Sidewalk Labs’ smart city masterplan raises concerns
Alphabet Inc.’s Sidewalk Labs released its sprawling masterplan for Toronto’s eastern waterfront on Monday, but the scope of the company’s ambitions, which extend well beyond the five-hectare Quayside district it was initially tasked to develop, are raising concerns with the federal-provincial-municipal agency overseeing the project.
In its development plan, Sidewalk Labs proposed to invest $1.3-billion to kickstart the real estate portion, which would feature tall wooden buildings and various smart city features, such as sensors, flexible streetscapes and robotic freight tunnels to reduce traffic.
But it also indicated that any plan was dependent on developing a nearby parcel of land known as West Villiers, where it said Google Inc. — Sidewalk’s sister company — would move its Canadian headquarters during the second phase of the project, sometime in the mid-2020.
That, in addition to identifying four other parcels of land, totalling dozens more hectares into which it might eventually scale any successful experiments from Quayside, elicited a reaction from Waterfront Toronto.
In a letter distributed to media, Waterfront Toronto chairman Stephen Diamond said that the scope of the real estate development was broader than anticipated, and Sidewalk is asking for major commitments from government, including regulatory changes and a promise to build transit through the proposed neighbourhood.
“Based on our initial review of the (plan) there are a number of exciting ideas that respond to challenges we face, particularly related to environmental sustainability and economic Development,” Diamond wrote. “There are also proposals where it is clear that Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs have very different perspectives about what is required for success.”
In response to Diamond’s letter, Sidewalk CEO Dan Doctoroff told the Financial Post that Waterfront Toronto laid out a series of key objectives at the beginning of the process, and both organizations have always acknowledged that greater scale than just Quayside might be necessary to achieve ambitious goals for housing, climate-positive urban development, clean technology and urban innovation.
“Now, at the end of the day people don’t want us to do something beyond Quayside, that’s entirely fair. It doesn’t mean we’ll want to do Quayside, though,” Doctoroff said.
“I’m not using the term deal-breaker, but what I will say is that we do not believe just at the scale of Quayside, that Waterfront Toronto’s priority objectives can be achieved. That’s just a reality.”
The current development started in 2017 with a request for proposals from Waterfront Toronto, a federal-provincial-municipal agency tasked with revitalizing the city’s lakefront lands.
The development plan lays out business models with potentially 11 different sources of revenue.
All in all, Sidewalk is proposing up to $1.3 billion in funding and financing, which they say could induce up to $38 billion in investment by 2040.
The core of that is $900 million in upfront capital for the real estate component, which will include dynamic data-powered streetscapes and buildings constructed entirely out of specially made wood, produced out of an $80-million factory owned by Sidewalk Labs.
For the first couple phases of the project, Sidewalk Labs proposed that it would act as the property developer, and buy or lease publicly owned land at a below-market price — discounted because Sidewalk is committing to meet urban development objectives.
Eventually, the same building techniques and technological systems would be deployed by other developers in a broader IDEA District throughout the Toronto port lands, with Sidewalk Labs acting as an adviser and a partner to the government agency mandated with developing the larger district.
These are all potential problems for Waterfront Toronto, according to the letter Diamond published Monday. “Waterfront Toronto has told Sidewalk Labs that the concept of the IDEA District is premature and that Waterfront Toronto must first see its goals and objectives achieved at Quayside before deciding whether to work together in other areas,” Diamond wrote.
One aspect of the development that Sidewalk very clearly says it does not plan to earn money from is data. When the proposed project was originally announced in the fall of 2017, it was supposed to be a new neighbourhood built “from the internet up” with high-tech sensors and data-driven community management.
Sidewalk Labs said in the plan that it would like to see an independent urban data trust established by the government to regulate all data collection in the development. The data trust would receive applications for all urban data sensor systems. The data trust would then make anonymized data equally available to anybody, so Sidewalk Labs would not have any special commercial advantage from proprietary data collected in the area.
Sidewalk emphasized that the company has consulted with tens of thousands of Torontonians in developing the plan, and incorporated the feedback they received.
Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs have very different perspectives about what is required for success.