Chris Selley,

Toronto fantasy failed to impress enough people

Twelve acres. Roughly six Canadian football fields. That’s how much of Toronto’s prime waterfront real estate Sidewalk Labs — Alphabet Inc.’ s ( i. e., Google’s) urban- innovation arm — was at least theoretically planning to develop before walking away on Thursday, citing economic uncertainties born of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Quayside, as it’s called, is a tiny chunk of a sprawling, 750- acre parcel of post- industrial moonscape surrounding the mouth of the Don River. Waterfront Toronto — an arm’s- length agency formed by the municipal, provincial and federal government — wants to turn Quayside into an innovative mixed- use neighbourhood and, in 2017, Sidewalk won a ( fairly perfunctory) contest to make it happen. ( Andrew Macleod, president and CEO of Postmedia, parent company of the National Post, joined Waterfront Toronto’s board in 2019.)

Sidewalk clearly had its eyes on developing more than that tiny chunk. But if its near- utopian vision had been borne out, that would have been no bad thing. This neighbourhood would privilege active transportation, with wide sidewalks and heated bike lanes and adaptive traffic signals that give slower pedestrians more time, and no street parking. There would be demand-based pricing for road usage. An automated underground freight- delivery system would cut down on the need for delivery trucks. “Modular pavement” would allow quick, non- labour- intensive repairs, reconfigurations and access to utilities.

It would be a mixed- income and family- friendly community: 20 per cent low- income and 20 per cent middle- income, with 40 per cent of units two- bedrooms or larger. It would be fantastically energy- efficient. It would discourage waste production using “pay- asyou-throw chutes” leading to pneumatic tubes that would rocket your trash, recycling and organic waste to the proper facilities.

Some of the details seemed a bit far-fetched, and some of the ideas came to naught at the design stage. But the Google family of companies is not known for wretched failure. To many Torontonians, it was a compelling vision.

Unfortunately, a lot of the very people it was designed to impress hated the hell out of it.

Of necessity, a so- called “smart city” vision like this involves the collection of massive amounts of data.

Privacy was a major and legitimate concern that Sidewalk tried to mitigate through renouncing control over the information it collected and ceding it to a public trust — an idea that comes from Barcelona, which is widely regarded as one of the “smartest” cities.

Beyond that, however, there was a blazing philosophical antipathy among some progressive Torontonians to the very idea of an American megacorporation presuming to negotiate with the city about building things on public land. “Corporations are seeking to exert influence on urban spaces and democratic governance,” Bianca Wylie of the Centre for International Governance Innovation wrote in 2018. She argued cities like Barcelona had come to terms politically with the idea of mass data collection before allowing it, whereas Toronto was essentially scrambling to march to Google’s tune.

She wasn’t wrong. And if the alternative were some kind of grassroots construction co-operative developing Toronto’s waterfront, one could perhaps understand the jubilation over Sidewalk’s announcement on Thursday. But that’s not the alternative: The alternative is Toronto’s other corporate developers, who know very well how to “exert influence on urban spaces and democratic governance.” Indeed they know far better than Sidewalk, which often seemed flummoxed by the various political and bureaucratic hurdles in its way — as if it hadn’t done its homework or sought the right advice.

So there is blame to go around — and to be clear, no one is officially blaming the city bureaucracy or the project’s opponents for scuppering the deal. But the fact is, Sidewalk simply wandered into the wrong saloon. Toronto is an intensely conservative city in the strictest sense of the word. Its establishment doesn’t even believe things that work in other cities would work here. It’s why we pilot-project food carts to death, instead of just allowing food carts. It’s why we’re closing parks and crowding people on sidewalks during the pandemic, instead of following other the lead of other cities and dedicating roads to safely spaced pedestrians and cyclists. When Ontario loosened alcohol regulations, many Torontonians predicted tailgate parties and picnicswith- wine would lead to mayhem — and they really, really meant it.

Sidewalk wanted to do something no other city had ever done. You can imagine the terror and confusion it sowed. And that was over 12 acres — six football fields. Toronto has a great many things going for it. I have argued in the past that its conservatism, broadly speaking, has served it very well. But Sidewalk reminded us what we trade for that. If we can’t take a bit of a chance on 12 acres, it doesn’t bode at all well for the many hundreds of other acres in this city that have been begging for redevelopment my entire lifetime — not if we want them to be at all innovative or memorable, anyway.