Greg Lindsay's Blog

June 01, 2020  |  permalink

Alphabet’s Dream of a Smart City in Toronto Is Over

Last month, Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs subsidiary pulled the plug on its two-year lobbying-and-PR effort to build a privately-controlled and operated district along the Toronto waterfront. Although the company cited economic headwinds from the COVID-19 pandemic as the reason, it faced fierce opposition from local activists, digital privacy experts, and even the Cement Association of Canada.

One of those activists was Bianca Wylie, who I had the pleasure of inviting to speak at Prague’s reSITE festival in 2019. Her talk on “the power of the collective” is embedded above.

I was also fortunate to be interviewed by Bloomberg’s Mark Bergen the day of the announcement. A few choice quotes made it into his story:

Sidewalk Labs’ failure signals how much attitudes toward big technology companies and their influence over our lives has shifted in recent years. If a company like Alphabet, with its talent and resources, can’t pull off such a project, it’s not clear anyone can.

“I would like to think this is the defeat of the privately owned city,” said Greg Lindsay of NewCities, an urban policy think tank, and a visiting scholar at NYU’s transportation policy school.

Alphabet’s final goals for the Toronto project never seemed clear throughout its life.

“Their business model continually shifted, and they never presented a final plan,” Lindsay said. “It appears that they never settled on one.”

 

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Greg Lindsay is a generalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker. He is a non-resident senior fellow of the Arizona State University Threatcasting Lab, a non-resident senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, and a non-resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative. He was the founding chief communications officer of Climate Alpha and remains a senior advisor. Previously, he was an urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, where he explored the implications of AI and augmented reality at urban scale.

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