Abstract
Toronto’s Quayside waterfront regeneration project has become an international reference point for the burgeoning debate about the scope and limits of the digitally enabled ‘smart city’ narrative. The project signals the entry of a Google affiliate into the realm of ‘smart urbanism’ in the most dramatic fashion imaginable, by allowing them to potentially realise their long-running dream for “someone to give us a city and put us in charge.” This article aims to understand this on-going ‘smart city’ experiment through an exploration of the ways in which ‘techno-centric’ narratives and proposed ‘disruptive’ urban innovations are being contested by the city’s civic society. To do this, the article traces the origins and evolution of the partnership between Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs and identifies the key issues that have exercised local critics of the plan, including the public/private balance of power, governance, and the planning process. Despite more citizen-centric efforts, there remains a need for appropriate advocates to protect and promote the wider public interest to moderate the tensions that exist between techno-centric and citizen-centric dimensions of smart cities.
Highlights
The unprepossessing landscape of Toronto’s postindustrial waterfront has become the unlikely setting for what is arguably the boldest and most ambitious ‘smart city’ design ever to emerge in North America
Urban Planning, 2020, Volume 5, Issue 1, Pages 84–95 urban innovation (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2019), data governance issues around privacy and security (Kitchin, 2016; van Zoonen, 2016), the extent to which ‘smart urbanism’ fosters or frustrates urban sustainability (Cugurollo, 2018; Haarstad, 2017), the integrity of the public sphere, where governments are expected to exercise a duty of care (Rodríguez Bolívar, 2016), and the role of profitseeking technology vendors that are marketing their wares to city mayors as panaceas for a wide array of urban planning problems (Viitanen & Kingston, 2014; Wiig, 2015)
The Quayside project signals the entry of a Google affiliate into the realm of ‘smart urbanism,’ as yet another ‘corporate storyteller’ (Söderström, Paasche, & Klauser, 2014), in the most dramatic fashion imaginable
Summary
The unprepossessing landscape of Toronto’s postindustrial waterfront has become the unlikely setting for what is arguably the boldest and most ambitious ‘smart city’ design ever to emerge in North America. The aim of this article is to analyse SL’s attempt to develop and control the narrative behind this ‘smart city’ experiment and identify the extent to which the public interest is employed by various actors within the planning process as a means of countering private interests. We argue that despite more citizencentric efforts, there remains a need for appropriate advocates to protect and promote the wider public interest as the smart city emerges as a means to moderate the tensions that exist between techno-centric and citizencentric dimensions of smart cities
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