Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 195

The years seem to only go by faster. December, in particular, is always a hectic month with social commitments. There never seems to be enough time. Then, all of a sudden, everything stops. Billions of people around the world slow down and unplug for the holidays. I'm the kind of person who is allergic to free time. I always want to be doing and accomplishing something, and that has consequences every now and then where I run out of steam. So Christmas is a good time for me in multiple ways.

It's been an eventful year. I left Slate to focus 100% on Globizen. Bianca and I got married in the summer, and then travelled around the mediterranean for a few weeks in August. One Delisle progressed substantially (we poured the level 10 slab right before the holidays). Project Bench received its zoning approvals . We completed Parkview Mountain House in Park City ( bookings are now open ). And we also laid the groundwork for a bunch of new projects and real estate strategies that I'm really excited about for 2025.

But until then, I'm going to enjoy celebrating Christmas and the holiday season. I'm highly suspect of any religion created by people (I guess that's all of them), but I do love celebrating Christmas and I do appreciate my upbringing more and more the older I get. Bianca and I went to church when we were in Mallorca in the summer and, even though we understood exactly 0% of the mass and it was a sauna inside the cathedral, we both enjoyed it. Later today, I'll be going to church with my mom.

I don't love the shopping part of Christmas -- it can be stressful. A simpler Christmas is probably better. I come back to something that Justin Welsh recently said about modern luxury. He defined it as the ability to "think clearly, sleep deeply, move slowly, and live quietly in a world designed to prevent all four." These are likely good things to focus on at this time of year with your closest family and friends. Merry Christmas and happy holidays, everyone.

For the last few weeks, I've been playing around with a new social platform called Rodeo . It runs on the Base blockchain (which is an Ethereum Layer 2 chain), but you don't really need to be aware of this or understand how it works behind the scenes. If you've ever used Instagram, then you will already know how to use this platform. You can upload photos, scroll through photos, and heart photos.

But what's unique is that you can also "collect" photos. This requires a very small amount of Ether (0.0001 ETH), which works out to somewhere around ~$0.33 today. But there's also the option of just buying credits with your credit card and bypassing the need for an external crypto wallet. Whichever option you choose, you are minting an NFT to your wallet every time you "collect" a post. This is whether you are aware of it or not.

What this then does is send the creator reward money. Every time someone collects/mints a post, the creator of that post earns 0.00005 ETH (~$0.16 today). And already, there are users on the platform who have collected thousands of dollars in rewards as a result of their posts. It is also possible to earn referral rewards. If I collect a post and someone sees that I did it and then collects it, I earn a percentage. I can also send direct referral links (similar to how people on IG share posts via DM).

So despite looking a lot like Instagram, this is a fundamentally different platform under the hood. There is an embedded economy where artists and creators can get paid directly by collectors. At the same time, the platform itself collects a fee from interactions and transactions and so, in theory, there's no need for them to turn to advertising and selling our personal information.

There's also no reason that any user needs to remain wed to Rodeo. When you collect a post, an NFT is minted and it goes directly into your crypto wallet (assuming you've connected your external wallet). That crypto wallet is yours and you can do whatever you want with its contents, including selling the NFTs on some other marketplace or gifting them to a friend or family member for Christmas.

So other than the fact that the biggest audiences are on platforms like Instagram and X, I'd much rather share my photos on a platform like Rodeo, where I have full control. This is also why I switched my blogging platform from Wordpress to Paragraph and why I've started using Warpcast alongside X . It's the same idea. This has always been the promise of blockchains, but it's amazing to see it playing out with all of these new platforms.

I have no idea if Rodeo will ever surpass Instagram as the dominant photo sharing platform. But I have a high degree of conviction that our online lives will eventually migrate onchain. It's for this reason that I largely don't care about the daily fluctuations of ETH or BTC; I'm far more interested in the software that is getting built out on top of these chains. That is what will generate the demand for these cryptocurrencies long-term.

We've spoken before about Saudi Arabia's "The Line" project. At first, I wasn't sure if it was real , but it is, and it's now under construction. We then spoke about whether a 170-kilometer line is an optimal urban form for a city, and the answer, according to this study , is that it's not. The problem with a line is that it actually maximizes the average distance between inhabitants. This makes sense because you could have two people living and working 170 kilometers apart.

On the other hand, if you maintain the same built-up area and take the opposite kind of geometry -- a circle -- you actually minimize the average distance between inhabitants. It's for this reason that older cities (the ones that weren't masterplanned) have tended to grow radially and not linearly (unless there were geographic features forcing it to grow in a certain way). So there is a strong argument to be made that The Line is a suboptimal plan for a new city.

But here's what's interesting: many cities already follow a somewhat similar approach. They don't do it as absolutely as The Line, but they do it in the way that they zone for higher densities and a mix of uses only on their main corridors. Example :

View post on X →

This creates a similar kind of effect when it comes to walkability, ability to support higher-order transit, and overall agglomeration economies. All of the urban activity gets concentrated along one corridor, maximizing the distance between people. In extreme examples, you also get inhabitants that are forced into different mobility options. The corridor is supposed to be transit-oriented, but all of the surrounding areas are really only conducive to driving. This creates a mismatch that is less an ideal for everyone.

So this post is our regular reminder that, when it comes to planning cities and bringing people together, circles tend to be better than lines. This doesn't necessarily mean that you need to adopt some sort of radial street network, à la French model. (Although I'm now thinking about the effects of this vs. an orthogonal grid.) It just means that urban density works a lot better when it's clustered, especially around transit. And generally, circles make for better clusters.