Archinect - News

Revived Toronto Quayside master plan is making headway

2023-02-03T17:16:00-05:00

A clearer vision is emerging for the futuristic Quayside project planned to transform a stretch of Toronto's waterfront, one that is shaping up to be one of the most architecturally-distinct pockets of development in the entire country.

Following over two years since the cancelation of the Sidewalk Labs plan to develop Toronto’s Quayside, a new approach to bring a mixed-use community to the lakefront site is being led by public entities Waterfront Toronto, the City of Toronto, PortsToronto, and private landowners. This past December, Waterfront Toronto’s Board of Directors approved an agreement with development partners Great Gulf Group and Dream Unlimited. The development is set to feature buildings designed by the likes of Adjaye Associates, Alison Brooks Architects, and Henning Larsen.

A recently-presented master plan update highlights new details about upcoming features at the site, including information on the Adjaye Associates-designed Timber House, the Alison Brooks Architects-designed Western Curve, and the Overstorey by Henning Larsen. The development will feature residential spaces, including affordable housing, retail, food, and cultural offerings. The master plan also aims to achieve near-zero greenhous...

Considering the Quayside failure as proof futuristic Smart Cities may be a thing of the past

2022-06-30T18:16:00-04:00

Smart city technology should do things like shorten commute times, speed the construction of affordable housing, improve the efficiency of public transit, and reduce carbon emissions by making building technology more efficient and providing less polluting transportation alternatives to the car. But often its proponents focus on what it can do rather than what it should. If Sidewalk’s Quayside failure taught us anything, it’s that these technologies need to respond better to human needs.

The MIT Technology Review took a dive into the abandoned pre-pandemic conversion of Toronto’s 12-acre Quayside waterfront plot into an elaborate “Smart City” development by the hands of Sidewalk Labs. The revitalization was recently repackaged as a mixed-use green corridor concept to be overseen by Adjaye Associates, Henning Larsen, and Alison Brooks Architects. Sidewalk Labs has said it was planning to redevelop the vacant brownfield site “from the internet up.”

Previously on Archinect: Sidewalk Labs' Quayside project in Toronto is cancelled

Author Karrie Jacobs considers the history of urban planning concepts such as the 15-Minute City and Ville Radieuse in relation to the rebuked concept, which has dominated the past two decades of planning, and will be felled, she predicts, by an “emphasis on the optimization of everything” and the contradictory desire to “eradicate the very thing that makes cities wonderful.”

Toronto’s Quayside is back with projects by Adjaye Associates, Alison Brooks, and Henning Larsen

2022-02-17T10:07:00-05:00

Toronto’s Quayside project is back online, almost two years after Sidewalk Labs’ plans to develop the site were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The new development will instead be delivered by a consortium led by developers Dream Unlimited and Great Gulf Group, featuring buildings by Adjaye Associates, Alison Brooks Architects, and Henning Larsen.

Quayside Aerial - Full view of proposed development. Image courtesy of Waterfront Toronto

The 12-acre (4.9 hectare) site will contain five towers, as well as one of Canada’s largest residential mass timber buildings. Over 800 affordable housing units will be contained in the scheme, with an emphasis on family-sized units. The team behind the development also claim the project to be “Canada’s first all-electric” masterplan.

A rendering of the Western Curve Building. Architect: Alison Brooks Architect. Image courtesy of Waterfront Toronto.

New buildings along the waterfront site will include the Western Curve Building by Alison Bro...

After the Sidewalk Labs split, Waterfront Toronto has plans for a more 'locally-led vision'

2021-03-18T21:34:00-04:00

Waterfront Toronto, established by the Government of Canada, the Province of Ontario, and the City of Toronto, launched a competition last week to select a development partner for the Quayside lands. The announcement comes close to a year after Sidewalk Labs announced it would drop its smart city plans for the area, citing "unprecedented economic uncertainty."

Sidewalk Labs presented an ambitious plan to transform Quayside into a "smart city." Yet, during our reporting of the project's cancelation last year in May, the reason for the project being called off was tied to the pandemic according to a report from the Toronto Star.

However, Waterfront Toronto recently shared its new plans for the site and what they plan to accomplish. Waterfront Toronto CEO George Zegarac shared with Smart Cities Dive: "A critical difference for Quayside now will be that the design of public realm, parks, streetscapes, and open community spaces will be led by Waterfront Toronto. As we move to build Quayside we are now looking for development teams that have the experience, capacity and passion to deliver a distinctive neighborhood that gives expression to our vision."

Sidewalk Labs' Quayside project in Toronto is cancelled

2020-05-07T12:09:00-04:00

The Quayside project developed for the Toronto waterfront by Alphabet-backed Sidewalk Labs has been officially called off.

In a Medium post announcing the death of the project, Sidewalk Labs CEO Daniel L. Doctoroff writes that the economic collapse that has resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic has made the controversial $1.3 billion plan to reprogram a portion of Toronto's post-industrial waterfront into a new smart city prototype no longer viable.

Previously on Archinect: "Mass timber and high-tech meet in Sidewalk Labs' vision for Toronto." View of the Sidewalk Labs plan for its now-cancelled Toronto smart city project. Image courtesy of Picture Plane for Heatherwick Studio.

In the announcement, Doctoroff writes, "For the last two-and-a-half years, we have been passionate about making Quayside happen — indeed, we have invested time, people, and resources in Toronto, including opening a 30-person office on the waterfront. But as unprecedented economic uncertainty has set in around th...

Alphabet launches smart infrastructure investment company

2019-09-06T19:54:00-04:00

The technology giant is teaming up with its subsidiary, Sidewalk Labs LLC, and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan to launch an infrastructure holding company that is being spun out of Sidewalk. Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, as the new firm will be known, will focus on investing in what the group calls technology-enabled infrastructure, the partners said.

The firm, according to The Wall Street Journal, will target its investments on "advanced mobility, energy, water and waste, digital infrastructure, and social infrastructure" projects that require more than $100 million in equity.

Mass timber and high-tech meet in Sidewalk Labs' vision for Toronto

2019-06-25T18:56:00-04:00

Sidewalk Labs, Snøhetta, Michael Green Architecture, and Heatherwick Studio have unveiled a controversial $1.3 billion plan to reprogram a portion of Toronto's industrial waterfront into a new smart city prototype that envisions a wireless, data-driven, and mass timber-filled future for the city.

Site plan for the Sidewalk Labs Quayside development. Image courtesy of Picture Plane for Heatherwick Studio and Sidewalk Labs

The thorough and graphically-slick plan aims to articulate "a new approach for inclusive growth" by developing a 12-acre site with a mix of mid- and high-rise housing towers, shared pedestrian plazas, and commercial uses. The plan is being submitted for consideration by Waterfront Toronto, a government-funded corporation that is tasked with redeveloping the 1,977-acre Toronto Waterfront. The group selected Sidewalk Labs as a potential developer for a portion of the site in 2017. Since the initial proposal was unveiled, there has been a significant amount of public c...

Sidewalk Labs, Google's innovation-forward city, faces backlash

2019-03-06T15:26:00-05:00

In 2017, Sidewalk Labs, aka Google's Company for Cities, announced plans to build an innovation-forward community along Toronto's waterfront. Developed alongside designs by starchitecture firms Snøhetta and Heatherwick Studios, the idea behind the mini smart city is to integrate cutting-edge technology into its built environment in order to promote sustainability, affordability, and overall livability. As an example, the company has been experimenting with features such as heated sidewalks and 'raincoats' for buildings that would make it easier to get around during the winter months.

Plans for the waterfront have received wide public backlash centered on concerns over transparency, technological surveillance, and urban profiteering. Part of what would make Sidewalk Lab's Quayside community 'smart', is a network of digital sensors embedded in the public realm. What the company would do with, and how it would control, the data collection of these public spaces has stroked fears of a d...

An army of underground robots will collect waste and deliver parcels

2018-05-28T22:36:00-04:00

Initially Sidewalk's deal with the organisation will cover a 12-acre site but it is believed it wishes to expand this to the whole area - which at 325 acres will represent a huge land-grab....As part of the planning process of bidding to develop the waterside location, the firm looked at 150 examples of smart cities, including those built from the ground up such as Masdar, in Abu Dhabi and Songdo in South Korea.

Jane Wakefield chatted with both critics and proponents of a, Sidewalk Labs, proposed project on Toronto's Eastern waterfront.

Will cities themselves become Silicon Valley's Biggest Start-Up?

2018-02-26T14:18:00-05:00

In the maddening gap between how this place functions and how inventors and engineers here think it should, many have become enamored with the same idea: What if the people who build circuits and social networks could build cities, too? Wholly new places, designed from scratch and freed from broken policies.

In Emily Badger's latest piece for the Upshot, she investigates the Tech Industry's newest sector of disruption, the City. From Alphabet company's proposal for Sidewalk Labs in Toronto to a proposed smart city in Arizona, Silicon Valley is looking to build urban utopias of their own. While the idea has received strong negative feedback, particularly from urban planners and architects who believe the tech industry should stay within its lanes, Badger wonders if approaching the problems modern cities are facing through a tabula rasa mindset might be beneficial.

From Search Engines to Sidewalks?

2018-01-10T12:22:00-05:00

Yet what has drawn the most concern and curiosity with regards to Quayside is a uniquely 21st-century feature: a data-harvesting, wifi-beaming “digital layer” that would underpin each proposed facet of Quayside life. According to Sidewalk Labs, this would provide “a single unified source of information about what is going on”—to an astonishing level of detail—as well as a centralized platform for efficiently managing it all.

While tech companies struggle to discover the new way to get a glimpse into our daily habits—attempting to discover how and where we spend our time and money—Alphabet might have just brought the ‘Truman Show’ approach to marketing.

With Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet, announcing its first ever Urban Development in Toronto earlier this year, it is no surprise that tech companies have switched gears and begun to see the city itself as a device, rather than just the thing in your hand. Tech giants are beginning to turn architecture into a tool for data collection and that data is then becoming the perspective in which the Architecture is critiqued. What does that spell for the discipline at large?

Beyond our discipline, if every decision is based on its ability to produce more data, how does that impact privacy and freedom of choice? What would the pop-up ad equivalent become if it is capable of leaving the digital screen and becoming an urban phenomenon and where would the ...

Google's Sidewalk Labs to redevelop Toronto waterfront as one of the largest smart city projects in North America

2017-10-25T14:43:00-04:00

Silicon Valley, and the tech industry at large, is known for reinventing the everyday. From buses to vending machines, and from the necessary to the indulgent, each week seems to bring another headline about the tech world's disruptions. Amazon has recently comprised a good sum of this ink with the announcement of plans for a new headquarters and the subsequent bidding war straight out of Hunger Games that has cities across North America submitting over 238 proposals to host. But while Amazon searches for cities to house a new campus, another tech giant—Google, that is—has decided to go in a different direction, cutting to the chase and just building the city themselves.

Digital Infrastructure Vision. Image courtesy of Sidewalk Labs.

The online empire began as a quaint search engine but has since transitioned into the business of measuring pretty much everything. In 2015, the company reorganized itself into multiples under the umbrella company Alphabet, in order to separate its core...

Google's Sidewalk Labs contemplates building an entire city

2016-04-06T12:49:00-04:00

The Information notes that building a city could allow Sidewalk Labs to “rethink government, social policy, and data-driven management.” [CEO Dan] Doctoroff explained that “thinking about a city from the Internet up is really compelling,” while also noting that “cities are hard. You have people with vested interest, politics, physical space…But the technology ultimately cannot be stopped.”

Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs joins the rarefied stable of companies potentially looking to expand from an initial service (in this case, improved WiFi access and traffic flow in cities) into a fully-fledged social experimentation machine. Will they build 21st century company towns or create a genuinely new, technology-based approach to living?

Here's a round-up of other mass-scale experimental projects:

Could Google's Sidewalk Labs help alleviate urban city problems?

2015-07-03T12:33:00-04:00

It’s this inevitable dichotomy between data and real life that will likely define [Google's] Sidewalk Labs...There’s a naivety to their worldview that might help to get things done inside a company but could prove a hurdle to progress in the public realm. Yes, the region does need more housing, but the politics of how, where, and when that housing is built are far more nuanced than Google can apparently handle.

The cloud of speculation surrounding Google as of late only grows bigger with the tech giant's recent launch of its independent start-up, Sidewalk Labs. Charging further into Google's real-world endeavors, the "urban innovation company" vies "to improve city life for everyone through the application of technology to solve urban problems" like curbing energy use, creating more affordable housing, cutting pollution, and streamlining transportation. Could Sidewalk Labs potentially ease the growing pains of real-life urban cities, or is Google just spewing more technocratic rhetoric?