One thing I’ve been thinking about here is: There is a lot of branding around “we’re building a city,” when it’s usually really “we’re developing land.” And maybe the utopian tech set just aren’t developers.
Developers have to work with cities a lot. If we asked a developer who developed part of a city that we really like how they did it, would they say they experienced the same friction? Or have they just figured out how to do it because that’s what they do?
Totally — developers aren't utopian; they're economic actors adapted to operating in the system as it currently exists. This is why the construction industry writ large is not nearly as politically Yimby as some critics would like to believe (if we were all actually getting funded by Big Real Estate, we'd have made a lot more progress in the last 8 years).
Re: your distinction between "building a city" and "developing land", I think I know where you're going with that...but also..say more? :)
This interview made me of think of Andrew Haswell Green, the driving force for New York's consolidation. He faced a similar set of impenetrable diffusion of decision-making that was only overcome with patience, time, and a clever strategy of shopping for favorable legal rulings and political issues to make hay with (IIRC, police couldn't pursue criminals outside their borough, which citizens knew to be a widespread problem). If anything, it feels like social media should make that even easier than his day.
For all the "world class city" bluster, Toronto is and will likely remain a world class backwater ruled by fear of the unknown, active discouragement of free thinking entrepreneurs and naive belief that being the big fish in the small Canadian pond insulates it from a slow decline.
One thing I’ve been thinking about here is: There is a lot of branding around “we’re building a city,” when it’s usually really “we’re developing land.” And maybe the utopian tech set just aren’t developers.
Developers have to work with cities a lot. If we asked a developer who developed part of a city that we really like how they did it, would they say they experienced the same friction? Or have they just figured out how to do it because that’s what they do?
Totally — developers aren't utopian; they're economic actors adapted to operating in the system as it currently exists. This is why the construction industry writ large is not nearly as politically Yimby as some critics would like to believe (if we were all actually getting funded by Big Real Estate, we'd have made a lot more progress in the last 8 years).
Re: your distinction between "building a city" and "developing land", I think I know where you're going with that...but also..say more? :)
This interview made me of think of Andrew Haswell Green, the driving force for New York's consolidation. He faced a similar set of impenetrable diffusion of decision-making that was only overcome with patience, time, and a clever strategy of shopping for favorable legal rulings and political issues to make hay with (IIRC, police couldn't pursue criminals outside their borough, which citizens knew to be a widespread problem). If anything, it feels like social media should make that even easier than his day.
For all the "world class city" bluster, Toronto is and will likely remain a world class backwater ruled by fear of the unknown, active discouragement of free thinking entrepreneurs and naive belief that being the big fish in the small Canadian pond insulates it from a slow decline.