Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 832

This recent study used geotagged tweets to measure social connectedness within American cities. There are two measures: (1) concentrated mobility and (2) equitable mobility. The first measures the extent to which social connections (geotagged tweets) are concentrated in a set of places within the city. And the second looks at the degree in which people move between neighborhoods in roughly similar proportions. These measures are the y-axis and the x-axis, respectively, in this graph:

So how do you read this chart?

Well if you look at New York, you'll see that it is relatively high in concentrated mobility, but the lowest in terms of equitable mobility. This means that social connections are highly concentrated and that there's low connectedness to other neighborhoods within the city. Miami, on the other hand, is the opposite. It's also an outlier. Few hubs. But its social connections appear to cross neighborhoods and spread across the city.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the study found that the size of a city seems to have the biggest impact on social connectedness. Which makes sense -- it becomes harder to get around and so people start to localize. I am reminded of this whenever my friends in Los Angeles tell me they never go to the beach because it's simply too difficult and too time consuming to get across the city.

This also became clear to me after I started playing around with the Moves App back in 2015. The app no longer exists, but it was an activity tracker that allowed you to map where you, well, moved. And the more time you spent in one place, the more concentrated the activity would become. They depicted this through larger and larger circles. Example maps, here . My maps revealed that I need to branch out into different neighborhoods more often.

To download a full copy of the study, click here .

Chart: CityLab

Ottawa, Ontario and Gatineau, Quebec are border cities. They exist on either sides of the Ottawa River. And yet, 2017 data from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation revealed that there's about a $450 per month rent spread on the average two-bedroom apartment in these two cities. The average rent on the Ontario side was $1,232 per month; whereas the average rent on the Quebec side was $782 per month.

Now, Ottawa is bigger. The city has a population of about 934,243 (2016); whereas Gatineau is about 276,245 (2016). Ottawa is also the nation's capital, and so the center of gravity is firmly toward the former. But the border is also very porous. Google Maps is telling me that you can walk from downtown Ottawa to downtown Hull (Gatineau) in 30 minutes. So why then is there such a rent disparity?

Is there a language barrier? Is it because income taxes are higher in Quebec? Or is it something else? Interesting.

Photo by  Marc-Olivier Jodoin  on  Unsplash

There's a stretch of restaurants and bars on the south side of King Street, west of John Street, here in Toronto, that I generally try and avoid. I won't name names, but if you're from Toronto, you know what I'm talking about. With all due respect to the business owners, I think of this stretch as tourist row. All cities have them. Usually the identifying marker is a human on the street with a menu trying to entice you to come inside and eat. And there's nothing wrong with that. I can appreciate good street hustle.

But whenever I'm traveling and trying to find a place to eat, I'll often think to myself, "Oh man, is this the (insert city name here) equivalent of tourist row? I see people on the street with menus in their hands. Could be." This is one of the reasons why I like Time Out's recent "definitive list of the planet's cultural and culinary hotspots." They surveyed over 27,000 city dwellers in order to figure out where locals actually want to hang out. The result is the 50 coolest neighborhoods in the world .

I am somewhat embarrassed to say that, I think, I've only been to 6 of them. I have work to do. But Toronto does make the list -- once -- and it is none other than the Junction. Their recommendations, here . However, one thing they did miss was the Union Pearson Express . That is the way to get to the Junction from Union Station and it is, clearly, still under the radar for most. The number one spot on their list goes to Arroios in Lisbon , which is actually beside where I stayed when I was there this summer. Damn that city is cool.

For the full list of neighborhoods, click here .

Full disclosure: I am not a neutral observer. We are developing in the Junction . And I am moving to the Junction (and trying to pretend to be cool).