
What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto? - pslattery
https://onezero.medium.com/how-a-band-of-activists-and-one-tech-billionaire-beat-alphabets-smart-city-de19afb5d69e
======
etimberg
As someone who lives in Toronto, the collapse of this project is a great
outcome. While the goals of the project seem forward thinking and could
benefit society in the long run (in terms of renewable building, etc) Google
is 110% the wrong company to be involved.

Imagine you lived there and your google account gets banned by some
overzealous ML model. Do you just get locked out of your house?

If Google, or any other company, wants to make this kind of development, they
should be regulated as a public utility and be accountable as such

~~~
xyzzy_plugh
My big problem from the beginning was that the money flow made no sense. Why
should Toronto be paying for a Google experiment? Google benefitted far more
than any other party involved, and that felt slimy.

~~~
Guidii
Did money flow from the city to Alphabet? My understanding was that it was
hugely in the opposite direction, with sidewalk investing alphabet money into
the project.

~~~
jgalt212
right because with Google, the customer is the product.

~~~
KineticLensman
The customer (and their data) is the raw material from which products are
created. E.g. an advert targeting product.

------
rchaud
The project was killed for the right reasons; the residents, people that have
to deal with its consequences and for whom the benefits were vaguely defined,
opposed it.

If smart cities are inevitable, then a mega-corporation like Google with all
the resources in the world should be jumping at the opportunity to build a new
settlement where none currently exists. Shouldering the cost of such a project
should not be a hindrance for them considering the potential economic benefits
for themselves.

Let them create their own proof of concept and incentivize people to live and
work there. The shift to remote work in the Covid age makes this much more
feasible now than in the past.

No need to glom their surveillance technology on to an existing metropolis
where people are already settled and don't have the option to opt out to any
meaningful degree.

~~~
dsl
> the residents, people that have to deal with its consequences and for whom
> the benefits were vaguely defined, opposed it.

When I lived in San Francisco proper this was the same reason I didn't have
high speed fiber. NIMBYs didn't want a little green can out front of their
houses.

Sometimes progress has to be made despite the residents so they can ultimately
reap the benefits.

~~~
jeffbee
All NIMBY power derives from the fact that authority is vested exclusively in
the people who already live somewhere, and none is given over to people who
could live there, or would like to, if policies could be changed.

The only thing that has eroded NIMBY power in California in my lifetime has
been state laws, and only very recently, and only just barely.

~~~
nitrogen
_authority is vested exclusively in the people who already live somewhere_

Isn't that the definition of democracy? Why should I be able to take what
someone else has just because I want it?

~~~
jeffbee
Interesting framing, because the history of anti-development is using
government powers to take away private property rights. As an example I own an
empty lot that is zoned for, say, up to four unit apartment building and then
the voters all decide to reduce my zoning such that I can only build 1 house.
This is a taking, right? That's NIMBYs taking what I have because they want
something else.

Another example is a bunch of old ladies get together and have my house
designated as a "historically significant" structure, thereby robbing me of my
ability to build anything else, or even repaint the window sashes. You
wouldn't believe that in Berkeley, California, this is perfectly legal without
the agreement of the owner, right? In fact it's legal to do this without even
_notifying_ the owner.

Finally, there's a pretty strong moral and ethical argument to be made that if
I'm born and raised in a town and I live there my whole life but due to a
housing crisis I am forced to move elsewhere, I should have had some input
into the government of the original place. We shouldn't be saying that we
divest our children in favor of their parents, just because they are the
incumbents. That's just wrong.

------
dkarl
I don't know why people are surprised at the "failure" of these ambitious
projects. Complex systems of technology, culture, and political consent do not
get built from the ground up in a few years.

If you bypass political consent, and the only culture that matters is the
culture inside a hierarchical controlling organization, then of course you can
impose anything and call it a success. It's frightening that Google (let's not
get distracted by corporate name games) expected this, but perhaps it
shouldn't be surprising. It's what they get from their users every day. All
they wanted was to do in physical space what they did on the web: set up a
system of technological surveillance and have people embrace it for the
conveniences they could build on top.

------
vincentpants
The prospect of handing off city data to further product development for an
American corporation to then sell it back to said Canadian city sounded and
still sounds pretty dubious no? I mean we didn’t say no to smart cities, we
just said no to alphabet. Great call imo.

------
cmoscoe
Watching this unfold as a resident of the next-neighbourhood-over was
fascinating. At first everyone was excited that a big, American company would
choose Toronto for this sort of project. The initial RFP from Waterfront
Toronto had very clearly been put together with them in mind.

But development takes a long time, and between the initial agreement and the
plan being released, public opinion had turned strongly against big-tech.
Those Waterfront Toronto board members were basically fired for not foreseeing
the change in public opinion.

------
boarnoah
I'm not quite sure how this is portrayed as NIMBYism.

As a Toronto resident there was more than enough news about how well reasoned
arguments from Privacy experts weren't addressed very well by Sidewalk labs.

It isn't a very trivial thing when high profile people like Ann Cavoukian
resigns from the project.

Portraying it as a case of NIMBYism gone too far is just revisionist history.

~~~
strig
Agreed. Most people I know were at least curious/interested about the project,
but also had serious reservations about Google's privacy and data collection
and wanted stricter oversight on how their personal data would be used.

~~~
sandworm101
>>stricter oversight on how their personal data would be used.

Beyond that, how many would have opted for "don't collect let alone use
anything about me". I have never met anyone who actually wants their physical
movement to be tracked by advertisers, not for infinite starbucks discounts.
Most hesitate at the idea of employers or even family members tracking them
24/7.

~~~
strig
> Most hesitate at allowing their employers to track them after hours

Is that a real thing?

~~~
sandworm101
Do you have a work-issued cellphone? I do. I also carry my own phone but my
job requires that I have the work phone on me 24/7 when out of the office.

~~~
sebastien_bois
On-call? Do you get on-call pay?

If not, have you asked for 3x normal salary, since they apparently think they
own you 24/7?

------
wendyshu
Well, NIMBYism + privacy paranoia. Torontonians who were never going to live
there, hadn't attended the open houses, and weren't willing to even try it as
a small-scale experiment apparently had veto power over what Sidewalk could do
with their own property.

~~~
jszymborski
Privacy paranoia? Under what pretense should Canadians presume Google a good
faith actor? Their business model has been to incrementally make the web their
walled-garden fiefdom.

Why shouldn't we think that their Toronto project was anything less but an
attempt to expand their iron grip into the physical world?

Ceding that much power, to a foreign entity no less, is a question of
sovereignty.

~~~
wendyshu
Privacy is very important to some people, but I don't think it's a good
argument against the project. Their collection and use of data would have been
under great scrutiny. And if you don't like it, just don't move there. It was
a small experiment not a takeover of the city.

~~~
sebastien_bois
AFAIK it wasn't going to be a condo-like development, with restricted access
to residents-only, so anyone could walk within the Sidewalk area, and
potentially be tracked, willingly or not.

~~~
wendyshu
They've said they won't do that, they could do that already, the benefit
outweighs the cost...

------
Invictus0
Big tech has pretty consistently failed to deliver on the rosy vision for the
future they've been promising for decades. I can't imagine trusting Google to
commit to building part of a city when they can't even stick to a mobile phone
for a few years. If it went tits up I'm sure they'd just leave Toronto to foot
the bill.

~~~
Google234
What? Google updates old pixel phones. They are way better than the other
manufacturers that give up supporting their phones after a few months. I don’t
your point, who would buy a new phone thst was made multiple years ago? This
project wasn’t even killed by Google, it was killed by everyone else.

------
Xcelerate
It sure would be cool to see someone successfully develop a new smart city.
The idea has been proposed many, many times, but at least in the U.S. it never
seems to work out for some reason (and it appears in Canada as well).

I would love to see a new city designed from the ground up on some currently
uninhabited plot of land. You could make it walkable, beautiful, design it to
have higher density housing from the start—so many things that would be
difficult to add to a city that already exists (an underground tube system for
transporting food and packages??). I guess the economic and individual
incentives just aren’t there. Even if you built it, would people come?

~~~
jpgleeson
New, centrally planned cities have only ever been a disaster that quite
quickly make apparent the shortcomings of the design professions. Brasilia is
a good example of the sort of planned city that would be built. Widespread
availability of cars positioned them as the symbols of modernity and so the
city was designed around the car, resulting in an entirely unwalkable city
that segregates the classes. See also Chandigarh. Barcelona is the main
counter example that springs to mind for me.

Every time this is brought up I fail to understand how people think that this
time would be any different. Cities are agglomerations of patterns at every
scale and the emergent beauty that arises is absolutely impossible to design
in any sort of masterplan way. Organic cities are resilient in ways that we
can't every really understand, and that's the important element in making a
place that is livable for the longer term.

~~~
treis
>New, centrally planned cities have only ever been a disaster that quite
quickly make apparent the shortcomings of the design professions.

I can think of Washington DC and Salt Lake City that were planned and aren't
disasters.

~~~
gamblor956
The planned parts of DC and SLC are the _old_ parts of the city. The rest of
those cities were not planned in the same way, and it shows in the haphazard
geography and zoning. (For example: why does SLC have 24/7 factories a block
from housing?)

~~~
dkn775
Columbia MD is pretty successful

------
dirtyid
Honestly a shame.

Genuinely descent ideas in terms of building science and urban design. 11/10
chance the technology elements would have gone the way of the Google Grave
yard after 10years, but at least it will leave a set of interesting buildings
to draw lessons from. Now nothing. Lots will stay empty or be filled with
generic condo developments with questionable longevity. The Google branding
and Silicon Valley outreach style didn't help. Simultaneously, the inability
for western societies to at least entertain rapid urban experiments is going
to backfire. I'm not a big fan of Google, but they have fuck you resources and
at least tried to direct it in prosocial designs with the expected cost of
privacy. If they can't succeed in Toronto then it doesn't bode well for anyone
else.

It also reveals a greater cultural problem...

On Cultures That Build [https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-
cultures-that...](https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-cultures-
that-build.html)

IT’S TIME TO BUILD [https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-
build/](https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/)

------
hprotagonist
I'll take "being super creepy" for $5, Alex.

~~~
sebastien_bois
I would think that one would be on the Daily-Double for $2000.

------
aurizon
Greed and Avarice mixed with cupidity blended with terminal nimbyism pretty
much sums it all up. Google was seen as a monster cash cow, and blood-suckers
lined up to drill for gold. Property costs (not values) have ramped up in much
the same way as if San Francisco, driven by height limits, density limits and
the huge ramp up of properties bought and rented for income. (aka rent
seeking). Often highly leveraged with 80%+ mortgages. the owners lice in fear
of a market decline. Rogue AirBNB owners infest the market, even when
precluded from doing that, they rent and litigate. So I think the smell of the
terminal cupidity they detected drove them away.

------
GhostVII
Personally, I don't want a smart city, I already have a smart phone and that's
enough for me. When I walk outside my apartment, I want to be escaping from my
technology as much as possible, rather than being exposed to more of it. Give
me trees, bike paths, and metal benches, not more screens and automation. And
a lot of the automation they talked about sounds like it would be taking away
low skilled jobs, which we are going to need more of unless someone implements
UBI.

Maybe I'm just getting old though, it's all downhill once you hit your 20s.

------
canistr
As a Torontonian, the problem with it has always been with both the data
sovereignty and overall control by a non-Canadian entity. The problem of
technology, foreign control, and what we give up is especially acute when
someone like Jim Balsillie points it out in the wake of technological blowups
like RIM and Nortel.

I especially didn't like the fact that the Sidewalk Labs employees were
primarily New York-based with very little understanding or familiarity with
the nuances of our city/province/country. Why are you remotely experimenting
with our city instead of sending your teams here to develop it? Wouldn't
familiarity with the surrounding neighbourhoods be an important factor in how
you make a deep impact into the local environment?

Doctoroff managed to not address any of Balsillie's primary concerns. And I
imagine most Americans are wilfully blind of the local issues when they come
here. (Just look at how ownership of sports teams like the Montreal Expos
turned out).

------
brudgers
_In May, the company announced it was abandoning the project, citing economic
infeasibility. But what wasn’t mentioned was that the project had also become
politically infeasible._

Google’s incompetence was multivalent. But that’s the nature of Dunning-Kruger
incompetence. Toronto is not a bigger version of the bedroom communities it is
familiar with. The site wasn’t lacking pie-in-the-sky planning exercises. Nor
interest from deep pockets. The biggest incompetence was pitching the project
as “what we want to do will finally put Toronto on the map.”

In real estate development, fanfare is to provide cover for _fait accompli_.
Publicity before the ducks are rowed is amateur. Steamrollering opposition
first requires a steamroller.

------
aSplash0fDerp
The best part about new 21st century cities being built from scratch is
kindergarten for tenure with primary services.

Resetting tenure for a new century solves 99% of the problems with trying to
build on-top of inefficiency (schools, public utilities, local government,
etc).

Toronto would have been better off with a sister city, developing a DFW-like
economic area for the future instead of accelerating urban rot.

~~~
notatoad
>is kindergarten for tenure with primary services.

i know what those words mean, but not in this context. what does this mean?

~~~
jcranmer
I think it means "there are no employees in school, fire, health, police
services to resist reform" in a tone somewhere around "condescending."

~~~
aSplash0fDerp
Sorry I missed this, but am on a first-time trip to a rain forest in America,
so my perspective may be temporarily biased (the air is phenomenal and the
ASMR soundtrack is better than atmos fwiw).

Instead of "condescending", its probably just a clean canvas imbued with
natural growth cycles (hence kindergarten, with nothing in-place to resist).

Saying "We the People have evolved" may be a stretch, but tenure and bad math
are basic components of the rot-ops/rot-optics of prior innovations.

------
AIME15
This project was dead once the backlash against Big Tech picked up in 2017. A
project like this requires the feds to be totally on board, have the power to
green light everything quickly, and have tons of capital to deploy.
Unfortunately for Sidewalk Labs, it's not possible for an Alphabet company to
build in Saudi Arabia or China.

------
sradman
Holy bike shedding batman. I can't comprehend our inability to focus on the
important things. Toronto's Port Lands need to be revitalized [1]:

> Waterfront Toronto has received $1.25 billion to clean up and protect the
> Port Lands. Federal, Provincial and City financial contributions cover the
> total costs.

> ...nearly a century ago the Don Valley became heavily industrialized and the
> river was re-routed to enter the lake into a concrete channel. The new
> project is intended to create a new opening for the Don River.

Spend some time in Google Maps [2] and explain to me why this revitalization
project has to be framed in terms of smart neighbourhoods, affordable housing,
and digital privacy. The plan only has to be slightly smarter than 100% condos
which seems to be the default for Toronto waterfront development.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Lands#Recent_history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Lands#Recent_history)

[2]
[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Port+Lands](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Port+Lands)

------
executive
The land in question is extremely contaminated.

------
an_opabinia
> transforming what had previously been an area east of downtown Toronto
> characterized by desolate parking lots and the graffiti-strewn foundations
> of demolished buildings

Guess Toronto got its crap back.

> Affordable housing was a top concern among Toronto residents before the
> pandemic, and in the economic fallout it will only grow as a priority, she
> said, as an example.

It’s ironic. At least in technology, the way consumer prices declined in the
last two decades has been through ads and data - by selling ad inventory
inside apps and websites, and buying ads to reach targeted people more
affordably.

Regardless of how you feel about data and surveillance and privacy or
whatever, at least ad targeting has a long proven track record of actually
delivering low real prices to consumers.

The only other thing I can think of that is as effective at reducing prices is
software and media piracy. So maybe prices are a reductive lens. Then it
should be obvious that affordability of housing is too a reductive lens. It
can’t be both ways.

~~~
xnx
Housing would be much better if we could get it to follow anything like the
technology price value trend. Housing today is barely better in terms of
quality or value from 50 years ago. To expect housing to improve as fast as
handheld devices is unrealistic, but I think they should be improving at
around the same rate as cars.

~~~
hbosch
>Housing would be much better if we could get it to follow anything like the
technology price value trend.

Do you think people would be willing to buy a house for cheap with the trade
off being that Google and Facebook get to collect data on everything you did
inside the house, and then got to display ads inside the house?

~~~
nitrogen
Wasn't there an original Twilight Zone episode about this? Also the more
recent short story Unauthorized Bread

