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. — City Lab
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 close button be on a city?
1 Comment
Pretty clear, based on their basic ignorance, that this is never gonna happen, unless it’s very different from what they are hyping up. No smart real estate developer would allow flexible prefab mcurbanism development (esp not in Toronto) and an aura of top-down surveillance because it undermines its own value. Architecture = value. The less architecture, the worse for you bottom line.
What they will probably do is hire a bunch of architects to do the heavy lifting (as usual) while they sit back and take credit for a WiFi hub in the lobby and some faux-inclusion PR from their CityLab friends.
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