Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 487

https://youtu.be/QDHUlL4lApo

One of the most exciting city building projects going on in Toronto right now is the revitalization of the 715-acre Port Lands area ( here's a map if you'd like to get situated). Despite its massive scale, it doesn't seem to be receiving a lot of attention. And that's probably because, at this stage, it's mostly infrastructure work. It's just a lot of soil being moved around.

But it's of course important work. The mouth of the Don River (where it meets Lake Ontario) was never properly engineered for resiliency, and so the entire area is at risk of flooding. That's why this $1.25 billion effort to re-naturalize its interface is currently underway. The above video does a good job explaining just what that entails.

At the same time, it is creating a wonderful city building opportunity -- new parks for the illegal drinking of craft beers, new wildlife habitat, new meandering rivers for kayaking, and of course new housing and new jobs. But when you look at what's planned , it's hard not to feel like we're missing the mark in terms of density.

The plan for Villiers Island calls for some 4,900 homes (according to this Globe and Mail article ). And the plan for the entire area calls for only about 20,000 homes (according to this recent Bloomberg article ). Surely there's room for at least a few more -- especially if we're hoping to support a new LRT line to the area.

Here is a neat tool (created by Benjamin Td ) that allows you to quickly see how far you can travel in Europe by rail in 5 hours. The way it works is that you just hover over a train station and then the relevant isochrone will show up. Above is what that looks like for Paris' Gare de Lyon, which has one of if not the largest catchment areas from what I can tell after playing around with the tool for a few minutes. The data being used to power this map is from Deutsche Bahn. And if there's a transfer on any of the routes, the tool assumes you can make that happen within 20 minutes, which may or may not be realistic. Regardless, it's fascinating to see just how connected (or disconnected) some cities are. It's also a shameful reminder that a North American version wouldn't be nearly as impressive.

https://twitter.com/betterstreetsai/status/1554225463651733505?s=20&t=GMKgDliRbq9yLVPUH_kuhg

One of the most effective ways to encourage change in our cities is to run a pilot. I think people find comfort in knowing that if chaos ensues, things can be easily reversed. So that is exactly what Phoenix has been doing with its "cool pavement" pilot program ; what Seattle did (or is doing) with electric scooters ; and what Toronto is doing with the pedestrianization of Market Street . Let's try it out and see how things go.

But there are other options emerging beyond just physical pilots. Better Streets AI, for example, is using artificial intelligence to instantly transform streets and give people an idea of what might be possible. If you haven't yet seen any of these images, I would encourage you to check out their Twitter account . The rendered images aren't hyper-realistic, but they are instant and they are all magically generated by a computer.

As these sorts of tools become more sophisticated and widespread, it isn't a stretch to imagine them having an impact on the way we think about and plan our cities. And I think that will happen. They also get me excited about the potential of augmented reality (which is something that interests me a lot more than full VR). Being able to quickly and accurately pilot the future is a powerful thing.