re:Build (June 2019)
Personal Update
Hi, friends!
Welcome to the first edition of my monthly newsletter, re:Build.
I’m taking a writing course and my assignment this week is to sign up 20 people for my newsletter (Check. Thank you!) and to send you all a personal update to kick things off. I'll send these out once a month as a way to share my thoughts, explore ideas, and a provide few personal updates.
What I’m working on
✍ A personal website to explore ideas around city building and connect with like-minded people. I remember ideas best when I have an opportunity to discuss or explain them to other people. My blog is an experiment to see if summarizing, writing up reactions, and reiterating the highlights of what I’ve thought about or learned have a similar effect. I was going to just write for myself but I think posting pieces online, even if no one reads them, will raise my standard of writing and help me think through ideas. Ideally posts will inspire feedback and new perspectives that can help me learn. Strong opinions, weakly held. You can check the website here and my first post here!
🔨 Affordable rental housing! I've spent the last 3 years developing and building what's often called "attainable ownership housing". Attainable ownership is needed everywhere but it serves a particular group of people who typically have steady incomes yet still find homeownership out of reach. Clearly there are many more types of people struggling to find suitable housing. With affordable rentals, I can offer places to live to a much broader segment of people on that spectrum. We're still looking for sites and applying for funding but the numbers work and it's a motivating process. I’ll write more as things progress.
What I’m thinking about
🏢 Sidewalk Labs and their plan for Toronto's waterfront. In 2017, Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google’s parent company), won a bid to help a government agency called Waterfront Toronto develop a small area along Toronto's eastern waterfront called "Quayside". Pitched as the neighbourhood of the future, Sidewalk Labs wants to remodel Quayside “from the internet up” testing new "smart city" technologies before scaling them to other cities.
A combination of PR missteps and concerns about decision making and data privacy have lead to leaders and advisers leaving Waterfront and Sidewalk and growing resistance to the project. The final plan is expected from Sidewalk this month, so I’m hoping for clarity on a few critical details.
What matters most is how Sidewalk plans to make money. Their revenue models seem to fall into three buckets - real estate, infrastructure, and data.
For me, it’s all about the data. The issue is clear, people are worried about privacy. But, and this is a working theory, privacy may not actually be people’s primary concern. What they actually don’t like, it seems, is the idea that their information is collected and they can’t control it. We all trade our privacy for services everyday when we post a picture, search directions, and pay with credit card. It may be that people are less concerned about their data being collected and more concerned about who controls it and how it’s used.
I’m not sure we’ve figured out the perfect structure for Toronto but I think the Civic Data Trust can be the right tool. The city needs to control its digital infrastructure.There are too many unknowns about the future of data monetization for governments to risk undervaluing their urban data today because they don’t know what it will be used for tomorrow, see Google’s DeepMind in the U.K.
Sidewalk’s real estate and infrastructure revenue models haven’t been all that innovative so far. The ideas have been around for decades with plenty of examples, both good and bad.
How land that is currently owned by various stakeholders will be transferred to Sidewalk is also hugely important. It’s impossible to evaluate a land deal with out knowing how it’s being made.
I’d like to dig into this once the final plan is released, so you have any thoughts or interesting takes on Sidewalk Labs please pass them along!
What I’m reading
📗 Paris Reborn by Stephane Kirkland. The serendipity of twitter put this book in my hands and it's been the perfect entry point to learn about the history of Paris before Andrea and I head there next month. From a Jane Jacob’s footnote, someone shared a an essay by Robert Moses critiquing the work of Baron Haussmann (you’re welcome fellow planning nerds, apologies to everyone else). Kirkland explains why Haussmann shouldn’t get all the credit for transforming Paris with its grand boulevards and limestone architecture. Much of the planning and initial work had already been put in place by Napoleon III and others, well before Haussmann came onto the scene. The book has been a fascinating story of how a heavy-handed government used force and fraud to build a beautiful, functional modern city that became the cultural capital of the world.
Extracurricular
🏀 It's the NBA Finals and Toronto is buzzing. The city is behind the Raptors as they face the Golden State Warriors, but I'm conflicted. I'm not so sure who I'm cheering for anymore. By dint of luck, I've got to hang with Stephen Curry and his family a handful of times over the past few weeks. I joined the Warriors in Houston for Game 3 of the Western Semi-finals, confirmed I’m terrible at golf in front of Seth and Dell Curry, and ate legendary jerk chicken with the Curry family and friends (it ain’t pretty, but here’s a pic).
It’s been a window into the life of one of the world’s top athletes at a point when he’s leading his team in the finals for the 5th year in a row. And the strange thing is, you’d never know it. He’s got a special ability to perform at an elite level, then, when the game is over, seamlessly step back into his role as a dad, husband, son, brother, and friend. Having a tight-knit and hugely supportive family probably doesn’t hurt either. The Curry’s also know how to have a good time. Around 1am Sunday morning, I was first to leave the party (including Stephen who had Game 2 later that day!)
Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it!
Until next month,
Angus