Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1511

As a follow up to my recent post called “ Disrupting everything ”, I thought I would share this talk by venture capitalist Chris Dixon at Y Combinator’s Startup School. In it, he talks about why good ideas often seem like bad ideas at first.

Chris frames the discussion by saying that when you have a good idea—that everyone else thinks is a bad idea—you effectively know a secret. But by a secret, it’s really that you believe something that nobody else believes to be true. So much so that when you try and tell everyone else about your secret, they all think you’re crazy, which is frustrating because it seems so obvious to you.

He then provides a number of characteristics that can help you identity good ideas that seem like bad ideas:

• Powerful people dismiss them as toys.

• They unbundle the functions done by others.

• Did it originate as a hobby?

• Do they challenge social norms?

Now, he’s obviously talking about startups, but I think the framework can apply outside of the technology world. I think it can apply to cities. 

To give you one example, let’s consider laneway housing. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that I’m a big supporter of laneway housing in Toronto. But that it’s something the city generally does not support.

However, there are laneway houses being built and they’re being built by architects and progressive urbanists. Some might even call it a hobby, because it remains a pretty tough business model at the moment.

Personally, I think one of the main reasons the city is unwilling to formally allow laneway housing is because it challenges social norms. I’ve read the staff reports and the meeting minutes: people think it’s weird to live off a laneway. In fact, in one case somebody asserted that since laneways are generally undesirable urban spaces, anybody who would want to live off one is almost surely a social degenerate.

But there’s absolutely nothing inherent to human beings that says we can’t live off a 5m wide street or that we can’t have a “house located behind another house.” Those are simply constructs we’ve created for ourselves.

So the next time you hear about an idea that you think seems like a bad idea, ask yourself: Is it really a bad idea or does it just make me feel uncomfortable because it contravenes the norm? Taking yourself out of your comfort zone is a good thing. It’s how we grow.

Warning: This post turns into a bit of a rant near the end :)

Since 2009 (well, much earlier actually), Toronto has been trying to figure out what to do with the eastern portion of the elevated Gardiner Expressway (the portion from Jarvis Street to the Don Valley Parkway). The process used to help make this decision is called an Environmental Assessment (or EA) and that’s what is currently underway. But it’s a painstakingly slow process.

Recently though, a third public meeting was held in order to solicit feedback on the various design solutions and so there’s been a renewed interest in this city building issue. Since the beginning, my position has been that we should tear it down. And in this post I’m going to explain why I think that is exactly what the city should do. 

But first, a bit of background.

The EA started by identifying four “Alternative Solutions” to the problem of the Gardiner East. And they are: 

1. Maintain the elevated expressway (Basically do nothing)

2. Improve the urban fabric while maintaining the existing expressway

3. Replace with a new above or below grade expressway

4. Remove the elevated expressway and build a new boulevard

They then went out and assigned these solutions to a bunch of architects and designers—whom are some of the world’s best—and asked them to come up with specific design proposals. These proposals are available online and that’s part of what the public has been commenting on.

City Council seems to generally want the Gardiner down, but there are some naysayers. 

Rob Ford doesn’t want it removed  (option #1) because it’ll add to driver commute times (no surprise there) and Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong is worried that tearing it down will just lead to another wall—a wall of waterfront condos.

But I think these views are terribly shortsighted and I’ve made my position clear by submitting a formal response through the City’s public engagement portal . To explain my view here on Architect This City, I thought the best way would be to simply share my answers. So here they are.

What do you like?

[slideshare id=22945545&sc=no]

I can honestly say that I love my city. I was born in this city. And I was raised in this city. This city has given me so much, which is why I feel so compelled to try and give back to it. It’s also the reason why I’m first to defend it when people talk about how great this or that city’s waterfront is and how much ours sucks. I mean, I know ours sucks. But we’re fixing it.

We have a lot of great plans in the pipeline for our waterfront, but there’s a remaining obstacle: our elevated expressway. Boston buried theirs. And San Francisco transformed theirs into a magnificent public space. What are we going to do with ours? Now is the time to be bold and not settle for the status quo. That’s too easy. We need to remove the eastern portion of the Gardiner Expressway today and the design proposal by Field Operations offers a brilliant way to do it.

Not only is removing the Gardiner the most cost effective solution ($470M, versus $870M to maintain, $865M to improve and $1.4 billion to replace), but it’s also the most desirable from a city building standpoint.

The Gardiner is not the only barrier. We also have the rail lines. So while repurposing the Gardiner might be doable in isolation, we simply have too much friction standing between us and the lake. We need to remove the barriers that we can. It’s for this precise reason that Field Operations spent so much time worrying about the north-south connections. And I think their “architectural sleeves” are a really interesting way to solve this problem.

At the same time, timing is an important consideration. As the surrounding East Bayfront area develops, it’s only going to become more costly to remove this stretch of the Gardiner. If we’re going to do this, now is the time.

Finally, I think it’s important to note that Field Operations is the landscape architecture firm behind the wildly successful High Line in New York. So what we have is a firm that made a name for itself repurposing an old elevated rail line, telling us that our own elevated structure is worthless and uninspiring. Think about that for a minute. Should we really be spending more money to salvage the Gardiner East?

What concerns do you have?

That we’re getting hung up on commute times as one of the key decision making criteria. It’s a red herring. Let’s face it: irrespective of whether we tear down the eastern portion of the Gardiner or not, Toronto is fucked from a transportation and infrastructure standpoint. We’re sitting on decades of disinvestment and some of the longest commute times in North America.

Field Operations put it well when they said that the tearing down of the Gardiner East needs to be thought of as a paradigm shift. We have a 25-year transportation plan waiting to be funded. Let’s go out and do that instead of trying to sacrifice our waterfront so that suburban commuters can save a few minutes. Let’s give them a shiny new train instead. They’ll like that.

Either that or Torontonians need to stop talking about how great Chicago’s waterfront is, because we can do it too. Now is our chance.

What advice do you have for the Project Team as the study moves into the next phase?

Don’t listen to Rob Ford.

Last year when I started working on Dirt —which was really my first startup—I had a number of people say things to me like: “Wow, that’s quite a change, going from real estate into tech.” But that’s not the way I saw and see it.

I don’t think you can silo industries like that anymore. Technology is touching everything. Some would even go so far as to say that every company in the world is, or will be, a software and technology company .

The way I looked at it was that I was starting a technology-enabled real estate company. I was hoping to leverage the internet to improve the way things are done in an existing industry. Of course, by improve I really mean disrupt—which is arguably the biggest buzzword in the tech community today :

"Disruption is not so much a trend as an especially lucrative world philosophy favored by technophilic entrepreneurs. It’s the only path towards progress. If you’re not disrupting something you might as well go collect kindling and roast raccoon meat in the hills of Cupertino."

A good example of how disruptive innovation is reaching all sectors of the economy, including government, is the New Haven-based startup called SeeClickFix (which I discovered via This Big City ). What it does is allow citizens to report non-emergencies (like potholes) to their local government. Governments can then respond and manage these tasks. (Sorry Rob Ford. Now you don’t need to return all those phone calls.)

But moreover, I think it shows that technology is not only going to disrupt business and industry, it’s going to disrupt the way cities function and the way we live. I don’t know what that’s ultimately going to look like, but I can already feel it underway.

Albert Wenger, of venture capital firm Union Square Ventures, recently argued— in a talk at DLD —that we are still in the midst of a transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. And I buy that. With every new disruption, we’re one step closer to completely making that transition. But we’re not quite there yet.

The Industrial Age drove people out of cities. It made cities dirty and undesirable. But in the Information Age, cities are damn important and it’s where people want to be. Look at all the people rushing back to urban centers.

So if technology has the power to disrupt business, industry, and cities, I suggest we stop just thinking about technology in isolation and remember the powerful words of Marshall McLuhan: “ The medium is the message. " Don’t just focus on the obvious or you’ll miss a tidal wave of change happening beneath the surface.