Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 632

https://vimeo.com/545163337

Well here is a clever idea by Berlin designer Tobias Trübenbacher. It is a wind-powered streetlight -- one that also detects when people are nearby and emits an insect-friendly light spectrum. Lots of cities already rely (partially) on solar powered lights and signage. But that doesn't always work if the street doesn't get a lot of direct sunlight or if you happen to be in a darker city. So perhaps wind is the answer. I could imagine this working very well here in Toronto in the middle of the winter at the intersection of Bay and King. And if you remember my post from earlier in the week about a roadmap to net zero energy , it is pretty clear that both solar and wind electricity are going to need to become far more prominent in our cities.

If you can't see the embedded video above, click here .

A new 50,000 square foot experiential art center (EAC to those in the know), called Superblue , has just opened up in Miami's Allapattah neighborhood. It includes installations by Tokyo-based teamLab , Amsterdam's DRIFT , James Turrell (amazing), as well as many others.

This is noteworthy because experiential art is both fun (and Instagrammable) and because it is another example of the continuing rise of Allapattah . Art, design, and culture are usually pretty good for city building.

At the same time, the New York Times raises an interesting question: "Is this a forward step in the march of modernism or a debasement of art into theme-park entertainment?" Arthur Lubow goes on to say:

The popularity of this genre is driven by contradictory desires, as demonstrated memorably by the line of visitors in 2019 who waited up to six hours for a one-minute stay amid the twinkling lights in  Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirror room at the David Zwirner gallery  in Chelsea. Malnourished by their phones and computer screens, people yearn for real-life visceral experiences. And yet they remain stuck in the gravitational pull of virtual reality: The experiences they seek are ones they can record on their phone cameras and post on social media.

I get this logic.

But my own view is that just because something has commercial appeal, it shouldn't mean that the art is any less serious. And just because people want to photograph and share it, doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't appreciating it in the same way as someone just standing around and pondering it.

Perhaps this is a good time to mention that Snap has also just announced the next version of its Spectacles . These ones come with the promise of augmented reality. What is real anymore?

We stumbled on Bar Volo last night on our evening walk (pictured above). It's on St. Nicholas Street, which I guess is technically a street. But it feels and acts more like a laneway. I was naturally pretty excited by this discovery and so I tweeted this out . I was then called out for glorifying this laneway because: 1) this is only one small storefront, 2) the rest of the laneway is kind of pooey, and 3) there are other, better, examples of complete laneways in the city such as throughout Toronto's Yorkville neighborhood. Okay.

What got me excited is that this is a recent development -- there's a residential building above this welcoming bottle shop -- that managed to successfully create fine-grained urbanism and activate a laneway frontage that could have very easily gone underutilized. Now imagine if every new development with some sort of laneway frontage did things as meaningful as this. Piece by piece, we would be building another layer to our city. (I like to think that we're contributing to this vision with our laneway towns at Junction House. They are, by the way, 100% sold out. Go laneway living.)

It's easy to get excited by the bigger urban moves. A new tall building or a Ferris wheel on the waterfront, perhaps. But sometimes the answer is as simple as a small brewery, a narrow and imperfect laneway, and a roll up garage door.