Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 488

https://twitter.com/DocumentingBTC/status/1553901007964442624?s=20&t=gRvygaF5RVVcIY-d_IHHeQ

Click here if you can't see the embedded tweet above.

This is your daily reminder that many/most of the things that are ubiquitous today were once difficult to explain and understand (in the above example it's email and the internet). Once a new idea or technology becomes widely adopted, its inner workings and technical aspects tend to recede into the background.

Most people, for instance, probably aren't familiar with all of the various internet protocols and how they work. Could you explain the difference between TCP and IP and SMTP? If you can't, it doesn't matter. The various protocol layers of the internet now work behind the scenes to power our daily lives. And the innovation that continues to be built on top of them is getting increasingly more user friendly as time goes on.

The same thing will happen with crypto, which is talked about today in much the same way as the above folks are talking about email and the internet. New ideas will continue to emerge and we will all start deriving more and more utility from it ( beyond just NFT art ). And at that point, most people will stop caring about how all the sausages are made. They'll just like eating them.

P.S. One of the nice things about blogging every day is that I'll be able to look back on this post in ten years and see how right or wrong I was.

Toronto's chief planner, Gregg Lintern , published this piece in the Toronto Star over the weekend where he argued that "expanding housing options in [Toronto's] neighbourhoods is the missing piece of the growth puzzle."

What he is saying is that if we're going to have any chance at reasonably accommodating the 700,000 or so people who are expected to move to this city over the next three decades, we're going to have to evolve our low-rise neighborhoods. That includes more retail, more amenities, more density, and yes, built form that houses multiple units.

I immediately thought that this was meaningful progress in the right direction. It is acknowledgement that things need to change and that our low-rise communities need to change.

But others felt that this was a case of soft-serve ice cream, arguing that there's "danger in praising incremental, belated change when dramatic change is what's needed." I also see this point.

To quote the late architect Daniel Burnham, "make no little plans." But this is arguably a little easier to subscribe to when you're rebuilding after a great fire has decimated your entire city (he was instrumental in the rebuild of Chicago following its fire of 1871).

The unfortunate reality today, at least in this environment, is that bold vision isn't often rewarded politically. The status quo bias is simply so great. Change is painfully slow. That's why we rely so heavily on pilot projects when it comes to city building.

So while I too am a fan of bold vision, I also see value in what Simon Sinek and others refer to as consistency over intensity . Small, repetitive, and compounding actions can have powerful long-term results. You just have to keep going in the right direction.

And I think that many of us, or perhaps most, will agree that the right direction is rethinking our low-rise neighborhoods.

Photo by  Tungsten Rising  on  Unsplash

https://youtu.be/0kz5vEqdaSc

I am usually known for my optimism for the future. But I am having a difficult time deciphering whether the new 170-km-long vertical city that Saudia Arabia just revealed ( see above video ) is a legitimate development proposal, a new metaverse project, or a dystopian spoof about how we're all going to live in beehives once autonomous everything and artificial intelligence takes over.

The Line, as it is cleverly called, is intended to form the basis for a new and allegedly livable city called Neom. This is a city that is intended to lead Saudi Arabia into some sort of glorious post-oil future. And the plan is for it to eventually house some 9 million people; all within a 170-km-long mirrored strip that is 200m wide, 500m tall, and accessible end-to-end in 20 minutes via high-speed rail.

I would love to see the development pro forma for this one (if it even exists), but I certainly don't need it to determine that this thing is never going to be built -- certainly not in its current incarnation.