Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 202

The obvious response to sea level rise and storm surges is to try and keep the water out by building things like walls. But there are other options. At the southern tip of Staten Island, New York, for example, a new near-shore breakwater system was just completed this past October.

Designed by landscape architect Kate Orff of SCAPE, the project cost $111 million, runs about 2,400 linear feet, and is designed to "break" future storm surge waves as they approach the coast. This won't completely eliminate the risks, but it will help to reduce them.

At the same time, by slowing currents next to the shoreline, these barriers are expected to reduce shoreline erosion (and eventually reverse it) and improve the overall habitat for plants and animals along it. The breakwaters themselves are also intended to attract organisms, hence the term "living."

It's a novel approach when it comes to flood infrastructure in the US. But it's certainly not a new idea :

Breakwaters is an ancient idea for how to protect shorelines – and the people who live close to them – by building underwater seawalls to defend a harbor or a beach from the force of waves. Kate has designed an extraordinary, modern-day interpretation, the Living Breakwaters, which will not only protect humans and revitalize the coastline of New York City, but also restore lost marine biodiversity. This is a visionary project that tackles the full task of adaptation, and which has the capacity to inspire and to positively impact vulnerable shorelines worldwide.

It'll now be interesting to see how this performs during storms. But in the meantime, you can find more information about the project on SCAPE's website .

Photo from SCAPE and Ty Cole

Today I have two things to share.

One, I'm not very good at following proper protocols during council meetings. You know, where you're supposed to direct communication via the chair person and say things like, "Through you, Mr./Madam Chair." I will work on improving this.

Two, I'm thrilled to report that, last evening, the proposed zoning and Official Plan amendments for Project Bench were approved by the Town of Lincoln Councillors in an 8-1 vote. This is following the positive planning staff report that I wrote about last month . Once again, this is an important milestone for the project and we're excited for the next steps.

At the same time, we recognize that change can be difficult. And this development represents change for the community. Three people from the community spoke last night in opposition of the project.

I spoke to one of them after the meeting and he was very respectful and said, "congratulations." But he also went on to say, "I hope that you and the team will continue to work with the community as you have been doing." My response was, "absolutely we will."

Onward.

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Update: Just to be clearer on the planning process details, last night was the Town of Lincoln's Committee of the Whole meeting. The Committee of the Whole has three areas of focus: community services & infrastructure, general business & finance, and planning & economic development. All Town of Lincoln Councillors, including the mayor, voted on the project at this meeting. The next step is for the Committee's recommendation to go to Council for final approval, and this meeting is scheduled for December 16, 2024. Following this, a formal Notice of Decision will be issued.

There are countless rankings of cities out there. And most of them probably don't mean very much. But the concept of a "global city", as coined by Saskia Sassen in the early 90s, is still immensely fascinating to me. And that's because there is, in fact, an order. There are cities that are less and more important to the global economy.

To this end, Resonance Consulting has just released their annual ranking of the world's best cities . And this year, they've introduced something new to their methodology: perception data. For this, they partnered with Ipsos and asked more than 22,000 respondents across 30 countries the following three broad and open-ended questions:

1. What are the top 3 towns or cities you would most like to live in someday?

2. What are the top 3 towns or cities you would most like to visit in the next 12 to 24 months?

3. What 3 towns or cities do you believe currently offer the best job opportunities?

The intent with these questions was to not anchor people to a specific list of places, and to not necessarily anchor people to big global cities. Maybe the best job opportunities are believed to be in small towns that most people aren't thinking about. The result is that thousands of different towns and cities were mentioned during the survey period.

While this didn't necessarily impact the cities and usual suspects that you would expect to see in a ranking like this -- cities like London, New York, and Paris -- it did change certain things and offer some interesting insights. For example, the strong global perception of Sydney helped to move it into the top 10 for the first in the ten-year history of this report.

On the other end of the spectrum, negative sentiment (outside of China) toward Hong Kong caused the city's ranking to drop precipitously. It is now ranked 97th, behind cities like Naples (Italy), Birmingham (UK), and Rochester (US). Singapore, in case you're wondering, is ranked 5th:

Broadly speaking, the perception data also served to remind us that we continue to have a bias toward cities. When people are asked where they want to live, visit, and work, they still think of the world's biggest and most important places. So despite the rise of decentralizing technologies (i.e. Zoom) and the bad things that happened to cities as a result of the pandemic, big cities remain at the center of the global economy.

This is not at all surprising.

Cover photo by Aaron Gilmore on Unsplash