Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 639

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This morning I came across this beautiful photo by @callicles of the 11th in Paris. After admiring it for a few moments, I then immediately tweeted it out with the above caption: "It's okay to put buildings close together." Because here's the thing about this photo: It represents one of the great paradoxes of city building. When most people look at this photo, I suspect that they will find it beautiful. They will like the mid-rise architecture and they will like the quaint European-scaled streets. But despite its fairly universal appeal, very few cities are able to build this way today. It's often not allowed. So instead what people do is travel to Europe in the summer, sit in cafes, admire the architecture and urban design, and then lament the fact that we don't build cities like we used to.

What is it that makes this intersection so inviting? Well, the buildings are tight up against each other. I'm guessing that the right-of-ways (ROWs) in this picture are maybe 6-9 m wide. There are no building setbacks or stepbacks to speak of, save and except for the penthouse floors which taper back slightly. And so all of the spaces in these buildings would likely have some sort of direct facing condition with their opposing neighbors (but partially mitigated by the fact that these aren't all glass buildings). The ratio of ROW to building height is, I'm guessing, something like 1:4, which, at the end of the day, is a large part of the reason why these streets feel so intimate and inviting. The buildings frame the streets and public realm.

What I just described breaks many of the guidelines that I suspect many of you in the industry are accustomed to following. In our world, the streets should be wider to allow for adequate fire and service vehicle access. The buildings should stepback to allow light to reach the sidewalks, to mitigate impacts on any surrounding single-family homes, and to provision for sky views. Here in Toronto, the midrise guidelines also stipulate that buildings should have a ROW to building height ratio that is closer to 1:1. Though to be fair this guidance is often rightly broken. But the truth remains, we generally don't build like this anymore. Why is that?

It's not because we can't do it. We certainly could. We are, for whatever reasons, choosing not to. Is it because we're bad at understanding what we actually like and what makes for great cities? Is it because what we end up liking is a bit counterintuitive? My unproven and untested theory is that it is at least partially the result of an approach to planning that is defensive -- instead of offensive -- in nature. We plan around and bow completely to existing contexts. We plan to mitigate impacts. We plan to satisfy some very individualistic concerns about how cities and neighborhoods should be built. For better or for worse, we plan to piss off the least amount of people. Politics also play an outsized role.

What is far less common to think about is how to plan offensively. The fact of the matter is that the Paris we all love today pissed off a lot of people when it was being constructed. The approach was top-down and hugely disruptive. It ignored and completely erased much of the city's previous urban context. Artists at the time, and probably many others, despised the new regularity of Paris' street wall buildings. They longed for the old hodgepodge of medieval blocks and the visual variety that they created. But today, it's hard not to think of this offensive move as anything but visionary. Of course, there are also countless examples of top-down offenses turning out terribly bad for cities.

Perhaps the right approach, then, is to simply start being more deliberate about introducing elements of planning offense. My friend David Wex of Urban Capital likes to remind me that Montreal is a city with grandeur and that Toronto, for the most part, is a city without it. So as I have argued before, over here , I think it's time we rethink our approach. Instead of just worrying about things like shadow impacts and angular planes (defensive), we should also be asking ourselves offensive questions. How refreshing would it be to sit down in a project meeting and have someone ask: "Okay, but does this design contribute to the overall grandeur and beauty of our city?"

And maybe once we take this new perspective, we'll come to the conclusion that sometimes it's okay to put buildings close together.

These are a set of diagrams taken from a recent WSJ article talking about how, " the pandemic changed where Americans live ." I know that this is a topic that gets a lot of air time (both here on the blog and elsewhere), but these diagrams do a good job of showing the flow of people, as well as how things may have changed/accelerated since 2018.

These diagrams also remind me of the work of Charles Joseph Minard . A French civil engineer, Minard is best known for his contributions to the field of information graphics, and in particular his flow maps. His most famous piece of work -- which I happen to have hanging at home -- is his depiction of Napoleon's losses during the Russian campaign of 1812.

The map itself is from 1869 and is packed full of information. It shows the number of Napoleonic troops as they left for Moscow, the distance they traveled, the outside temperature (the French weren't properly prepared for the cold), latitude and longitude, the direction of travel, and the location of the troops relative to specific dates.

The point of the diagram was really to show how disastrous this campaign was for Napoleon. The thick beige band on the left is showing over 400,000 troops setting out. But by the time they reached Moscow -- which, by the way, had been abandoned before their arrival -- only about 100,000 troops were left.

The thin black bar on the bottom is showing how many troops ultimately remained and returned at the end of the campaign -- the number was only about 10,000. So the vast majority of Napoleon's troops perished. Supposedly over half either starved or froze to death.

Some 150 years later, and we are still using flow charts to clearly depict the movement of people and things.

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This morning I attended ULI Toronto's annual " Meet the Chief Planners " event. (Some of my random tweets from the morning can be found here .) Now in its 7th year, it is a great event where all of the chief city planners from around the Greater Golden Horseshoe area come together with professionals from the land use community to network and discuss the future of our cities.

Normally it happens in the evening over dinner and drinks, which is how I attended last year right before our first lockdown (we were at the elbow bump and foot tap stage of the pandemic). But this year it was of course online.

First, I would like to say thank you to Multiplex Construction Canada (our partner on Junction House ) for the invite. And secondly, I would like to say kudos to Richard Joy and the rest of ULI Toronto for coordinating such a great event with over 400 virtual attendees.

However, the main point that I would like to make today is that I don't know how anyone can attend a virtual conference and believe that this is some sort of "new norm." I don't know about all of you, but I am ready to go back to rubber chicken dinners and too many glasses of affordably priced wine -- pronto.

I say this not to criticize any of the groups that are working hard today to organize virtual events. I am a big fan of ULI and the work that they do. I would encourage all of you involved in the built environment to join immediately if you're not already members.

Instead, I say this as yet another piece of evidence for why I won't stop writing and talking about the resilience of our cities. Video calls are such an awful substitute for sitting around a table with people and breaking bread. It's not even close.

And so as I sat at my home office desk this morning, listening to the conference and eating McDonald's hotcakes (because, hey, Uber Eats and because, hey, it's Friday), I couldn't help but be reminded of how bullish I am on cities and city life. This, I thought to myself, is why cities are such a centralizing force.

Ultimately, it is also why groups like the Urban Land Institute are so important. It is because our cities matter a great deal and because they're not going anywhere. If you aren't sick of me talking about the resilience of cities, you can also find me in this recent RENX article called, "Toronto residential tower boom shows no signs of slowing."