Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 972

This afternoon my friend Gabriel, of Gabriel Fain Architects , sent me the work of APOLLO Architects & Associates. They are based in Japan and South Korea. Here is a preview of some of their “ private houses ”:

There is a lot that I love about these homes. 

I love their simplicity. Look at this handrail detail. Nothing more than what is absolutely necessary.

I love their modesty. Many of the above homes hover around 150 square meters and many of them are much much smaller. 

I love that each project’s description starts by talking about the owners and the site conditions, signaling that each home represents an individual response tailored to both the occupants and the context.

And I love that many of these homes have been built on unthinkably small parcels of land in dense urban settings; parcels that would be dismissed as entirely useless in other parts of the world. 

The site area for this home is 46.53 square meters and the building’s footprint is 36.93 square meters.

Of course the Japanese housing market is a unique place. It’s worth pointing that out . 

But as I browsed through what are effectively custom single family homes, I couldn’t help but be reminded that there’s a fine line between need and want.

Small can be very beautiful. But small is also subjective.

We often talk about agglomeration economies in terms of their horizontal clustering within cities. But a new paper in the Journal of Urban Economics –  summarized here by Richard Florida – has looked at the other dimension: the vertical clustering of economic activity within tall buildings. 

Here is an excerpt from Florida’s piece in CityLab:

Economic activity is also sorted vertically, with higher-profile and more profitable firms occupying higher building floors. Law offices are disproportionately represented on the highest floors, taking up more than a third of floor space above the 40th floor, compared to 12 percent of floor space between the second and 40th floors. Finance, insurance, and real estate take up roughly 20 percent of floor space above the 40th floor, compared to 23 percent between the second and 40th floors. Business services, engineering, and miscellaneous other industries are also more likely to take up more space below the 40th floor.

The other takeaway is that there appears to be a greater rent premium attached to higher floors (vertical movement) than for being located closer to the central business district (horizontal movement). This surprised me. But I also don’t have access to the full paper. Is the dataset just US cities?

Nevertheless, the idea of a vertical city interests me a lot. And I agree with the authors of the report that, for perhaps obvious reasons, it is far less studied compared to horizontal development patterns.

This piece in the New Yorker about how e-commerce, and in particular JD.com, is transforming rural China is worth a read.

In typical New Yorker fashion, it’s a good long-form read, but one that you can also listen to if that’s your thing.

What’s immediately fascinating are how important trust is to JD’s rural expansion strategy and how locals from these rural communities are used to penetrate the social networks.

Today, Xia oversees deliveries to more than two hundred villages around the Wuling Mountains, including his birthplace. But, in line with JD’s growth strategy, an equally important aspect of Xia’s job is to be a promoter for the company, getting the word out about its services. His income depends in part on the number of orders that come from his region. Across China, JD has made a policy of recruiting local representatives who can exploit the thick social ties of traditional communities to drum up business.

This is important because:

“Chinese people don’t easily believe the good will of strangers,” Liu told me. “Why do you think Chinese fight tooth and nail to get on the bus and subway?” He shook his head and laughed. “It doesn’t matter that it’s less efficient or unnecessary. It’s a complete reflex for them, because it’s what they’ve been taught since they were young.”

When you have some time, here is the full article . 

According to the New Yorker, JD.com is the third largest tech company in the world in terms of revenue. They also have the largest drone delivery platform in the world .