Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 759

The “contact tracing” API that Apple and Google are working on and that I wrote about earlier this month is set to be released on May 1. Given all the concerns around privacy, it’s now being referred to as “ exposure tracing.” The idea, here, is to emphasize that it is being designed to trace the coronavirus and not individuals.

To be clear, we’re talking about APIs, and so third party apps will need to be built on top of this tech before we can start downloading anything to our phones. But I am sure that will happen very soon and I will gladly opt in.

It’s also worth mentioning that this entire concept of smartphone exposure tracing only works when Apple and Google cooperate . Whatever apps ultimately get built need to work across both platforms, otherwise there would be far too many gaps in the network. So this — along with the focus on privacy — has become a bit of good PR for “big tech.”

The smart people working on exposure tracing over at Oxford University seem to think that (alongside other interventions) we could stop this virus with only about 60% of the population using an exposure tracing app. (They ran models with a pretend city of 1 million people.) But even at 50% penetration, they believe it could make a meaningful contribution.

These are numbers I think we could easily get to in major cities. Overall, I suspect it could also make people feel a lot more comfortable about going out. And going out is what’s going to be required as we gradually reopen the global economy. How many of you think you will opt in to something like this once it becomes available?

I am sure that many of you have been eagerly waiting for an old Brutalist wine warehouse to come on the market near Bordeaux, and so here is a listing from Espaces Atypiques . The site is over 1 hectare. The ground floor is about 2,000 square meters. And the central atrium space is some 25m tall. It's listed for €550,000 and I reckon it needs a bit of work.

I don't know where exactly it's located in Saint-Émilion, France (nor have I ever been) and I can't vouch for the condition of the existing building in any way shape or form, but I do think it would be a lot of fun to turn a Brutalist structure like this into a hotel, restaurant, and creative event space. Public gathering space(s) in the atrium; private rooms along the perimeter.

Image: Espaces Atypiques

The Penn Institute for Urban Research has just launched a new initiative called, Cities and Contagion: Lessons from COVID-19 . The inaugural piece is a special edition of its Urban Link publication. But going forward, the initiative is planned to include not only publications, but a resource library, convenings (online and offline, when appropriate), and research projects. The objective is to bring together experts from different disciplines to discuss the impacts of this pandemic on cities, as well as the possible responses going forward. You can find the first set of articles, here . Some of the contributions include, " Agglomeration economies are not going away " (Jessie Handbury) and, " There's no substitute for cities " (Richard Voith and Susan Wachter). The titles alone should give you a taste of what you can expect from this first publication.

Photo by  Patrick Mueller  on  Unsplash