Result of Google search could remake waterfront
Technology giant looked around the world before choosing Toronto as site for ambitious project
Google’s urban innovation offshoot looked at hundreds of international cities before choosing Toronto’s east waterfront as the best site to use technology to try to radically remake the modern city.
“We looked all over the world for the perfect place to bring this vision to life and we found it here in Toronto,” Dan Doctoroff, chief executive of New York-based Sidewalk Labs, told a crowd Tuesday at Corus Quay that included Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet.
In an interview, Doctoroff said his two-year-old company looked across North America, western Europe and Australia for the best place to try new ideas including self-driving buses and mass-production modular homes to solve major problems of urban living such as high housing costs, commute times, social inequality, climate change and even cold weather keeping people indoors.
Sidewalk Labs settled on Toronto for reasons including “unequalled diversity and spirit of openness,” a booming tech sector and three levels of government committed to Waterfront Toronto’s unfolding redevelopment plans for 800 acres of east downtown land.
Tuesday’s announcement made official recently leaked news that Sidewalk Labs won a Waterfront Toronto competition to at least start a conversation about building Quayside, a 12-acre site at Queens Quay E. and Parliament St. into a bustling neighbourhood.
There would be homes — one fifth of them for low-income Torontonians — as well as offices, stores, cultural spaces and more, underpinned by sensors and other cutting-edge technology.
Doctoroff said his company will spend $50 million on a yearlong discussion, starting at a Nov. 1 public meeting, with citizens, governments, universities and others, about what the project dubbed “Sidewalk Toronto” should be.
At the end of the year, they hope to have a blueprint that Waterfront Toronto, a partnership of the federal, provincial and Toronto governments, and Sidewalk Labs will find worthy to continue a partnership that both sides say could spill into the rest of the largely undeveloped 800 acres.
“A lot of the things I think we might want to do, while you can pilot them at the Quayside level, they really achieve their real benefit at a larger scale,” Doctoroff said.
Google Canada would move its Richmond St. headquarters to the area.
Officials stressed all plans are tentative until the end of consultations but the Sidewalk Labs winning submission paints a futuristic picture.
Transportation would be provided by small self-driving “taxi-bots” controlled by app services, with selfdriving buses to follow. An already planned waterfront light-rail line would link new communities with surrounding areas.
Instead of city garbage trucks rumbling through streets, robot vehicles would move waste and other goods through underground tunnels.
Weather “mitigation” features including wind shields could double the time people spend outside.
There are big questions and challenges. Some worry that Google, which makes money with data about people’s lives, could use the new project in a way that jeopardizes privacy. Sidewalk Labs documents released Tuesday don’t dispute such data will be collected but try to blunt such concerns with assurances that security and privacy protection will be baked into the new infrastructure.
But Tuesday the talk was of opportunities, not problems.
Trudeau heralded “technologies that will help us build smarter, greener, more inclusive cities which we hope to see scaled across Toronto’s eastern waterfront and eventually in other parts of Canada and around the world.”