving during off peak times. It’s smart because selling a reward program to cities will be a lot easier than selling a new charge.

Overall, this a great example of how startups are stepping up to solve some of our most important societal problems. For more information on Urban Engines, check out their website and this writeup on CityLab .

Spacing Vancouver recently published an interesting look at Vancouver’s West End neighborhood . And it led me into a deep dive of the neighborhood’s recently adopted Community Plan (November 2013). So today I’d like to talk a bit about the neighborhood and also their plans for managing growth over the next 30 years.

Officially established in 1969, the West End spent the next 3 decades as the most densely populated area of Vancouver. But starting in the 2000s with the development of high-rise condo towers in neighbouring areas such as Downtown South to the southeast and Triangle West and Coal Harbour to the northeast, the West End lost this position. Today it’s the 4th most densely populated neighborhood in the city.

The bulk of the housing (77%) is in the form of apartments with 5 or more storeys. And 81% of residents are renters. This is well above the city average of 52% and is likely a reflection of the neighborhood’s younger demographic (25-29 years old is the largest segment) and its position as a landing ground for new Vancouverites.

But as a large central area with exceptional access to natural amenities, I would imagine that development pressures are and will continue to be significant. To plan for this growth, the city wants to intensify the central areas of the neighborhood with low-rise and mid-rise form and the periphery with high-rise towers. And already this is happening with developments such as the 62-storey Shangri-La Hotel .

Here’s an image depicting their 30 year vision:

But what stands out for me in the Plan is Vancouver’s continued commitment to laneway intensification. The Plan refers to it as “Laneway 2.0” and they specifically mention the opportunity to redevelop the West End’s wide laneways with “ground oriented infill housing.” Below is an example of how this could be done on a small residential lot, but the Plan also includes images for how the same might be accomplished on underutilized apartment building sites.

Laneway housing is a topic I’ve written about extensively on ATC . Toronto is absolutely behind on this. And as I’ve argued before, we need to be looking at urban intensification across all scales, from low-rise to high-rise, if we want to create inclusive and vibrant cities. With the West End Community Plan, Vancouver seems to be doing just that.

Yesterday I came across a post called, The Workplace of the Future , by venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz. In it, he references a book called, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace , and talks about the changing nature of how and where we work.

What’s immediately interesting to think about is how recent the modern workplace really is:

The information worker is a relatively new concept. Peter Drucker coined the term in the 50s. By then companies had already developed new ways of housing information workers. The very first information workers were accountants hunched over “Bob Crachit” desks in the back rooms of factories. Booming railroad companies demanded more organization and created offices within the new skyscrapers along the Chicago skyline. With these new offices came stacks of paper and folios, and cabinets in which to file them. Then, the Mad Men wrought an era of typewriters and mahogany corner offices. Next, Bell Labs invented the suburban office park, moving offices from the city as part of post-war suburbanization and in the 70s, Herman Miller crafted the now-ubiquitous cubicle, which was called the “Action Office” when it launched. Oh, the irony.

It’s also interesting to think about how quickly things seem to be changing. Up until quite recently, everybody seemed to be singing the virtues of the open office plan. However, today, more and more companies are shying away from that kind of space planning :

In 2011, the organizational psychologist Matthew Davis reviewed more than a hundred studies about office environments. He found that, though open offices often fostered a symbolic sense of organizational mission, making employees feel like part of a more laid-back, innovative enterprise, they were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction. Compared with standard offices, employees experienced more uncontrolled interactions, higher levels of stress, and lower levels of concentration and motivation. When David Craig surveyed some thirty-eight thousand workers, he found that interruptions by colleagues were detrimental to productivity, and that the more senior the employee, the worse she fared.

Today, the most radical changes are appearing in startup offices around the world and are being driven by a desire to have spaces that embody their unique corporate cultures. This means everything from cool brick-and-beam architecture to bike racks in the office to flexible rooms and spaces that encourage mobility throughout the day. And to further reinforce these cultures, companies are creating positions like Chief Culture Officer and Chief Vibe Officer.

But as I’ve said before on ATC, the other big shift is simply location and the return to cities. More and more startups, for example, are choosing San Francisco over Silicon Valley and it’s because the city is where young people want to live. It’s increasingly where the talent is. This has already brought about many changes in workplace design, but it likely bring about many more. 

Image: Airbnb’s San Francisco Office