Sidewalk’s vision for Quayside — as a place populated by self-driving vehicles and robotic garbage collectors, where the urban fabric is embedded with cameras and sensors capable of gleaning information from the phone in your pocket — certainly sounds Orwellian. Yet the company contends that the data gathered from fully wired urban infrastructure is needed to refine inefficient urban systems and achieve ambitious innovations like zero-emission energy grids. — washingtonpost.com
Last fall Sidewalk Labs, a Google-affiliated company, announced plans to build a new smart city model on 12 acres of the Toronto waterfront named Quayside. The design would include infrastructure with sensors and data analytics with the claim of building an overall more streamlined, economical, and green urban space. Sidewalk Labs' partnership with Canada is the beginning of an urban model they hope to expand globally.
While the goal may look utopian, many see an ominous future where governance is under threat rather than the projected promise of urban innovation. Concerns center around tech monopolies, the collection and commodification of city data, and a democratic process of decision making for our environments.
2 Comments
Big tech company produces overwrought real estate project with faux-community meetings (PR campaigns) and generic McUrbanist renderings .... with a few WOOD BEAMS to signal that they “care.”
Were they not expecting a backlash?
Who will own the data streaming from sensors in every park bench, lamppost and dumpster in Quayside? No one at Sidewalk Labs, nor in local government, has given a straight answer to that question yet.
Wylie doesn’t see it as a topic for debate. “Data produced by the public should be publicly owned and managed transparently,”
Wylie is right, but that’s the opposite of what Google is doing. Maybe they could get away with it if they had any design smarts
This is a test model for advanced data collection and population manipulation.
If you leave your phone home you'll be invisible, and likely to be run over or mistaken as refuse by an automated garbage collection unit.
The end goal is to dispense with humanity entirely. Think SkyNet.
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