Sidewalk Labs pulls out of smart city project
An ambitious plan for a hightech neighbourhood on Toronto’s waterfront has been shelved after Google affiliate Sidewalk Labs walked away from the project, citing “unprecedented economic uncertainty.”
Sidewalk Labs said Thursday that it is abandoning its controversial smart city plans that had envisioned a state-of-the-art neighbourhood on a derelict parcel of land and drawn the ire of those concerned with the privacy implications of living or moving through an area that is under constant surveillance.
“As unprecedented economic uncertainty has set in around the world and in the Toronto real estate market, it has become too difficult to make the 12-acre (nearly five-hectare) project financially viable without sacrificing core parts of the plan we had developed,” Sidewalk CEO Dan Doctoroff said in a letter posted online that announced the news.
Doctoroff had informed Waterfront Toronto, a tripartite agency in the process of deciding whether to allow Sidewalk to pursue the plan, on Wednesday.
“While this is not the outcome we had hoped for, Waterfront Toronto offers thanks ... to Sidewalk Labs for its vision, effort, and the many commitments that both the company and its employees have made to the future of Toronto,” Waterfront chairman Stephen Diamond said in a statement.
The decision marked an end to the rocky relationship between Sidewalk and Waterfront as the project was met with criticism around privacy protections and intellectual property concerns from business leaders and security experts alike.
It began in 2017, after Sidewalk won the right from Waterfront to develop a proposal for the swath of lakefront land, dubbed Quayside, in an underdeveloped corner of the city.
Critics complained about a U.S. company getting its hands on prime land that could be developed by homegrown enterprises.
They also worried about what would happen with data collected from a myriad of sensors and devices throughout the neighbourhood.
“This is a major victory for the responsible citizens who fought to protect Canada’s democracy, civil and digital rights, as well as the economic development opportunity,” said Jim Balsillie, co-founder of Research In Motion and a vocal critic of the project.
“Sidewalk Toronto will go down in history as one of the more disturbing planned experiments in surveillance capitalism and I hope Canadian policy-makers will reconsider how we build Canada in the 21st Century knowledge-based and data-driven economy.”
Though without its tech giant partner and amid the pandemic, Waterfront still seems to want to revitalize the area.
“Today is not the end of Quayside, but the first day of its future. Waterfront Toronto will continue to seek public and expert input as we make a next generation community at Quayside a reality,” Diamond said in his statement. Toronto Mayor John Tory echoed those sentiments, saying the decision had not changed his mind about there being a “tremendous” opportunity to develop the area.