Rob Gillies/AP Photo
Jesse Shapins, director of public realm with Google affiliate Sidewalk Labs, speaks at a public forum about a proposed development on Toronto's waterfront, December 7, 2018.
Google's smart city of the future is in trouble. For the past two years, Sidewalk Labs, Google's sister company under Alphabet, has been in talks with local officials in Toronto to redevelop 12 acres of neglected land along Lake Ontario into what it calls a data-driven “disruption” of urban life. But as details of the project—dubbed Quayside—have begun to emerge, residents and local officials have expressed alarm about what it might mean for their city and their democracy.
The final straw came on June 17 with the surprise release of the Quayside master plan: Amid glossy illustrations of a techie utopia, the stubbornly coy document described a project that had mysteriously grown from the originally agreed-upon 12 acres to a mammoth 800 acres, in which public spaces could be shaped and controlled by a private company, and where data privacy protections for residents would be shaky at best. In the plan, Sidewalk Labs also assigned itself the role of lead developer—though it is not a development company—and called upon the city to invest $1.2 billion in public funds to expand its light-rail system to the new development.
On August 2, Waterfront Toronto, the public authority that currently owns the Quayside area and had enthusiastically invited Sidewalk Labs in, threatened to pull the plug if these issues remain unresolved by the end of October. But even if Toronto rejects Sidewalk Labs' proposal, the company's plan points to a privately controlled digital future for cities in need of dollars that Big Tech can provide.
FOR ALL ITS UTOPIAN BLUSTER, Quayside is only the latest foray Big Tech has made into the world of urban planning in recent years. In 2016, startup accelerator Y Combinator announced it would begin researching how to create “the best possible city” with so-called smart technology at its center. Among the questions it planned to ask were “Can we figure out better zoning laws?” and “Can we fit all rules for the city in 100 pages of text?” Two years after that, Blockchains, LLC—a company run by cryptocurrency millionaire Jeffrey Berns—bought some 67,000 acres of land in western Nevada to build a futuristic new city with an economy based on—you guessed it—Bitcoin.
And in places like Seattle, San Francisco, and very soon, Nashville and Northern Virginia, the tech industry's outsized influence on everything from housing markets to municipal tax codes to transit policy has been undeniable. In 2018, Amazon's HQ2 gambit threw local governments' desperation to attract tech giants into stark relief—giving dramatic new meaning to John Dewey's warning that government may merely be the shadow cast over society by big business.
What makes Quayside different is the sheer scope of its plans—and the contempt Sidewalk Labs seems to have for local public institutions. Conceived as a city “from the internet up,” Sidewalk says Quayside will feature heated bike lanes, underground package delivery, and “adaptive” traffic lights that prioritize pedestrians. Taking the increasingly ubiquitous “five-over-one” mid-rise design several steps further, the plan calls for building wooden multistoried buildings zoned for commercial and residential use. At the ground level, adaptable walkways would shift between civic and commercial uses depending on real-time changes in market demands—metrics determined through systemic collection of residents’ personal data. To do all this, Sidewalk promises to pump CA$1.3 billion, or $980 million, into the project—big money for any city.
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The need to expand and enhance public space appears frequently in the master plan, from new parks and plaza designs to those “adaptable” walkways it touts. But a closer read suggests Sidewalk's definition of “public” is nothing if not opaque. Instead of being under government control, these spaces would fall under the jurisdiction of something Sidewalk calls the Open Space Alliance (OSA), a public-private partnership that would include government officials, residents, landlords, and tenants. The plan does not specify the scope of the OSA's authority, how it would make decisions, or whether one or another group would hold more sway. It does, however, describe in detail how the OSA's operating budget would be structured, suggesting Sidewalk could enjoy a significant degree of control over the organization.
“The sci-fi isn't just in the gadgets—it's in these fictional authorities they want to create,” says Mariana Valverde, a professor of socio-legal studies at the University of Toronto and member of the Toronto Open Smart Cities Forum, a local watchdog. “This would only work if it was like a gated community, but they don't want to say that's what they're creating.”
It's also unclear what political rights residents may have in those supposedly public spaces. The Canadian constitution guarantees rights of free expression and assembly in public spaces. But spaces that are privately owned come with few, and often no, such guarantees. If, say, workers in a Quayside restaurant go on strike (nearly a third of Canadian workers are unionized), will they have a right to picket on the adaptable walkway? What happens if their demonstration interferes with the OSA's real-time, market-driven plans to convert that walkway into a pop-up farmers market? Who gets final say?
Indeed, for all its ambitious language about remaking the modern city, what Sidewalk's master plan reveals most vividly is a serious misunderstanding of how urban planning actually works. “It's not a plan—it hasn't gone to the city planning department. It's nothing. It's just their ideas and fantasies,” says Valverde.
“Development plans are usually much more specific. It's clear who's doing what. There's no way the City Council would approve this.”
MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE, data collection lies at the heart of Sidewalk’s plans for Quayside. Nearly all of the “smart” technologies touted in the company’s master plan depend on an Orwellian collection of personal data of all kinds—in both public and private spaces. Through what it calls “ubiquitous sensing,” Sidewalk aims to make a vast array of public services responsive to residents’ needs in real time: traffic lights that analyze traffic patterns; homes that track residents’ behavior to reduce heating costs and lower carbon emissions. Sidewalk even envisions a centralized “identity management system,” which would apparently function much like a government ID, enabling residents to access public goods like transit and health care.
Just how much personal data will be open to collection by Sidewalk is hard to say. In its master plan, the company claims that it will harvest only what it calls “urban data,” a doggedly vague term which the company defines as “information gathered in the city's physical environment, including the public realm, publicly accessible spaces, and even some private buildings.” Yet elsewhere in the plan, Sidewalk expands this definition to include data collected in private residences, such as “tenant or building noise, air quality, and energy use.”
To allay privacy concerns, Sidewalk insists it would not monetize data and that all collected data would reside in an Urban Data Trust, an independent body composed of Sidewalk, local companies, municipal officials, and Waterfront Toronto. The trust would then set rules for outside companies—like say, Google—attempting to access and monetize the data. Sidewalk says that all such access requests would be made public.
Data trusts themselves are nothing new. In Barcelona, the city government has taken a leading role in regulating the collection and use of data through a public trust. Such data are publicly owned, and their use by private companies is tightly controlled. Citizens can even opt themselves out of certain kinds of data collection and control how their data will be shared.
But while Sidewalk points to Barcelona as inspiration for its trust, its plans are very different. Barcelona's trust empowers citizens to take control of their data, share them on their terms, and establishes digital sovereignty as a fundamental right. Sidewalk's plan, by contrast, empowers a private company to collect unclear amounts of data with few, if any, concrete checks on its authority. And even if Sidewalk itself does not monetize the data, there's nothing stopping other companies—say, Google—from doing so.
As with the Open Space Alliance, it's very difficult to say how the trust will make decisions or whether one group could hold more sway over the others. Sidewalk's original proposal called for a “civic data trust,” which might have implied some leadership role for the government. But in its current proposal, “civic data” has been supplanted by “urban data,” a term with no legal meaning. Whether this shift signaled some change in how the trust would function is anyone's guess. “The boundaries are not at all clear,” says Andrew Clement, a professor emeritus of public information policy at the University of Toronto and member of the Waterfront Toronto Digital Strategy Advisory Panel. “Urban data is a problematic mix of private and public information that's being smooshed together in ways that are really murky.”
Because of the lack of legal protections for personal data, in Canada as in most other countries, the potential for abuse is high. According to a 2018 report by Ontario’s auditor general, Waterfront Toronto failed to consult with any other levels of government before awarding the project to Sidewalk. Ontario lacks the robust policy framework necessary to regulate a project like this, the report warned, and Waterfront made no attempt to address that. In 2018, Ontario’s auditor general recommended that the province pass legislation that more adequately protects residents’ personal data and privacy before the Waterfront project moves forward.
WATERFRONT TORONTO WAS CREATED with a specific purpose in mind—and it wasn’t to build a smart city with Google’s sister company. The organization had its origins in Toronto’s failed 2008 Olympic bid, with the ultimate goal of revitalizing the city’s waterfront in time for the games. The Olympics never made it to Toronto, but the legacy of that bid remains in Waterfront Toronto’s bizarre governance structure. Officially a tri-government agency, all of Waterfront’s decisions must go through three different levels of government—federal, provincial, and municipal.
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And unlike other, similar public authorities, Waterfront Toronto is specifically barred from creating subsidiaries, changing local zoning, or borrowing money on its own credit. It even has an expiration date: By law, Waterfront Toronto has a 25-year lifespan, which ends in 2025. Contrast all that with, say, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, an agency with independent funding and a wide scope of authority over the parks and transportation infrastructure in the New York metro area—and of course, no expiration date.
It was the finite budget in particular that fueled a kind of existential fear within Waterfront in recent years. Having exhausted its CA$1.5 million in seed money, unable to borrow money on its own to revitalize the area, and with the clock ticking on its very existence, the agency began thinking creatively about how to achieve its goals. In March 2017, Waterfront put out a request for proposals (RFP) for an “innovation and funding partner” to redevelop Quayside. Going well beyond the scope of a typical RFP, Waterfront said its new funding partner would work with the agency to “create the required governance constructs to stimulate the growth of an urban innovation cluster, including legal frameworks.” Sidewalk Labs, an “urban innovation organization” founded less than two years prior, jumped at the chance. That October, Waterfront announced Sidewalk had won.
The choice of Sidewalk was unusual for a few reasons. For one thing, Sidewalk was a technology company, not a developer, and had no prior experience designing urban spaces. But from the very beginning, Waterfront made it clear that it was looking beyond more traditional funding partners like private developers, and toward technology companies and nonprofits. “What we are looking for is a partner who for themselves may have done something like this, a demonstration project,” said Waterfront CEO Will Fleissig in April 2017. “Or may have some technologies they may want to try out, and put their seed capital into it.”
Once it found out that Sidewalk was interested, Waterfront went out of its way to give the company a competitive edge. According to a 2018 report by the Ontario auditor general, Waterfront shared information with Sidewalk about the project even before issuing the RFP. This helped Sidewalk develop what was reportedly the most comprehensive bid. Other bidders were not quite so lucky.
Waterfront Toronto did not release any of the other bids when Sidewalk was chosen—or even the identities of the other bidders. Typically, Toronto public agencies release details of a bid's three finalists before choosing a winner. Waterfront also kept its preliminary agreement with Sidewalk secret for more than seven months, fueling speculation among city officials and residents. “Even city councilors couldn't see it. And they're used to seeing everything, especially when it comes to development proposals,” says Valverde. “That's when I got interested.”
WHILE IT'S TEMPTING TO SEE the Quayside project as a corporate takeover of public space and functions, Waterfront’s role, particularly in the scope of its RFP, cannot be diminished. Faced with a shrinking budget and a rapidly approaching deadline, the agency did everything it could to attract a corporate partner willing to invest big money. Waterfront “basically asked a corporation to act as a government,” says Bianca Wylie, co-founder of Tech Reset Canada, a digital watchdog.
Yet as Sidewalk has endeavored to become that investor qua government, its honeymoon with actual local governments has rapidly come to an end. Last year, several high-profile officials announced their resignation from Waterfront's board, citing concerns over privatization, data collection, and Waterfront's inept leadership. “I imagined us creating a Smart City of Privacy, as opposed to a Smart City of Surveillance,” privacy consultant Ann Cavoukian wrote in her letter of resignation in October. Following the release of Sidewalk's master plan this past June, Cavoukian told Canadian tech outlet BetaKit that little had changed.
In August 2018, Waterfront CEO Fleissig himself resigned. That December, Fleissig's successor Michael Nobrega defended Sidewalk’s proposed data collection practices and committed to holding the company to high privacy standards. Nobrega also shrugged off allegations of bias in its selection process: “We want to be crystal clear—our RFP processes are competitive, fair, and follow best practices.”
That sympathetic attitude evaporated quickly, however, when Sidewalk released its master plan in June, designating itself the lead developer, expanding the area it is developing to 800 acres, and demanding $1.2 billion of public funds for transit expansion. On June 24, Waterfront Toronto responded by sending Sidewalk Labs an open letter outlining its concerns. Taking care to emphasize that Waterfront had had no part in creating the master plan, the agency reminded Sidewalk that, for any of this to move forward, it would need the approval of both Waterfront and the Toronto City Council. In sharp contrast to the agency’s erstwhile boosterism, the letter ended on a decidedly noncommittal note: “Whether the Quayside project proceeds or not, the conversation we are having is important for all of Toronto.”
On August 2, the agency announced it would extend its initial agreement with Sidewalk through March 2020 in order to work through unresolved issues and give the public more time to sift through the master plan. But that extension came with a big caveat: If these issues remain unresolved by the end of October, the project would be dead.
In announcing the deadline, Waterfront officials seemed to have no problem imagining a future without Sidewalk. “If for whatever reason [the project] was not to go ahead,” spokesperson Andrew Tumilty told the Toronto Star, “we’re still committed to exploring how we can solve some of these great urban challenges that Toronto and cities around the world face.”
For Valverde, the question is less what happens in Toronto and more what Quayside might mean for the future of urban governance. “This plan is not necessarily for Toronto. There's so little in it that's actually specific to the city,” she says, adding that Toronto may have been a kind of test run. “It's possible that the real customer is the rest of the world and other cities more desperate for investment.”
Indeed, even with the Toronto plan still on the table, Sidewalk seems to be moving in that direction. On September 3, the company announced a partnership with the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan to form something called Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners. Apparently inspired by Sidewalk’s work in Toronto, the spin-off company will help cities “enable sustainable, distributed and intelligent urban infrastructure, creating jobs, improving mobility, and providing more environmentally friendly infrastructure solutions,” in the words of Sidewalk’s CEO Dan Doctoroff.
Whether such plans move forward in Toronto or anywhere else, what is clear is that the public sector is wholly unprepared for the kinds of disruptions Big Tech is preparing to unleash on urban life. Waterfront Toronto may have been uniquely vulnerable, but any public authority would be, at best, befuddled in the face of one of the largest companies on the planet, bent on reshaping how it functions. From protecting personal data to defending the democratic process, governments at all levels have struggled to respond to a sector with a habit of moving far faster than regulators. And while Big Tech firms like Google are eager to fill that vacuum of power, they seem uninterested in the types of accountability, responsiveness, and transparency that are central to democratic decision-making. If governments in Canada and the United States are unable to get out in front of the changes that Big Tech is proposing, the future of cities may begin to resemble Sidewalk's master plan: stylish, “smart,” and with little room for the public.
