Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 602

With every passing year, the Matrix feels less and less like science fiction. With the continued rise of the metaverse -- Zuckerberg is betting all of Facebook on it -- we are increasingly living our lives between two worlds: one is offline and one is online. What this will ultimately mean (for us and for our cities) is of course up for debate. But what is clear is that the traditional trappings of real life have quickly made their way online into the metaverse. Arthur Hayes recently penned this fantastic article about the future of the world (it's the metaverse) and the role of art (including NFT art). In it, he makes the argument that to "flex" is integral to the human experience. Here's what he means by that:

As social beings, the sole purpose of many activities and purchases is to publicly display how much energy you can waste. The nightclub economy is extremely a propos to this concept. Individuals walk into a dark room, listen to loud music (art), dance (a waste of energy akin to a mating call), and pay exorbitant amounts of money to drink liquid. Everyone gets dressed up real nice in articles of clothing that serve no useful purpose other than to demonstrate that the wearer spent a lot of money to display their social status to the rest of the clubbers present.

People go to clubs to flex. In the words of the late Clayton Christensen , that is the "job" to be done.

Why this matters is that many of us are now doing the same kind of things online. Buying a CryptoPunk (an OG NFT) for a large sum of money and posting it as your social media profile pic is a flex. Is this rational or irrational behaviour? Whatever your answer, it is akin to paying several hundred dollars for a t-shirt from some cool streetwear brand. The real job to be done is not that you desperately need a t-shirt to cover your upper torso. It is the signalling that goes along with owning something scarce and valuable. One of the things that is so special about NFT-permissioned stuff is that there's now a simple way to prove and enforce all of these things: ownership, scarcity, and so on.

What's equally fascinating to me is how offline and online will end up interacting with each other. (Arthur refers to our offline world as the meatspace. I don't know if he coined the term, but I'm going to rolling with it for the purposes of this post.) If people end up preferring to flex online instead of offline (and I'm sure many already do), what does that do to our meatspace(s)? And what does it do to our cities and how we build? I have no doubt that these questions are coming.

Photo by  Richard Horvath  on  Unsplash

Building height and density are not one and the same. You can have tall buildings configured in a low-density way (think post-war towers in the park). And you can have low/mid-rise buildings configured in a high-density way (think Paris and Barcelona). This is one of the reasons why it is important to decouple density and tallness when thinking about our cities.

This line of thinking is the approach that a recent study took when trying to determine the optimal built form for minimizing climate impact. In the study they define four building typologies: 1) high density, high-rise, 2) low density, high-rise, 3) high density, low-rise, and 4) low density, low-rise.

What they found was that taller environments tend to have higher life cycle GHG emissions, but that lower-density environments are (obviously) far more land consumptive. To determine life cycle GHG emissions they looked at both embodied and operating emissions, which is why the taller stuff didn't score as well under their methodology. There's typically a lot of concrete and steel in tall buildings.

This lead the team to conclude that if you want to optimize around climate impact, you should probably aim for that perfect middle ground: dense, but not super tall.

But as Joe Cortright ( City Observatory ) rightly pointed out in his email newsletter, one of the big limitations of this analysis is that it does not consider transportation-related impacts. And since we know that transportation is one of if not the largest source of GHG emissions and that how we get around is heavily dependent on land use patterns, it is probably an important piece to consider.

Photo by Alfons Taekema on Unsplash

I was riding my bike on Bloor Street along the north edge of High Park over the weekend. And in between cyclists in spandex yelling at me for seemingly riding the wrong way in the bike lanes, I managed to safely snap this picture:

It was a reminder of that thing we like to do in Toronto where we want lower-rise along our main streets and then we tuck the taller parts somewhere in the back so that we can pretend they are maybe not there. Here's an aerial shot of the situation from Google Maps:

It's a very different condition from what you will find in New York along virtually all edges of Central Park:

Now, New York and Toronto are not the same city. This much is obvious.

But there is a grandeur and degree of urbanity that is present along Central Park that is not present along High Park. And I would argue that this feature isn't exclusive to New York. It can be found in many other cities, including places like Montreal .

I am sure that part of the rationale here on Bloor Street had to do with matching the lower-rise existing context. But we shouldn't forget that the edges of public spaces are oftentimes just as important as the spaces themselves. Sometimes they can be even more important.

So I thought I would put it out to all of you. To stepback or not to stepback. What do you think would be the most appropriate built form along this north edge of High Park? Leave a comment below.