I rarely watch any TV, but when I do, I enjoy browsing YouTube. One of my favourite channels, one that I have mentioned before on this blog, is Never Too Small. It's a look at small urban spaces from around the world, with the architect or designer walking you through their intent and the various design details. Whenever I watch an episode, I usually get excited about the possibility of buying some piece-of-shit apartment in Paris and turning it into something cool. One day.

Now NTS has a new series coming out, and it's premiering this week on July 30. It's called My City, My Backyard, and it's a look at cities, specifically through the eyes of creatives. I already know that I'm going to like it, and I love the title. When you live in a city, the entire city is your backyard and amenity. The first city in this new series also happens to be one of my favourite cities: Marseille.

Marseille is having a moment right now, and that's not just my confirmation bias speaking. In 2024, the city saw 19.5 million overnight stays, which were a 20% increase compared to the year prior (they hosted 10 medal events during the Paris 2024 Olympics). But even if you strip out its Olympic boost, tourism is rising. Spring 2025 recorded a 7% year-over-year increase, which included a 19% increase in international visitors. Summer 2025 visitors were also 10% higher than in 2023.

What's driving this, beyond its vibrant culture, great restaurants, and breathtaking landscapes, is that Marseille has just the right amount of edge. It's not always a hyper-polished Instagram moment; it's an effortlessly cool place where finding an uncomfortable rock next to turquoise waters will give you everything you need.

In other words, it is a place that feels authentic. And in a world of global sameness and AI-generated simulacra, I think many of us are now seeking that authenticity — something that feels real and a little raw. Marseille has that in spades. Oh, and if any of you happen to visit la plage de Maldormé, let me know if my unauthorized sticker is still there.

Here is NTS's channel in case you want to check out Marseille this week.

Cover photo by Jeet Sandhu

Real estate can be an abstract concept. If you're a capital allocator, it might be a line item in one of your spreadsheets. Or, if you're a developer primarily focused on zoning and entitlements, you might think in terms of gross floor area. How much density do I have, and what is it going to be worth?

This is not to disparage any one component or participant within the development supply chain; it is simply to say that development is long and complicated, participants will naturally specialize, and everyone will have a lens through which they see things.

But at the end of the day, these activities ultimately come back to fundamentals: the real estate needs to house people and things, and do something. Gross floor area has value on a spreadsheet because it can be turned into something. And it is ultimately that something that determines how much it is worth.

If you're a developer selling entitled land, your direct customer is the next developer, the one who will ultimately build out the site. Then, that developer's customers are the people who will ultimately buy, rent, and occupy the space. And in some cases, those customers will also have their own customers, if, for instance, they choose to buy a space and then rent it out to somebody else.

So there are layers to this. But regardless of where you might sit within the chain, I think it's always helpful to focus on the customer, or customers. It's harder to be wrong with your assumptions if you drill all the way down and consider the end use cases.

Cover photo by Israel Andrade

We talk a lot around here about the surprising difficulty of building small-scale apartment buildings. Here's a post from earlier this year where I outlined a working list of policies, codes, and approaches that would need to change in order to unlock more of this housing type.

But my list was just that — a list — and the reality is that each individual item can be shockingly complex. To that end, here's a recent study, published by the Neptis Foundation, called "Ontario Building Code Missing Middle Study: Bridging the gap between houses and high-rises."

The authors are Conrad Speckert of Semibold Solutions (who has appeared on this blog in the past) and Jack Keays of Vortex Fire Consulting, and I encourage you to download a free copy. I haven't gone through it yet, but I will, because we are actively working on projects at this exact scale.

Enjoy the weekend.

Cover photo by Danish Prakash