Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 408

This Sunday, Paris will be hosting an important referendum that has nothing to do with France's retirement age. The question is whether shared electric scooters should be banned citywide . And while there are concerns about whether this single-question referendum will draw many people out to vote, the city has said that, whatever the outcome, the results will be binding.

To be clear, this would only apply to the three micromobility rental companies that operate in the capital: Lime, Dott, and Tier. It would not apply to privately-owned scooters, of which there are many. In fact, France might just be one of the scooter capitals of the world . Over 900,000 scooters were purchased across France in 2021, and last year the number was about 759,000.

Mayor Anne Hidalgo has publicly said that she thinks these scooters should be banned. But does that really solve things given the number of private scooters in circulation? And are the current problems truly ones we can't solve? As I have said many times before, I like scooters. I like them a lot. They're convenient and fun to ride, and I see their value in helping to solve the last-mile problem.

I also can't help but think back to the early 1900s when cars were just starting to infiltrate our cities and there were absolutely no traffic regulations to think of . It was chaos, it was dangerous, and I'm sure it was similarly divisive at the time. So should we have banned them and stuck with horses? Hmm. Maybe.

Like everyone else, I have started playing around with Midjourney to create AI-generated images. Here are two that I created last night using the prompt: "A silver Land Rover Defender driving through a snowstorm in the mountains of Utah."

Now, you can tell that these are AI-produced images, but it's still wildly impressive that something like this can be easily generated in a matter of a few seconds. And that's the thing about AI: it's easier to get, especially compared to crypto. It's immediately useful and it's immediately clear what this can and will disrupt.

Levis, for example, just announced that it will start using AI-generated photography in lieu of actual fashion photoshoots. This is obviously suboptimal for photographers, models, makeup artists, and so on, but a hell of a lot easier for Levis. I would also imagine that the same thing will happen to real estate renderings and many other things beyond just imagery.

Ben Myers and Steven Cameron recently speculated on their podcast -- Toronto Under Construction -- that AI could be used for reviewing development applications . Imagine how much this would speed up reviews and the delivery of new housing! So there are very good reasons for why the hype cycle has moved over to AI from crypto and NFTs.

https://twitter.com/punk6529/status/1639411208192139266?s=20

However, I'd like to go on the record saying that my gut tells me that this will only make what crypto offers even more important. Permissionless public databases (as opposed to databases controlled by individuals/companies) and the ability to demonstrate authenticity/ownership, feel like two important things to me in a world where computers are constantly generating a flood of new content and nobody knows what is "real" anymore.

It's certainly a lot less tangible than, "hey, check out this badass Defender driving through the snow." But I feel strongly that these two innovations will end up working together.

This is an intriguing idea :

Many cities around the world practice some form of participatory budgeting, but even among those that do, Cascais [Portugal] is an outlier. It spends prodigiously through the system: in Paris, five per cent of the city’s annual investment budget has been allocated to participatory projects in recent years, but in Cascais, more than fifteen per cent of the budget flows through the program, and the percentage can float higher if voter turnout rises. Cascais is surprising in another way: its mayor, Carlos Carreiras, is both a champion of participatory budgeting and a member of a center-right political party. Participatory budgeting is often considered a tool of the left, but its role in Cascais suggests that it could have a broader appeal; part of the theory behind it is that citizens can be better than officials at knowing how money should be spent.

Of course, it won't solve all of our problems:

Even in the best of circumstances, participatory budgeting faces some structural limitations. Citizens can’t use it to raise the minimum wage, for instance, or to reconfigure  affordable-housing  policy, or to ban  single-use plastics . As it stands, the approach “will never change the destiny of a poor neighborhood,” Giovanni Allegretti, a senior researcher at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, told me. Allegretti noted that participatory budgeting is mainly a competitive process involving limited resources with no long-term strategy; it doesn’t eliminate the need for other policy interventions. But when it functions effectively, participatory budgeting can give direct political power to those who might otherwise have very little of it.

There is something very compelling about empowering people to come up with new ideas, compete with others for the best ones, and then participate in public decisions. It also strikes me as a possibly efficient way to force: "We only have this much money to spend. What should we spend it on? Spending on this means not spending on that. Time to make a decision."

And now it has me wondering: If we asked Toronto whether it wanted to spend over $1 billion to rebuild the Gardiner Expressway east or spend it on other things, what do you think it would say?

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