Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 855

https://twitter.com/alexbozikovic/status/1149316549993488384

As I was going through this Twitter thread by Alex Bozikovic on the "Château Laurier battle," I came across a great line by Robert Wright: " We cannot recreate the past only parody it ." I told him I was going to steal it, but here I am giving him credit .

The controversy in Ottawa stems from the fact that a number of people believe that a modern addition to the Fairmont Château Laurier (which was constructed between 1909 and 1912) amounts to heresy.

Instead, the addition should be designed to match the "Château style" that already exists. There should be no change. As Alex put it, "people want Disneyland."

We've had this very same debate come up on some of our projects, where people -- but notably, not the city -- have asked us to replicate something that was constructed in the 1800's using labor and material techniques that no longer exist.

This is where Robert's line comes in.

Architecture is a reflection of the cultural milieu in which it was designed and built, which is one of the reasons why we sometimes preserve old buildings. They communicate to us a particular moment in time.

The reason architects, designers, and planners so often respond -- negatively that is -- to Disneyland-type architecture, is that it lacks that same authenticity. It's only a simulacra.

It's for this reason that one of Ontario's " eight guiding principles in the conservation of built heritage properties " is, in fact, legibility:

" New work should be distinguishable from old. Buildings or structures should be recognized as products of their own time, and new additions should not blur the distinction between old and new."

This is not to say that we shouldn't be respectful of the past. Five of the eight guiding principles include the word "respect" in the title. There should be lots of that.

But we would be fooling, and cheating, ourselves if we believed we could mimic the past with any justice. We cannot recreate the past only parody it.

There's now evidence to suggest that the political crisis in Hong Kong may be having an impact on capital flows. Bloomberg, as well as others, reported today that wealth managers in Asia have been receiving a heightened number of requests to transfer assets out of the country -- to places like Singapore -- and to setup new overseas bank accounts so that they can be ready to transfer, should the situation gets worse.

In fact, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) even asked the country's financial institutions not to prey on the wealthy in Hong Kong during this period of uncertainty. They want to avoid the perception that Singapore is trying to capitalize on the situation. Of course, it remains to be seen how much all of this is here-say and how much of it will actually translate into a meaningful transfer of wealth.

Hong Kong has a significantly larger private wealth base, with about 853 individuals worth more than $100 million . This is more than double the number in Singapore (figure from Credit Suisse). But the current demonstrations have people questioning what will happen to Hong Kong in 2047 when the constitutional article committing Hong Kong to a capitalist way of life is set to expire.

The flows of capital can be fickle.

Photo by  Florian Wehde  on  Unsplash

Garrett Dash Nelson recently published a study looking at urban density on a cell-by-cell basis for a number of US cities. Each "cell" is a 30 arc-second grid cell , but you can think of them as being approximately one square kilometer. The goal of the project was to better define urban density and do it in a more granular way. City averages don't tell you a whole lot about how neighborhoods vary, and they can be skewed by the denominator you use. i.e. Where are you drawing the urban boundary?

You can play around with his interactive study, here . Each city can be explored according to its 200 most dense cells. One interesting takeaway -- though it is probably not all that surprising to this audience -- is that New York City is really a unique place when it comes to American cities. If you look at the above chart (sourced from CityLab ), you'll see that most other US cities don't come close to it in terms of urban density. New York's 200th densest cell is still denser than the most dense cells of Boston, the Twin Cities, and of Dallas.

The y-axis is the total population in each grid cell.