Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 715

The width of a standard parking space in Toronto is generally 2.6m. I say generally because it depends on a few other factors, such as whether it's "obstructed" or whether it's being accessed off a substandard drive aisle. But for the purposes of this post, let's agree that the width of a standard Toronto parking space is 2.6m.

The reason I mention this is because Onexn Architects has recently completed a 2.6m wide cafe in Shenzhen called Joys. Pictured above, the 9 square meter space used to house an air conditioner repair shop.

Now, some of you are probably looking at the photos and thinking that this maybe isn't such a big deal. But small spaces force you to be creative.

Look at the grey exterior paving that creates the impression that the cafe is spilling out onto the sidewalk. And look at how they used an illuminated 5 meter tall canopy to try and accentuate the space.

In some places and in cities, a retail space like this might easily become forgotten space. But here, it was something worth designing.

Photography by Li Jinhui via Dezeen

At a high level there are two components to the value of a house. There's the value of the land and there's the value of all the improvements. That is, the bricks, wood, and other stuff that form the actual house. When a media outlet runs a sensational headline about some shack in Toronto selling for, oh I don't know, a million dollars, what it actually means is that the land in this particular area was just valued by somebody at this number. In fact, if the property is very clearly a "knock down" the improvements sitting on the land become a liability/cost rather than anything of value. Because whoever buys the land will almost certainly need to remove the improvements before they can build whatever it is they want to build.

This distinction between land and improvements is a valuable one for many reasons. Here's one example. In cases where the improvements aren't some shack, you may be faced with a scenario where a property can be valued in two different ways. You can value it based on the development potential of the underlying land or you can value it based on the income (either in-place or potential) that the improvements are generating, or could be generating with some hard work on your part. If the development value is greater than the value of the improvements, then there will be pressure to redevelop. Conversely, if the opposite is true, it is likely that not much will happen other than maybe capital expenditures applied to the existing building(s).

Of course, you could also run into a scenario where there's little development potential and there's zero ability to invest in the existing improvements, either because the market rents are too low in the area or because they're capped and/or controlled in some way. In this scenario, it's likely that not much will happen other than the normal and expected depreciation of the improvements. Maybe one day the development/investment math will work. But in the interim, you probably won't be seeing any of those sensational media headlines.

Photo by Andre Gaulin on Unsplash

It used to be the case that cities had a habit of catching fire and burning down. Toronto had the Great Fires of 1849 and 1904. Chicago had the Great Fire of 1871. And the same can be said about many other cities. In fact, you probably weren't considered a real city until you had some sort of "Great Fire." But as Derek Thompson points out in this recent Atlantic article about urban comebacks, disasters have a way of forcing positive change:

The 21st-century city is the child of catastrophe. The comforts and infrastructure we take for granted were born of age-old afflictions: fire, flood, pestilence. Our tall buildings, our subways, our subterranean conduits, our systems for bringing water in and taking it away, our building codes and public-health regulations—all were forged in the aftermath of urban disasters by civic leaders and citizen visionaries.

As Charles Dickens famously described, British cities in the early years of the Industrial Revolution were grim and pestilential. London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds—they didn’t suffer from individual epidemics so much as from overlapping, never-ending waves of disease: influenza, typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis.

It's somewhat unfortunate, but oftentimes we need something to break before any action is taken. There's a bias toward the status quo . Otherwise, it becomes a question of, "what did we do last time? Well that worked just fine. Let's do it again." But hopefully all of this makes you at least a little optimistic about the future. Because history has taught us that when faced with adversity, we don't typically turn our back on our cities. Rather we turn around and make them better .

Photo by Tomek Baginski on Unsplash