Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1560

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.

According to a recent report called Building a Digital City , which I found via Fred Wilson’s blog , tech is now the second largest job sector in New York City behind financial services (which includes real estate). There are an estimated 262,000 tech workers in the city earning wages in excess of $30 billion.

This is a really interesting stat that speaks to the diversity of New York’s economy and the ability for it to continually reinvent itself. But what I found particularly interesting, was the following comment by Fred Wilson :

“And the reason tech is growing so fast in NYC is that it is embedding itself in all of these other industries. It’s not entirely clear to me whether Gilt is a tech company or a fashion/retail company, it is not clear to me whether ZocDoc is a tech company or a health care company, it is not clear to me whether Codecademy is a tech company or an education company.”

This is very much the way I think about so called tech companies today. I recently had a Rotman colleague say to me that he felt the startup world was becoming saturated. Everyone is now seemingly working on some new app.

But I like to think of it slightly differently. As Fred’s comment above suggests, a lot of startups today aren’t purely tech companies. They’re just out to solve a problem and it just so happens that technology and the internet are creating all sorts of opportunities for new solutions.

I also read a blog called Platform Connected and the author put it like this:

“In the future, every company will be a tech company. We already see this change around us as companies move to restructure their business models in a way that uses data to create value. We are moving from linear to networked business models, from dumb pipes to intelligent platforms. All businesses will need to move to this new model at some point, or risk being disrupted by platforms that do.”

So there you have it. Software really is eating the world.