Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 979

This morning Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang published an op-ed in Fast Company detailing how her architecture and urban design practice closed the gender wage gap. 

It is also a call to action and an example of something the firm calls “actionable idealism.” Here is an excerpt from the article:

What we discovered was that, despite our ideological commitment to equality (and though our numbers were significantly better than all the U.K. architecture firms reporting, in all categories), a small pay gap nevertheless existed between the women and men in my office. We fixed that with this year’s raises and now have no wage gap as an organization.

To learn more about how they accomplished this, check out the full article . And if you’d like to meet Jeanne Gang in Toronto this week and learn more about what we’re up to at Yonge + St. Clair, click here .

Later this month the new 9.7 km  North-South metro line in Amsterdam will start service. Like most large scale infrastructure projects, its opening has been delayed many times. 8 times according to this source . But this post is not about that. It’s about a byproduct of the line’s construction. 

The excavations required for the line meant that two sections of the Amstel River – namely the Damrak and Rokin sites – had to be drained. This took place from 2003 to 2012 and gave archaeologists unprecedented access to the bottom of a river in the middle of a historic city center.

Amsterdam started as a small trading port along the banks of the Amstel River some 800 years ago. So not surprisingly, they found a few things. Over 17,000 objects were found and all of them have been catalogued online according to time period, use, material, and location found.

For the full catalogue of objects, click here . Screenshot of the catalogue shown above. And to learn more about the entire project, start here . There’s a lot of good stuff in there for city nerds.

Happy Canada Day to the Canadian readers of this blog. Here is a picture that I took of the CN Tower a few weeks ago just after sunset from Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport ( YTZ ). It also symbolizes Canada for me. 80mm f/1.2 in case you’re wondering.

In some parts of this country, July 1st has another, perhaps more laborious, significance: It is “moving day.” In 18th century Quebec it was forbidden for les  seigneurs to evict farming tenants during the winter, a law that was simply inherited from France at the time.

As time went on, this evolved into a law – baked into the Civil Code of Lower Canada (1866) – requiring that all residential leases run from May 1 to April 30. May 1 was “moving day.”

In 1973, it was determined that May 1 was too disruptive to children in school and so an extension was granted on all leases, automatically pushing the date to July 1. It also meant moving in the summer, as opposed to in the spring when weather can be unpredictable in Quebec.

The requirement of fixed lease terms was also removed at this time (1974 onward), but tradition has persisted and July 1 remains known as “ moving day .” This seems to me like a logistical nightmare and a highly impractical way of allocating resources, but perhaps I’m just missing some of the nuances.

In any event, whether you’re sitting on a dock reading the Canadian Constitution Act of 1867 with a Brickworks cider , moving all of your belongings (in what is a hot weekend), or doing something completely different, I hope you’re having a good one. Happy Canada Day.