Sidewalk Labs is best thing we never had
The way couples break up usually tells us a lot about how they cared for one another in their partnership. Particularly fiery divorces usually signal relationships that were fraught with passionate misunderstandings.
But what do we make of a breakup where one party packs up their belongings and leaves the city without a trace? We might think the parties were committed to the relationship in very different ways; that they had different dreams of what their partnership might become.
This is the case in the recently announced divorce of Sidewalk Labs from the city of Toronto and the Quayside development.
The CulturePlex Lab at Western University has been analyzing all of the documentation produced by Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto throughout their partnership. Using AI techniques we were able to establish that Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto promoted visions of their relationship that were miles apart.
Sidewalk Labs’ sudden abandonment of the Quayside project confirms three ongoing concerns about their true love for Toronto.
> Sidewalk Lab’s first goal of this partnership was about building and development, and, in the end through “patient capital,” making a nice profit in an inflated real estate market.
It looks like Google’s capital wasn’t so patient, because last week, it unexpectedly dumped Waterfront Toronto in the middle of the COVID-19 crisis.
We need to remember that Google does not have any special skills or experience in the complex domain of urban development and planning. There were ongoing doubts and suspicions by many social and economic stakeholders about whether making enough of a profit (for Google) would be compatible with Waterfront Toronto’s goals of affordable housing, socio-economic inclusivity and better mobility.
> Second, Sidewalk Labs’ digital objective was to use this partnership as a way of seamlessly assessing new digital technologies related to “urban innovation.”
Current debates about these technologies have taught us that digital technologies do not on their own solve problems that are analogical and social in nature. The digital does not and cannot fix all human problems.
The need to be clear about the boundary between the digital sphere and our analogue world is one of the greatest lessons of this breakup.
> Third, and the most important reason as to why the Alphabet company was in Toronto in the first place, is related to its long-term strategy of complete digital control.
Google’s deployment of Sidewalk Labs as the digital platform for not only the Quayside development, but eventually the entire city of Toronto would manifest this control.
Google and the big tech companies have a history of wooing participants into their domains; creating dependency and then annihilating all autonomy of choice for users and stakeholders. Basically, they become the partner you never really wanted to have.
But, in this tale of relationship woes, Google forgot something really important. It forgot that Toronto is already the civic platform for its inhabitants. The idea of Toronto is constructed through City Hall; roads; schools; neighbourhoods; civic government, public transportation etc. The city functions as a complex platform that uses analogical, social, political and digital tools to create what cities were intended to be: spaces for citizens to live well.
What are the lessons we can learn from this complicated partnership about urban innovation? The most evident, and the lesson we forget most often, is that innovation is a human process designed for the good of the people. This has never been more obvious or important to recognize than in the case of cities.
The second lesson we have learned, is also something that the COVID-19 pandemic teaches us every day: the digital does not solve, in their entirety, the problems of humans. That is not to say the digital cannot be used to improve certain situations, but we must always remember that the digital cannot be left unattended to solve all of our problems.
This is for the simple reason that humans are not digital. We are biological beings with complex social relations who live in space through vulnerable bodies. This is still the realm we inhabit, and this is what cities were built to both protect and care for.
If the digital is going to have a human future in our cities after Sidewalk Labs and the pandemic, this future lies at the boundary of the digital and the analogue, not in the mirage of a total conversion into a digital world. Let’s embrace this friction and be relieved that Sidewalk Labs was the best thing we never had. Juan-Luis Suarez is the director of the CulturePlex Lab at Western University.