Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 206

If you go to the Town of Lincoln, Ontario's website, scroll down to the meeting calendar, lookup the December 2nd Committee of the Whole, and click on the meeting agenda, you will end up right here . And then, if you click on 7.2.1. under reports, you will get to this planning staff report recommending approval of the Official Plan and Zoning By-law Amendment applications for 4933 Victoria Avenue North -- also known as Project Bench.

Here's some of what the report says:

This report provides a recommendation to Committee, Council and the general public regarding the Official Plan Amendment and Zoning By-law Amendment applications to permit the development of a mixed-use residential building with 346 dwelling units, 100 hotel suites, banquet space, and commercial uses including restaurant, café and spa on the subject lands.

[The] Committee recommend to Council to approve the Official Plan Amendment application (PLOPA20240045) and Zoning By-law Amendment application (PLZBA20240046) by Landwise on behalf of 4933 Vic Court Globizen GP Inc.

It has been a real pleasure working with the local community and the Town of Lincoln on these development applications. From the start, our goal has been to create something remarkable for the town and the broader Niagara Benchlands, and so this approval recommendation is an important milestone for the team. We're excited for the next steps! For more on Project Bench, make sure you check out onthebench.ca .

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On a separate note, since switching blogging platforms earlier this week, I have heard from a lot of you that my newsletter is now going to your spam folder. I was expecting this. Spam filters don't like familiar names with a different email address. So to continue hearing from me, you may need to whitelist the following address: brandondonnelly@newsletter.paragraph.xyz .

Sadly, I also don't have a solution for those of you who were subscribed to my weekly digest on Sunday mornings. This was about a quarter of you. Sorry. Paragraph doesn't seem to have this functionality. But I'm in touch with the company directly and so maybe it's a feature they can add. Thanks for continuing to read. I'll keep you posted as I try and figure something out.

We've spoken before about One Delisle's fun slab edges . No two floors are the same. The tower is constantly changing as it transforms from a square at its base to a hexadecagon at its top (16-sided shape). But one part of each floor that does repeat is the core (the center of each floor plate that houses the elevators and other essential stuff). And so for this, the site team is now using something known as an automatic climbing system to "jump" the concrete forms between the floors. More specifically, we are using a Doka Super Climber SCP .

Here's what that looks like inside the core of the building right now:

At a high level, the way it works is pretty simple. The system has two levels of brackets that can anchor to the concrete core of the building, below the floor that is currently being poured. The concrete forms are then raised using hydraulics. And once that has happened, the lower brackets "climb" up the building and get reattached at a higher point. If this isn't clear in your mind, imagine Spiderman climbing up a tall shaft. His arms would represent the upper brackets and his legs would represent the lower brackets. Maybe this isn't helpful.

In any event, the point of this system is that it makes construction go faster. So now that the ACS is up and running, the team is looking to bring down our cycle time per floor. Hopefully you'll notice that the next time you go by One Delisle .

When I first started writing this daily blog back in August 2013, I was using Tumblr. I had already been using Tumblr to share random stuff, and so when I decided to venture into longer-form writing, I just adapted what I had already been using. Here's what I consider to be my first real blog post, which was over 11 years ago.

But then Tumblr got sold to Yahoo (and became generally less popular) and it started to feel like the wrong place for me to be writing about city building. So I packed up and moved over to Wordpress. Here's my last post on Tumblr, which was some 4 years ago.

Wordpress has been working out just fine for me, but the world is changing and the internet is starting to move from web2 to web3 platforms . So this week, I made the decision to once again pack up and move -- this time to Paragraph.xyz . I moved over all of my old posts, my email subscribers, and my domain (brandondonnelly.com).

A lot of you may not notice much of a difference. If you type in my domain, you'll find all of my old posts. And all new posts will continue to show up in your inbox every day (I don't think I can do a weekly digest with Paragraph, which was an option I had with Wordpress + Mailchimp). The important part, though, is that the backend is now completely different.

All of my posts are now stored on a blockchain called Arweave , which is a permanent and fully decentralized protocol. Meaning, if I were to get hit by a bus tomorrow, all of my writing would still live on forever, even if Paragraph goes bankrupt and shuts down. It is now also possible for readers to "collect" my posts just as they would an NFT.

I don't know how many people will actually do this and what utility it will serve today, but I think all of this is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm a firm believer in crypto and blockchain technologies, and so it was time to walk the talk with my daily blog for city builders. Change is good. Welcome to brandondonnelly.com 3.0.

Regularly scheduled programming will resume tomorrow.