Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 264

On this blog, we often talk about city building in the context of doing things to help improve a city -- whether that be a development project, a new public art mural, or an interesting local business. These interventions help to build a city. But even more specifically, the term has, for many, come to mean building up a city in a positive way.

But there is another way to think about city building. You can think of it in terms of building actual new cities. We've spoken about some of these before, namely this one in California and this odd one in Saudi Arabia . But apparently it is becoming more common. According to The Economist , the world is now building more new cities than it has in the last 80 or so years:

Egypt’s “New Administrative Capital” is part of a rush of city-building. Firms and governments are planning more settlements than at any time in the post-war period, with many already under construction. Ninety-one cities have been announced in the past decade, with 15 in the past year alone. In addition to its new capital in the north, Egypt is building five other cities, with plans for dozens more. India is considering eight urban hubs. Outside Baghdad, Iraq, workers have just broken ground on the first of five settlements.

In some cases, it is being done as a solution to urban congestion. If this city is too expensive and unaffordable, just create a new one. This appears to be part of the idea with the above city outside of San Francisco . Of course, new cities can also be created for ideological reasons, or for political purposes, which was the case with Brazil's capital city, Brasilia.

Here, the idea was to move the federal capital away from the country's populated southeast region to a more geographically neutral location in the middle of the country. It also turns out that seeding a new city with government institutions is a good way to get one of these started. Existing cities do, after all, benefit from network effects.

History points to characteristics shared by successful projects. State institutions can help anchor cities, as Brasília (in Brazil) and Chandigarh (in India) showed in the 20th century. Although both have had problems, people in Brazil and India are voting with their feet. Brasília’s population is growing at 1.2% a year, more than double the national average. Chandigarh, a state capital, is now India’s fourth-richest region on a per-person basis.

But putting money, ego, and ideology aside, when does it actually make sense to start a new city in lieu of just expanding (or addressing the problems in) the one(s) you've already got? Population size can't be the only factor in determining whether a city is "full", because Tokyo seems to do just fine as the largest metropolitan area in the world.

If it hasn't already been done, I think this would make for an interesting research project. Until then, there's this (paywalled) Economist article .

This is an aerial photo of the construction site at One Delisle :

Currently, we are on hold and waiting to pour a number of columns on the ground floor because the city has not yet issued our above-grade building permit. And the reason the city has not issued our above-grade building permit is because we have not yet conveyed our parkland dedication land to the city. Frustratingly though, we have been ready to convey this land for over a year! We simply need the city to allow us to give them this free land. To date, we have meticulously documented at least 3-pages of follow-ups and back-and-forth emails as we try our best to do this.

I’ve been doing this long enough that this isn’t surprising or unusual. But it remains deeply maddening. Younger people on the team can’t believe that this is par for the course. On top of this, the city continues to charge interest on the fees that are payable upon issuance of the first above-grade building permit. The result is an insane dynamic where the city can delay things as long as it wants and then charge us, and all other developers, interest on its own delays! I mean, is it any wonder that housing keeps getting more expensive in this city?

During the last mayoral election, some candidates were quick to promise that, if elected, the city itself would start building affordable housing. This, I'm sure, sounded good to most. Toronto needs more affordable homes. But for all of us involved in the building of buildings, it was frankly impossible to imagine. If the city takes this long to accept free land from developers, how could it possibly build anything?

Studio Libeskind has a recently completed project in Brooklyn that looks like it was designed by Studio Libeskind. It has angled facades and, judging by the comments on Dezeen , its design is polarizing. But it is an affordable housing project for seniors, and it does have a large atrium in the middle of it.

Atria are a bit of a unique feature in multi-family housing (at least in this part of the world). For better or for worse, the gold standard has become the double-loaded corridor. And that's because it's "efficient." It helps you maximize the amount of rentable or saleable area to gross construction area.

Here in Toronto, a typical efficiency -- calculated as the net saleable/rentable area divided by the gross construction area -- would be somewhere between 75-80%. Though many factors can affect this percentage, such as the amount of amenity space in the building.

There is certainly the option of just building a less efficient building, but then it means you'll likely need to increase the price of the homes to compensate for this loss in efficiency.

This is the trade-off that is often made with smaller suites. More and smaller suites usually translate into more corridor space (i.e. a lower overall efficiency). But it may make sense to do this if you think your smaller suites will generate more revenue on a per square foot basis.

Off the top of my head, I can only think of two residential building in Toronto with an atrium. And that's 71 Front Street East in the St. Lawrence and "The Atrium" at 650 Queens Quay West. The latter is pretty neat inside. The last time I checked, it even had fake palms.

In the case of both The Atrium and Libeskind's Brooklyn project, the atria result in single-loaded corridors. (I'm not sure how 71 Front was designed.) Here's what Libeskind's project looks like:

The obvious advantage of this condition is that you get natural light into the corridors, whereas with a typical double-loaded corridor you don't. But again, the disadvantage of this design is that you only have apartments on one side, instead of both sides.

In this case, the thermal envelope of the building is the outside face of each corridor (atrium side). This means the corridors are interior or conditioned spaces.

Another option would be to create open-air corridors, like in this example from Montreal . This creates corridors exposed to the elements, but now you've reduced your overall energy consumption (less space to heat/cool) and you've created the possibility of double-aspect units.

Personally, I'm a fan of atria and courtyards in residential buildings. But for the reasons we just talked about, they're not that common. My sense is that they're far more common in commercial buildings. John Portman , for instance, made a name for himself designing and developing hotels around them.

What are your thoughts, though? Would you pay a premium to live in a residential building with a nice atrium? I bet some of you would if it meant an improved suite design, such as more windows and more natural light.

Photos: Hufton + Crow