Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 79

In yesterday's post about bottom-up urban development, I mentioned (in parentheses) that the focus on regenerating local economies is arguably even more important in the context of Japan, where a shrinking population is creating urban decline in many communities. And the reason I said this is because it is widely known that Japan has a demographic problem.

Since 2009, the country has seen its population decline every single year. Currently, it is hovering at just over 120 million people, but by 2050, it is expected to fall to roughly 100 million (or lower), with people aged 65+ accounting for nearly 40% of the population.

When this is your backdrop, you're usually more concerned about urban decline than you are about building enough new housing. As Fred Wilson mentioned in this recent post , "pressing issues like the unaffordability of housing, for example, can quickly change if we are living in a shrinking world, not a growing world."

Of course, it's not just Japan. The global fertility rate (as of 2024) stands at around 2.25 live births per woman . This is not that much higher than the replacement level of 2.1, and it's being largely propped up by only one region: Sub-Saharan Africa (>4 births per woman). Remove this region, and the world is now already shrinking in population.

This will have dramatic consequences not just on our cities and real estate markets, but on the global economy as a whole, which is why some people, like venture capitalists , are already betting that the world will need to move from labor-bound to energy-bound. What this means is that we're going to need a lot more energy-consuming tech to compensate for the fact that we have less of the other stuff.

You know, humans.

Sometimes I am an advocate for big, bold urban change. This is where I tend to be closely aligned with urbanists like Joe Berridge , co-founder of Urban Strategies. ( We sat on a panel together this past October at the Council for Canadian Urbanism Forum, and I found myself agreeing with him on this point.)

For example, last week I tweeted that the edges of High Park would be better off looking like Central Park in New York. By this I meant that High Park is an urban park with a major subway line running on top of it — we should not be shy about embracing a more urban future.

This stretch of Bloor Street, at the north edge of the park, has got to be one of the dullest stretches of street along the entire line. It's hardly fitting for Toronto's most famous urban park.

Some of you didn't like this tweet. Serendipitously, it also happened to align with a heated community meeting for a major two-tower rental development in High Park North. But this project is one block from a subway station, and it should be approved. The unfortunate reality is that we have underdeveloped much of the land around our transit infrastructure.

At the very same time, I am a strong advocate for small-scale, incremental change. We've spoken a lot about this topic over the years, particularly in the context of Tokyo. Japan is renowned for its flexible approach to zoning and for the way that it allows small, ground-up interventions. The result is an approach to urbanism that is often referred to as emergent .

A good example of this approach is the work of Japanese developer Staple . Staple calls itself a "soft developer" and what that translates into is a bottom-up model that is focused on regenerating local economies. (This is arguably even more important in the context of Japan, where a shrinking population is creating urban decline in many communities.)

To achieve this, they rely on "soft infrastructure" such as local shops and grocers, hotels, housing, workspaces, restaurants, regenerative agriculture, lifelong learning centers, and more. In other words, they are focused on the nuts and bolts that make for thriving local communities and that can be easily missed if you're too focused on the bigger picture.

One recently completed project is Soil Nihonbashi in Tokyo's Nihonbashi-Kabutocho neighborhood. Designed by architect Kiyoaki Takeda, the project opened in September and includes a coffee shop, cocktail bar, dim sum spot (and other dining options), co-working space, parklet (bakery), rooftop agricultural garden, and 14-room hotel.

It's the kind of hotel that global brands tend to avoid like the plague. It's too small. Too many diseconomies of scale. But it's exactly the kind of hotel and mix of uses that is wonderful for local communities. Think of what the Drake Hotel here in Toronto did for West Queen West when it opened back in the day.

All of this brings me back to something I have said before. A good recipe for city building is to be stubborn on vision, but flexible on the details . Cities are at their best when you allow and empower bottom-up change. Get out of the way. There's no way that top-down planning will get it all right. So if you can combine bold vision with flexible implementation, well then, you've got the secret sauce.

Cover photo from architect Kiyoaki Takeda

We've been talking a lot about autonomous vehicles, and in particular Waymo , on this blog. In my opinion, the safety records — which Waymo has published after driving more than 100 million driverless miles — already suggest that none of us should be driving cars anymore . Some or many of you will disagree with this statement, but there's a reason why car crashes are the number two cause of death for children and young adults in the US.

So not only is this a tech breakthrough and a profound city-building shift, but it's also a public health breakthrough. Here's a recent opinion piece published in the New York Times by Dr. Jonathan Slotkin, the vice chair of neurosurgery at the Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania. I found this statement particularly interesting:

In medical research, there’s a practice of ending a study early when the results are too striking to ignore. We stop when there is unexpected harm. We also stop for overwhelming benefit, when a treatment is working so well that it would be unethical to continue giving anyone a placebo. When an intervention works this clearly, you change what you do.

Now the imperative:

There’s a public health imperative to quickly expand the adoption of autonomous vehicles. More than 39,000 Americans died in motor vehicle crashes last year, more than homicide, plane crashes and natural disasters combined. Crashes are the No. 2 cause of death for children and young adults. But death is only part of the story. These crashes are also the leading cause of spinal cord injury. We surgeons see the aftermath of the 10,000 crash victims who come to emergency rooms every day. The combined economic and quality-of-life toll exceeds $1 trillion annually, more than the entire U.S. military or Medicare budget.

Dr. Slotkin goes on to talk about some of the cities that are pushing back against AV adoption, or simply erecting barriers, namely Washington, D.C. and Boston. That's too bad. This is a decision that can be easily guided by data: Which is the safest option for the greatest number of people? Just do that. Dr. Slotkin gets it right: "policymakers need to stop fighting this transformation and start planning for it."