Google to build hi-tech city as a test bed
CANADA: The founding engineers of Google have long dreamt of the wonders they might work in the service of humanity if they were allowed to build a city from scratch.
Like Gonzalo in The Tempest, who imagined the grand commonwealth he might create on a deserted isle, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt liked to talk about ‘‘all of these things that we could do if someone would just give us a city and put us in charge’’, Schmidt said.
Now someone has. The Canadian government and municipal authorities in Toronto have announced a deal that will give Sidewalk Labs, Google’s urban development company, the chance to build its vision on the shores of Lake Ontario.
Schmidt was standing beside Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, who declared that Toronto’s eastern waterfront was to become a model for cities all over the world.
If it is not quite an entire city, it is viewed by urban planners as the nearest thing to it: the chance to build an entire district from the foundations up.
Sidewalk Labs, which is based in New York and run by Daniel Doctoroff, who once served as inhouse visionary and the city’s deputy mayor to Michael Bloomberg, sketched out its ideas in a 200-page proposal.
There will be no private cars in the city, to judge by this document. Self-driving shuttles will turn ‘‘every corner into a bus stop’’. The streets will be planned around pedestrians and cyclists and every traffic light will recognise them when they approach, and may also monitor noise and air pollution.
Public bins will issue an alert when they need emptying, dirty park benches will summon cleaners. In the zone where oldfashioned cars with drivers are permitted, a ‘‘parking pilot’’ will escort motorists to the nearest space.
Sidewalk Labs said it would seek to create loft-like accommodation that could switch from family housing to a tech startup. The company envisages floating parks and theatres in the lake and robotic ferries.
Weather monitors would keep tabs on the elements and operate windbreaks and retractable awnings that allow residents to stroll in the dry when it rains. There would be no more snow shovelling: heated pavements would melt the drifts.
It would be ‘‘the world’s first neighbourhood built from the internet up’’, Sidewalk Labs declared.
The company had been looking at cities all over the world as test beds for its ideas before settling on this patch of Toronto. Schmidt said he had first met Trudeau after he was elected in 2015. The prime minister had asked the chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, to help him to create a Canadian Silicon Valley.
‘‘I hear this a lot from politicians but somehow I believed him,’’ Schmidt said.
Matti Siemiatycki, associate professor of urban planning at the University of Toronto, said the district was a former industrial area that had been cut off from the city by an aerial highway. ‘‘If there was a site where a company like Google was going to have a chance to apply technology to address urban challenges, I think it’s the Toronto waterfront,’’ he said.