Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1547

I was browsing my Tumblr feed this morning and I found a link to an interview with Marc Andreessen posted by Fred Wilson.

I liked Marc’s response to a question relating to people’s love of cars and so I decided to post it to Facebook . I then received an email notification from Fred Wilson’s AVC blog titled “ The New Freedom. " Turns out that he liked the quote as well. With so much love for this quote, I figured it was worth reposting here.

The interviewer started a question to Marc with, “But people love their cars.” This is his response:

"Ask a kid. Take teenagers 20 years ago and ask them would they rather have a car or a computer? And the answer would have been 100% of the time they’d rather have a car, because a car represents freedom, right?

Today, ask kids if they’d rather have a smartphone or a car if they had to pick and 100% would say smartphones. Because smartphones represent freedom. There’s a huge social behavior reorientation that’s already happening. And you can see it through that. And I’m not saying nobody can own cars. If people want to own cars, they can own cars. But there is a new generation coming where freedom is defined by “I can do anything I want, whenever I want. If I want a ride, I get a ride, but I don’t have to worry. I don’t have to make car payments. I don’t have to worry about insurance. I have complete flexibility.” That is freedom too.”

This ties in well with the return to city centers and downtowns. When people live in walkable neighbourhoods, cars can be more of a liability (car payments, insurance, parking, and so on). In fact, I think of them as a liability all around. Banks think of them as an asset, but I like my assets to increase in value.

The other interesting point that Marc makes about cars is that supply and demand are not very well matched using the current model. If you only use your car to drive to and from work, it sits idle 90% of the time. This is where the sharing economy comes into play: How can people better optimize that 90%?

My smartphone certainly doesn’t sit idle 90% of the time.

I’ve written before on how Toronto needs more autonomy and how I think there’s a huge opportunity to create a Third Coast Megaregion spanning from Chicago all the way to Quebec City—a region that could compete with the rising urban agglomerations of Asia and elsewhere.

The central theme around these arguments is that there’s clear evidence in support of a return to city-states .

Today, the 388 metro areas in the United States make up 84 percent of the nation’s population and an astonishing 91 percent of gross domestic product. The top 100 metro areas alone total two-thirds of the U.S. population and three-quarters of GDP.

And the reason why I say “return” is because, if you think about it, this is largely how the world used to operate before the shift towards nation-states. 

Ironically, given the nature of our high-tech, super-connected age, the future will look more and more like the city-states that ruled the world for millennia, from the days of Athens, Sparta, Carthage, and Rome, and that were last dominant 500 years ago, in such places as Venice and Florence, before the formation of most modern nation-states. Today, the shining example is Singapore, the city-state of 5.2 million people that, all by itself, has become an Asian tiger. The city-state of the future will not be sovereign, of course, but instead will act largely independently. “What we are experiencing is a metro-centered driving force of change. This is the center of the economic universe,” says James Brooks, program director of the National League of Cities. “The United States is not one national economy but a series of smaller metropolitan economies.”

If you’re interested in this topic, here’s the article by Michael Hirsh from which the above excerpts are taken. It’s called, “The Nations’s Future Depends on Its Cities, Not on Washington.”

Lately I’ve been learning a lot about wind and how certain building forms can create dramatically different microclimates.

In light of this, I’ve gained a new appreciation for the 30 St Mary Axe tower in London (colloquially known as “the Gherkin”). I’ve always been a fan and I was well aware of its sustainability initiatives, but I didn’t fully grasp how much wind played a role in its design.

Because of its cylindrical shape and the fact that the tower tapers as you move towards the top, the bulk of the wind hitting the building either flows around it or gets pushed upwards, towards the sky. This is in contrast to a typical square or rectangular building where the bulk of the wind often gets pushed down towards street level.

The benefit of this is that it obviously creates a more pleasant environment for pedestrians at street level. However, in addition to this, it also means that the wind loads against the building were brought down to a minimum and so the structure of the building could also be reduced. 

This is the kind of architecture I love: architecture that performs.