Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1551

It’s no secret that TAS is working on a project in the Kingston Rd & Victoria Park area, technically known as Birch Cliff . As a result of this, I’ve been spending time getting to know this neighbourhood as well as the adjacent Upper Beaches area, which I truthfully didn’t know very well before.

As someone who grew up in the west end of Toronto and never lived east of the DVP before, my sense of the place was limited. But I have to say that I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what a lot of people would simply call Scarborough. 

Kingston Road is a thriving main street with lots of great local businesses, as well as a spattering of the usual chains - such as Starbucks - that arguably legitimize the arrival of a neighbourhood. On top of this, the next major block south is Queen Street East and the Beaches neighbourhood.

So to all of my downtown friends, go hop on your bike and check it out.

Here’s an interesting graph I found on Businessweek that outlines retail sales growth in America over the past decade:

What’s interesting is not that furniture stores suffered during the housing crisis of 2008-2009 - this much is obvious - but that there seems to be a few other trends at work.

For one, warehouse club sales have gone from being the highest growth to the slowest growth sector (excluding, for a second, department stores). The urbanist in me wonders if this has to do with “ The Great Inversion .” That is, the trend towards more and more young people choosing to live in inner city neighbourhoods - where warehouse club penetration is low - as opposed to the suburbs.

The other notable sector is department stores. It’s the only sector that seemingly hasn’t been able to rebound along with the rest of the economy. I think this points to another larger trend at play: there are structural problems with the department store model . They’ve been beaten up by category killers , the internet and the fact that individual retailers seem to want to manage their own brands and experiences from top to bottom.

I know that for me, personally, I rarely shop at department stores. What about you?

Dutch architecture firm OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) has a subtle way of being incredibly subversive in their architecture.

The recently completed 1.9 million square foot Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE) building is presently making the rounds online and I personally find it incredibly striking. It has the same timelessness about it that makes me love Mies’ Toronto Dominion Centre .

But it wasn’t until I read the description on OMA’s website that I decided to blog about it. Here’s the first paragraph:

"For millennia, the solid building stands on a solid base; it is an image that has survived modernity. Typically, the base anchors a structure and connects it emphatically to the ground. The essence of the stock market is speculation: it is based on capital, not gravity.

All of these factors suggest an architectural invention: our project is a building with a floating base. As if it is lifted by the same speculative euphoria that drives the market, the former base has crept up the tower to become a raised podium.”

It’s a powerful, yet potentially controversial, symbol, as one could argue that efficient markets should , at least in theory, operate not on ramped speculation but upon fundamental values. However, if markets are an expectations game, perhaps you could simply argue that the building symbolizes a perceived bright future.

Either way, very interesting.