Sidewalk Labs
Concerns surround Sidewalk’s Toronto project.
Waterfront Toronto may sound like any other regeneration project, but the Canadian city’s former industrial district’s warehouses and quays aren’t only giving way to high-end housing, but to an experiment in building a connected, data-driven neighbourhood. It’s run by Sidewalk Labs, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet.
Experiments are good. Not all of the ideas laid out in Sidewalk’s 2017 vision document will necessarily work, but they’re worth attempting, be it self-driving public transport, modular housing for low-cost homes or climate-positive energy grids. The problem is those promises come with downsides, with people concerned about data collection, privacy and surveillance. No surprise considering it’s Google in charge.
At the time of writing, Sidewalk was long expected to file a detailed document laying out specifically how the Waterfront project will work, including how the firm will generate revenue and how the neighbourhood will be managed. While we await the formal plans, activists have called for the project to be blocked, privacy experts have quit the company over data collection concerns and Sidewalk has been hit by internal leaks.
None of that bodes well for the final plans, but it highlights that the problem with smart cities is rarely the tech. It’s people and politics – and those require as much consideration as the technical innovations. Anyone can build a connected rubbish bin that notifies you when it’s full, but doing that while resisting the temptation to track the contents or accidentally leaking that residents are away on holiday takes a bit of thought. Given Sidewalk Labs has much more planned at Waterfront Toronto than shoving a few sensors into streets, it has plenty it needs to be considering.
We know what modern cities need – affordable housing, useful public transport and clean energy – but we need to find a way to deliver that without handing over our privacy. If Sidewalk Labs can’t manage that, it shouldn’t manage Waterfront Toronto.