Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 837

This deserves a blog post. Below is a great tweet by Jason Thorne . Jason leads the department of planning and economic development at the City of Hamilton, where, full disclosure, we have a development project.

https://twitter.com/JasonThorne_RPP/status/1169749295299538944?s=20

I have said this many times before on the blog, but the challenge with most "community engagement" is that cities typically hear from the people who disagree. Those voices are then taken as representative.

My gut tells me that we need to make it easier for people to agree. We need to reduce the barriers. Some will take the time to write a thoughtful letter. But most won't.

https://www.ted.com/talks/debora_mesa_molina_stunning_buildings_made_from_raw_imperfect_materials

A few people have now sent me this TED talk by architect Débora Mesa Molina. But I watched it for the first time today. I guess my personal brand is pretty closely associated with architecture and design.

In it, she talks about her firm's approach to using overlooked and/or standard building materials in unconventional ways. For example, here , she used stacked precast beams to assemble a house in Madrid (c.2008). The entire structure came together in only 7 days.

My first reaction is that I like the idea and approach -- which is really quite interesting -- more than the final designs. I am also curious if there were any cost savings as a result of using "standard" materials. What are your thoughts?

I came across this map while reading up on Hurricane Dorian :

It is a map showing the tracks of every known hurricane in the North Atlantic (1851-2013) and in the Eastern North Pacific (1949-2013). Major hurricanes (category 3 or higher) are shown in yellow and tropical cyclones (intensity less than category 3) are shown in red.

The map is from the National Hurricane Center . Some of their other maps include the points of origin for tropical cyclones ( here is August 21-31 from 1851-2015) and the total number of hurricane strikes by U.S. county ( here is Florida from 1900-2010).

What has happened is a catastrophe. UBS is already estimating the insured damages in the Bahamas to be between $500 million and $1 billion. But as is usually the case, the total economic losses will likely exceed the insured losses .