Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 935

Yesterday I sent out this tweet about the, relatively new, Apple store in Kyoto . 

It is the first in the city and I like what they did with the facade of the building. It is decidedly modern and yet there are hints of a local vernacular.

Photographer  Jonathan Castellino responded and suggested that I check out the new(ish) Leica store, which is also in Kyoto. 

So here is that store (if you can’t see the video below, click here ):

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouckkaj3XVc&w=560&h=315]

I shoot on the Fujifilm X-T3, but Leica certainly makes some exquisite (and expensive) cameras. The Leica Store Kyoto does not deviate from that recipe.

In 2011, Apple owned 584 acres of land.

As of this year, and according to the Financial Times , the company now owns about 7,376 acres. 

Apple uses its “facilities and land for corporate functions, R&D and data centres.” The latter would include server farms for its various online services, such as iMessage, Apple Music, and the App Store.

It can be easy to think of “the cloud” and the online services we use every day as existing only in some ethereal world up in the sky or in a distant land.

But the reality is that these services have very real physical space requirements. The above chart begins to speak to that.

During the recent election here in Toronto, mayoral candidate Jennifer Keesmaat raised the idea of this city region, maybe, becoming its own province. It wasn’t the first time this idea has been floated, but it once again didn’t stick.

Earlier this week, Richard Florida spoke at the Urban Land Institute’s Toronto symposium and he brought up a similar issue: Toronto is a ‘city state’ and needs to start acting like it . Here is an excerpt from a recent Star article about his talk:

He also noted that in terms of total economic output, the GTA [Greater Toronto Area] — he included the Golden Horseshoe — is responsible for about “$700 billion” (U.S) in economic output.

“Which means our … region is equivalent to that of Sweden. So we are a city state, a mega region.”

He later added: “we are a powerful global city with lots of assets to build on,” he said.

But he went on to say that despite all of these successes there’s a “sense that something is amiss, something is wrong.”

I have long supported the notion that city regions need to see and think of themselves as one united and contiguous economic landscape. In our case, it is not about, for instance, Hamilton vs. Toronto. This is about our entire region vs. New York or Singapore (a city-state) or the Pearl River Delta megalopolis.

The headlines coming out of Amazon’s recent announcement are clear: In Superstar Cities, the Rich Get Richer, and They Get Amazon . This is winner-take-all urbanism where you need to be a “superstar” in order to compete.