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 dystopian world ripe for a Black Mirror episode.
More recently, Sidewalk Labs put forth an expanded proposal that includes funding for a timber factory and transit infrastructure along the waterfront. In exchange, the company is hoping to recoup the costs by taking a portion of the city's property taxes and/or development fees generated by rising land values. The revenue that would be brought in through this private value capture is estimated at $6 billion over the next 30 years.
Similar to the protests over Amazon's plan to build a second headquarters in New York, Toronto residents opposed to the project have begun the campaign, #BlockSidewalk, in an attempt to push back on corporate influences. Sidewalk, on the other hand, maintains that the organization is enabling critical infrastructure that not only benefits the public, but would otherwise not be built.
At it's heart, as John Lorinc points out in the Baffler, this is a debate over "what precisely we mean when we talk about urban spaces and publicly owned amenities. Are these assets there merely to be optimized, monetized or, possibly, securitized?" Here, as with Amazon in New York, the public is becoming increasingly wary of economic development deals, inviting doubt on how they are managed and for whom they benefit.
5 Comments
it looks nice from the images
that’s what you call 11th hour woodwashing
What, they don’t like our surveillance scheme? Call some hot sh*t architect .... or heatherwick
Even Aalto is like .... that’s some gross woodwashing
PS lux megadevelopments are always bad just like public megadevelopments. How about .... structured organic urban planning and infrastructure
"Information technology has the obvious capacity to concentrate political power, to create new forms of social obfuscation and domination. The less prepared we feel to question the uses to which it is put, the more certain we are to suffer those liabilities."
Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information 1986, 1994
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