I had almost forgotten this blog existed.

Well actually… not entirely.

Every now and then, I remembered that somewhere on the internet was a WordPress site I started in 2019, wrote exactly one post on, and then promptly abandoned.

Seven years later, I opened it again.

My first reaction was: Jesus, this is cringey.

Second: wait, don’t delete it.

I was 25 when I wrote that first post. I had just finished university and apparently thought “Hey-o!”, “doode”, and “ANYWHO” were perfectly reasonable words to put on the internet for the world to see.

It was a different time.

But underneath all that… I found something I still agree with:

“I found that writing eases me head…”

Grammar aside, I think 25-year-old me had a robust point.

Writing forces me to take thoughts that are floating around in my head and put some structure around them. Things that seems obvious become less obvious once I try to explain them. Things that seems complicated… sometimes become surprisingly simple.

And sometimes I discover that I don’t understand something nearly as well as I thought I did.

Maybe that’s the most useful part.

When I started this blog, I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to write about. I mentioned sharing things I found interesting, perhaps some short stories, and whatever else happened to occupy my mind.

Seven years later, I think I have a better answer.

Buildings. Cities. Business. Capital.

They sound like four separate subjects.

They actually aren’t.

Buildings don’t appear out of nowhere. They are products of architecture and engineering, certainly, but also; business, land, regulation, financing, construction, materials, and thousands of decisions made by different people.

My experience in the construction industry can attest to that. I found that what I had been taught in architecture school scratches the mere surface of the whole fruit. The actual flesh inside… is a lot more complicated.

Buildings, in turn, make cities.

And cities shape business, property, transportation, productivity, and the everyday lives of the people inside them.

Behind much of that is capital: where it comes from, where it goes, who decides where to put it, and what gets built as a result.

Over the past seven years, I’ve found myself becoming increasingly interested in the connections between these things.

I’ve also learned that the larger the subject becomes, the more important the small things seem to get.

A building can have a beautiful architectural concept and still fail because of poorly resolved little detail.

A business can have an ambitious strategy and still stumble because its everyday processes don’t work.

A city can have grand infrastructure plans and still be unpleasant to walk through because somebody forgot about the pavement.

The big picture matters.

So do the details.

Metres and millimetres.

Which brings me… back here.

I don’t intend for m & mm to become a carefully curated publication where I pretend to have an authoritative answer to everything I write about. Quite the contrary.

I want this to be somewhere I can examine things I find interesting, put ideas into words, and hopefully understand them a little better in the process.

Sometimes that will mean architecture or façade engineering.

Sometimes cities and infrastructure.

Sometimes running a business.

Sometimes property, investing, or capital allocation.

And occasionally, probably something completely unrelated because I found it interesting that week.

Some of these thoughts will eventually turn out to be wrong. I hope some will change as I learn more. That’s part of the point.

Seven years ago, I ended my first post by saying I’d try to make whatever I wrote here interesting and useful.

I also said I wasn’t making any promises.

That second part turned out to be remarkably accurate.

So this time I won’t promise a publishing schedule.

I’ll just write.

There are a few things I’ve been thinking about.