Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 800

A recent study by the MIT Senseable City Lab has used cellphone data to map both social and physical segregation within Singapore. To start, they used residential sale prices as a proxy for socioeconomic status. They then used call and text records (presumably it was all anonymous) from 1.8 million cellphone users in Singapore (2011) to map who interacted with who. Pictured above is one of those mappings.

What they discovered was evidence of a "rich club effect." In other words, the richer the person the less likely they were to interact with people outside of their socioeconomic band. The study calls this their communication segregation index .

A similar phenomenon was noted as people moved around Singapore. (This is the study's physical segregation index .) People tend to spend time in spaces alongside people with similar socioeconomic attributes. However, they did notice that this tends to wane during the day as people move around the city -- presumably for work and other such things.

I think it would be interesting to get a bit more granular about the findings in order to try and see, among other things, if certain public spaces are more successful than others at encouraging a broader socioeconomic mix. And it's probably only a matter of time before we start using tools like this to plan our cities. For more on the study, click here .

Image: MIT Senseable City Lab

This past fall, Goldman Sachs published an important report about " making cities resilient to climate change ." In it, they remind us that the scientific consensus is that the world has already warmed from the pre-industrial era (and will likely continue to do so) and that a great many of us live near water (and will likely be impacted going forward).

About 40% of the world's population lives within 100 kilometers of a coast, and about 10% of the world's population lives in a coastal settlement that is less than 10m above sea level. Above is a list of some of those cities, along with their average elevation in meters. The cities with single digit elevations include Bangkok, Miami, Alexandria, and Amsterdam.

Goldman's prediction is that this need for "urban adaption" could lead to one of the largest infrastructure build-outs in history. And that cities all around the world should already be thinking about how they will finance and equitably execute on greater resilience (assuming they aren't already).

Click here to download a full copy of the report. The diagrams showing the average change in global mean surface temperatures against the pre-industrial period are something you should all look at it. The 2015-2019 change is pictured above.

Charts: Goldman Sachs

I think it's time to make it official: Brutalism is fashionable again. Okay, kind of. According to this WSJ article , the appreciation for this style of architecture remains nowhere near universal, but the renaissance is certainly continuing. Some Brutalist structures are and have been torn down; while others are being repurposed .

One recent example is the Balfron Tower in East London (pictured above). Designed by the Hungarian-born architect Ernő Goldfinger and completed in the 1960s as social housing, the tower is currently undergoing a £40 million renovation that will convert it to market-rate housing. Apartments start at £365,000 (USD 472,054) for a 450 square foot one bedroom.

One notable feature are the "streets in the sky" that separate the building's circulation (elevator core) from the actual suites. It's a peculiar way to build and most never consider it today, but it's very much a hallmark of the Brutalist movement. The idea was to express the building's various functions -- vertical circulation being one of them.

I guess we just don't build them like we used to.

Photo: Walter Homann via the WSJ