Waterfront reality gets in way of Google affiliate’s ideas
“Be seeing you.”
Only devotees of The Prisoner, the superbly hallucinogenic ’60s-era series about entrapment in “The Village,” will recognize the show’s creepy language of leave taking.
The neighbourly farewell was accompanied by forefinger pressed to thumb, as in a circle, and raised to the eye, in the manner of a spy glass. The implication of always being under watch was clear.
This is perhaps too extreme a sensation brought on by the intense relationship between Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp. (TWRC) and Sidewalk Labs LLC. But such are the spaces the mind occupies when presented with a vacuum.
Before you know it, you’re imagining you’re wearing a sensor-packed wristband and walking around with the number six stuck to the lapel of your jacket.
But back to the modern day.
The Sidewalk Labs experiment bumps along, with the two parties releasing this week a plan development agreement which, I guess, is meant to settle the nerves of those who fear that having a Google Inc. affiliate creating a mini city within our city presents serious implications for privacy, data scraping and monetization for Google, and not us. (I try to use the name Alphabet Inc., the still newish parent to Google, but it is hard. When Google founder Larry Page explained the new moniker thusly —“We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language” — I briefly thought that making a bazillion dollars might not be all that difficult.)
Alphabet is really a collection of initiatives, including the core Google business.
So this is a segregation play. Page can envision his “10X” bets, or alpha-bets, and pursue them with a “relatively small investment” in a startup like Sidewalk Labs and keep it operationally at arm’s length from Google itself. By making 10X bets, Page means launching initiatives with the potential to make an enormous impact. In the case of Sidewalk Labs — and I’m using Page’s words here — the list includes better public transport, less pollution, plentiful parks, safer biking paths, affordable housing and more.
On the surface, the plan for 12 acres known as the Quayside pilot, or “test bed,” extrapolated to the roughly 800 acres that constitute the Eastern Waterfront, sells well, by which I mean it sounds socially progressive and environmentally conscious.
But as has been much reported, it failed the essential first test of transparency last November, when Waterfront Toronto revealed that in naming Sidewalk Labs as the winning partner it had also signed a non-disclosure agreement preventing release of the first framework struck between the two parties. Only now, nine months later and in tandem with the release of a further agreement that nullifies the first, has the initial confidential document been released.
That’s a shameful example of good corporate governance, or a great example of lousy corporate governance. The citizens of Toronto are due transparent stewardship of waterfront lands and were not offered it. (The CEO of Waterfront Toronto, Will Fleissig, resigned last month. The techies at Google have yet to snip him out of the Sidewalk Labs promotional video. And then there’s the subsequent resignation of board member Julie Di Lorenzo. As reported by my colleague David Rider, Di Lorenzo’s letter of resignation questioned the appropriateness of a single limited company becoming “or filter, our gatekeeper and our agent.”)
In truth, the first framework agreement offered few surprises if you hew to the belief that big business usually wins where municipal governments are involved. Sidewalk Toronto (or the Master Developer, an affiliate of Sidewalk Labs) was put in charge. So the Master Developer “will be the primary vehicle through which they will create the Master Innovation and Development Plan, oversee its implementation, and achieve economic alignment between TWRC and Sidewalk.” So Sidewalk would ensure “alignment” between Sidewalk and the TWRC. That sounds like a line out of a gangster flick.
The Master Developer was named as the lead hand on everything from “establishing parameters for governance” to “maintaining operating control of the public realm, including parks, streets, etc.”
A mega-project encompassing the 800-plus acres — absorbed “as those lands become available to TWRC” — was assumed. The Master Developer “may divest specific land parcels to Development Companies in order to enable purposeful solutions related to vertical development.” Vertical development includes “new building typographies” and new construction technologies.
One more: the Master Developer, or its affiliates, “may enter into management operations, purchasing, licensing, technology or other services agreements with related parties and third-parties.”
Here’s where we get into the underlying tech side of the story, as in, “technology that enables electronic sensing and management of the public realm.” In my reading, consideration of the public realm was reduced in the document to procurement standards and little more.
It’s easy to lose the story line. At the time of Sidewalk’s launch in June 2015, Larry Page touted its magical prospects: “By improving urban technology, it’s possible to significantly improve the lives of billions of people around the world. With Sidewalk, we want to supercharge existing efforts in areas such as housing, energy, transportation and government to solve real problems that city-dwellers face every day.”
In the realm of affordable housing, the company posits that new construction methods and cutting-edge designs could create more affordable mixed-use (retail and residential) buildings.
What was needed was a willing host city, or Petri dish, upon which to conduct the grand experiment.
The nasty framework agreement is meant to be forgotten now, superseded by a much more polished plan development agreement that deploys such language as “enabling a meaningfully superior quality of urban life” in a diverse city that’s more livable, connected and prosperous. (I wonder if Larry Page even read the first go-round.
Someone should send it to him, perhaps with the words “Don’t be Evil” printed across the top.)
In the new agreement, Waterfront Toronto is defined as the “revitalization lead in the public interest.” There is a great deal of talk about collaboration. And those 800-plus acres?
As the new agreement acknowledges, Waterfront Toronto owns only Quayside and thus no property interest in any other lands can be as- sumed by Sidewalk Labs. So we’re good then? No. When Waterfront Toronto put out its request for development proposals in March 2017, Sidewalk Labs responded with a 196-page ode to the future that was based not on Quayside alone, but the Eastern Waterfront, envisioning a dozen or more distinct neighbourhoods with sensors throughout creating a “digital layer” offering an “unprecedented degree of insight into the physical environment.”
Quayside was just the “launchpad” for an idea that would be taken to a grand scale, “turning the Eastern Waterfront into the most in- novative urban district in the world.” So a thermal grid pilot at Quayside, by example, “can become the foundation of a district-wide energy system that sets a global example for climate-positive thinking.”
A12-acre parcel about the size of Nathan Phillips Square offers no scalable opportunities and will fail to meet Google’s predictably global ambitions. And financing? Where’s the appeal?
What we see now is not a Google-sized business proposition.
The way I read it, Google — sorry, Alphabet’s — raison d’être for getting involved in the waterfront has been lost.