Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1481

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

Today at the office we took a time out during lunch to plant vegetables on the rooftop of our building. Using 100 EarthBoxes , we planted everything from lettuce to hot peppers. It was a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to fresh salads throughout the summer.

I only recently learned about EarthBoxes through a colleague at work, who has a significant amount of experience in the world of urban agriculture. The way the boxes work is that they have an aeration screen at the bottom that serves to create a reservoir for water. You then fill it with water regularly and, through capillary action, the soil is kept properly watered with minimal maintenance. They’re explicitly designed for growing on balconies, terraces and rooftops.

I was so impressed by the boxes today that I came home and bought 3 margarita lime green EarthBoxes for my own terrace. They’re only $30 if you buy 3 at a time. I think urban farming is something that we’re going to need to do more of in the future and so I wanted to give it a try myself. It’s healthy and environmentally sustainable, and I’m sure everything will taste great.

I plan to start with lettuces, kale, cucumbers and hot peppers in my terrace garden.

The journey of Architect This City has been an organic one. When I first started blogging regularly in September 2013, I had no plan in mind other than that I wanted to write about cities. I had just come off working full-time on my startup, Dirt , where I had gotten into the habit of writing and I enjoyed it immensely. So I wanted to continue.

Cities seemed like the perfect umbrella to capture all of my passions: architecture, design, planning, real estate, and even technology. And so I rebranded brandondonnelly.com—which I had already been using as a microblog—and slapped the title “Cities” on it. (That personal microblog has since become brandondonnelly.me .)

Then, after a few months of blogging, I was having drinks with a good friend of mine and telling her about my new daily discipline. She immediately asked me what it was called and, when I replied by saying that I didn’t really have a name for it, she insisted that I create one immediately. Since she’s one of the brightest people I know, I gave it some serious thought. A few days later, Architect This City was born.

I liked the idea of having a distinct brand, because then it meant it could grow beyond just a personal blog. It could become a real community of people passionate and committed to building better cities. And that ultimately became the goal as I got deeper and deeper into writing.

Since that time last year, I’ve had friends guest blog on ATC . It has gone on to become syndicated on Mobility Lab and Urban Times . And it has been featured by the Guardian in the UK has one of the big city blogs in the world . But even more exciting are the moments when somebody tells me, either face-to-face or through a quick message, that they’re really enjoying ATC and that they read it daily. That’s what keeps me going.

Lately though, I’ve been thinking about what’s next. What’s the purpose of ATC? What’s the why ? I thought about writing a manifesto of sorts, but that just seemed unnecessarily onerous. So I sat down, primarily on the subway, with Evernote , and I wrote a purpose statement for ATC:

To promote the building of beautiful and environmentally sustainable cities that offer strong economic opportunities and a high quality of life.

That’s really what I believe cities should do. They should be enjoyable and beautiful places to live life and they should empower people to get richer. At the same time, we need to be aware that as more and more of the world’s 7 billion people move into cities, the need for environmentally sustainable solutions is only going to increase.

So those are the kinds of discussions I hope we can have on ATC. Regular scheduled programming will continue as usual, but hopefully now the why is clearer. If you have any feedback on the above statement, I would love to hear from you in the comment section below.