Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 306

This is my first time seeing a device like this.

Also, it’s solar powered.

I just discovered and purchased a pair of pants from this French brand called 1083. They specialize in jeans and everything they sell is, for the most part, made in France.

The name 1083 refers to 1083 kilometers, which is the longest possible linear dimension within the “hexagon” of France (a hexagon is often used to describe the geographic boundaries of continental France).

As an example, their shoes have a message on the insoles that says “this shoe was produced within 1083km of where you are right now.” I thought this was a cool brand story and so I wanted to share it with all of you today.

One of the things that I have noticed while walking around Lyon is that there seems to be a lot of office space right at street level.

And most of it does not seem to have a consumer-facing element where people just walk in off the street.

There’s something nice about seeing beautiful spaces and people sitting at their desks (I walked past people sitting on exercise balls). It’s another way of animating the street.

Personally, I’d love to have an office right at ground level, similar to the above. But it’s not usually where our minds immediately go. We usually default to retail. Or at least I do.

So I’m going to work to remove this blind spot from my mental models. Office right on the street can clearly work really work.