Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 327

During the pandemic, there was a lot of erroneous talk about the death of cities. Much like when the consumer internet first came around, the thinking was that technology would make geography irrelevant. I was and am vehemently against this idea, but it's hard to not feel like technology is doing something. But what exactly? According to Richard Florida, Vladislav Boutenko, Antoine Vetrano, and Sara Saloo, it is creating something called the Meta City :

The various communities that make up the Meta City may be in different time zones and noncontiguous locations, but they function together as a coherent network with a distinct structure and logic .  The Meta City combines physical and virtual agglomeration, in seeming defiance of the laws of physics, making it possible to occupy more than one space at the same time. As a result, urban areas within the Meta City network can share economic and social functions.

The narrative is compelling. Cities have always responded to and been a product of new mobility technologies. Streetcars, subways, and the car have all reshaped the geography of our cities. Some would argue for the worse. What the Meta City proposes is that technology today is not a disruptor of cities, it is simply another mobility shift. Rather than make cities irrelevant, it actually makes them more important by expanding their reach:

The pandemic-era shift to remote work is yet another technology stretching the boundaries of the city into a new and larger geographic unit. But instead of doing so physically, it does so by enabling virtual expansion. The share of American workers engaged in remote work  tripled  from roughly 6% in 2019 to almost 18% in 2021. Remote workers can access significant quality of life at far more affordable prices in smaller cities, suburbs, and rural areas.

Some specific examples:

Many of these rising places are critically connected to established cities. As we will see, Austin’s rise is best understood as a satellite of San Francisco’s long-established tech hub. Miami is enmeshed in New York City’s finance and real estate complex. The rise of the Meta City informs a counterintuitive logic: Leading superstar cities are seeing their role as economic hub expand, even as some talent and some industry disperse to satellite centers.

Finally, here's their ranking:

If you believe this to be true, then it should be good news for the real estate located in the cities listed above. But it also means that we are now facing a new kind of hub-and-spoke model of urbanism. London and New York remain at the center, but tech is only strengthening their reach and influence. This is a new way of thinking about the flow of human capital around the world, and I'm sure it will have impacts on how we plan and build our cities.

Image: Harvard Business Review

Here is an interesting way of looking at risk ( via Seth Godin ):

If you’re trying to reduce risk, do the hard part first. That way, if it fails, you’ll have minimized your time and effort. On the other hand, if you’re looking for buy-in and commitment so you can get through the hard part, do it last. People are terrible at ignoring sunk costs, and the early wins and identity shifts that come from the easy successes at the beginning will give you momentum as you go.

He's not wrong. We are generally bad at ignoring sunk costs, which is why they have to tell you in business school that you need to ignore sunk costs. It doesn't come naturally.

We are also victims of temporal myopia. Meaning, we tend to emphasize short-term items and discount things that are in the future. So if two things are equally risky, we'll likely perceive the immediate one as more risky than the one that will occur in a few years.

Some things to keep in mind as we go about managing risk.

This morning I did a hard hat tour of the Port Lands area of Toronto. And once again, I was reminded that this is one of the most important projects taking place in the city right now.

When completed at the end of 2024, the $1.25 billion flood protection project is going to create over 60 acres of new greenspace and parkland, and unlock a significant amount of land for development. Already, it's hard to imagine this part of the city not becoming a desirable new neighborhood and a magnet for recreation.

I was asked not to share any images from within the site (i.e. the non-public areas), so I'm only sharing the above photo taken from Cherry Street. But we did get a chance to stand on the bed of the new river valley that will eventually take flow from the Don River. And I have photos on my phone to prove it. That was almost certainly a once in a lifetime thing.

For the latest on construction progress, check out this video from Waterfront Toronto.