Sidewalk Labs Research Articles

Review Essay: Get Smart?!

This review essay considers three books that provide a detailed overview of smart cities and the politics and eventual demise of the proposed Sidewalk Toronto project (2017-2020), an initiative of Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet’s urban technology company.

Urban neoliberalism, smart city, and Big Tech: The aborted Sidewalk Labs Toronto experiment

ABSTRACT On May 7, 2020, Sidewalk Labs (part of Alphabet, which includes Google) abandoned its Toronto waterfront redevelopment project after two-and-a-half years of planning, public relations, and bargaining with the public agency responsible for this sector. The official and final reason Sidewalk gave for its withdrawal was the uncertainty of the Toronto real estate market due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Few observers of the Toronto scene subscribed to this explanation. Events did not unfold as Sidewalk would have hoped for. Its Toronto venture exposes implementation difficulties of a form of neoliberalism combining the smart city model with an active involvement of Big Tech. The Toronto narrative suggests that while the materialization of this version of neoliberalism is advantaged by plentiful resources, futurist visions of the city, and access to new technology, it is not immune to implementation hurdles associated with the context-specific nature of neoliberal projects. The paper identifies three categories of obstacles that have hampered the reaching of the Sidewalk objectives in Toronto: opposition movements objecting to electronic surveillance, corporate control, and restrictions to democratic processes; the fragmentation of the neoliberal political block; and ill-advised strategies on the part of Sidewalk.

Quantum Healthy Longevity for healthy people, planet, and growth

Quantum Healthy Longevity for healthy people, planet, and growth

When digital capitalism takes (on) the neighbourhood: data activism meets place-based collective action

ABSTRACT Recent social movement scholarship has highlighted the instrumental and material roles played by digital technologies in supporting collective action and new cultures of organizing. This research seldom considers the symbolic role of digital technologies and data. However, the extraction and exploitation of data, described as data colonialism, facilitate novel opportunities for capitalist expansion in the everyday. Extensive data appropriation and commodification have led to a growing interest in data activism which challenges dominant data politics. Focusing on the intersection of data activism and local organising of collective action, this article examines two cases of how Big Tech disrupts everyday life and becomes a grievance used for mobilisation. With these cases, we illustrate how protest campaigns react to Google’s aim to colonise both digital and physical spheres of life. The first case concerns the creation of a Google Campus in Berlin, while the second focuses on the Sidewalk Toronto urban development project led by the Google subsidiary, SideWalk Labs. Both projects were met with resistance comprising elements of data activism, mobilised as the Fuck Off Google and #blocksidewalk campaigns. Beyond rallying local discontent around impending gentrification and increased housing prices, the campaigns raised awareness about digital giants’ unethical data practices and underscored alternative human-centric technologies and data politics. Employing frame analysis, we elaborate on the intersecting dynamics of traditional, community-based grassroots mobilisation and data activism against Googlization and explore the potentialities and limitations toward contextualising collective action for (rather than in) the digital age.

From Legitimation to Failure: The Downfall of a Temporary Hybrid Organizing in Smart City Project

Organizational hybridity refers to operating in a context of institutional plurality due to a combination of multiple, often conflicting elements of institutional logic. To be successful, organizations must develop strategies to combine logic and sustain their hybrid forms. Success, however, is not inevitable. The simultaneous pursuit of dissimilar and oftentimes conflicting logics causes hybrid arrangements to experience divergent pressures from various stakeholders and, in many cases, fail. This study illustrates that hybridity failure is not always the reverse of succeeding. Instead, failure may occur through a complex trajectory of de-settlement. Utilizing archival data, we empirically examine Toronto's new Quayside smart city projects as the case of temporary organizing in which a public-private partnership between Waterfront Toronto (public) and Google's affiliate Sidewalk Labs organization (private) has been failed. Drawing on an in-depth field study, we develop a framework to track distinct hybridity trajectories, including complementary, separation and contestation trajectories that all together led to the hybridity failure. We reveal mechanisms associated with each trajectory and show how the pathway led to the hybridity failure.

Infrastructure, smart cities and the knowledge economy: Lessons for policymakers from the Toronto Quayside project

AbstractSidewalk Labs' Quayside project in Toronto demonstrates how information technologies are shaping cities' core governance functions. This article focuses on the rules governing decisions to collect, use and disseminate data in data‐intensive urban‐infrastructure projects. We propose a methodological framework grounded in the multidisciplinary literature on data governance and apply it to the Quayside project, demonstrating how Waterfront Toronto's failure to ask basic questions at the project's outset forced it into retroactive improvisations that allowed Sidewalk Labs to lead and propose data‐governance policies primarily in the company's economic interests. We offer recommendations for how cities and other public entities can avoid such mistakes and better analyze knowledge‐intensive infrastructure projects.

Smart City Toronto: Extraction, Enclosure, Rentier Capitalism

Background: The failure of Sidewalk Labs’ smart city initiative in Toronto provides insight into the imperatives and contradictions of platform capitalism. Analysis: A political economy analysis reveals why this Alphabet subsidiary sought to expand the project beyond the parameters of the initial plan, stepping into a vacuum created by neoliberal forms of governance. Ultimately, the company’s expansionism resulted in a political backlash that scuttled the plan. Conclusion and implications: This case study highlights the political contradictions of platform capitalism, emphasizing the diversification of corporate strategies characterized by the extraction of data, enclosure of platforms, and accumulation of rentier profits.

It’s a Smart World? An Architectural Reflection on Smart Cities through Hannah Arendt’s Notion of the World

This paper challenges the ideas beyond the application of smart technology in the urban environment by investigating the proposal for the waterfront of Toronto by Sidewalk Labs. Although the project has been cancelled in the first months of the COVID pandemic outbreak, it still offers a valuable case study, as it was developed by Sidewalk Labs, part of Alphabet Inc, the company behind, among others, Google. This paper focusses on the spatial, material, and political aspects of the proposal, which are investigated through an architectural reading of Hannah Arendt’s notion of the world. The paper reflects on the public spaces in the plan, and in particular to the ambition to make these spaces “responsive” to popular demand. This ideal is inherent to the most far-fledged convictions beyond smart cities. In contradiction to its promising images and wild ideas, this paper concludes that it silences the participants and diminishes the possibility of active participation in the built environment.

Data Trusts and the Governance of Smart Environments: Lessons from the Failure of Sidewalk Labs’ Urban Data Trust

Data trusts are an increasingly popular proposal for managing complex data governance questions, although what they are remains contested. Sidewalk Labs proposed creating an “Urban Data Trust” as part of the Sidewalk Toronto “smart” redevelopment of a portion of Toronto’s waterfront. This part of its proposal was rejected before Sidewalk Labs cancelled the project. This research note briefly places the Urban Data Trust within the general debate regarding data trusts and then discusses one set of reasons for its failure: its incoherence as a model. The Urban Data Trust was a failed model because it lacked clarity regarding the nature of the problem(s) to which it is a solution, how accountability and oversight are secured, and its relation to existing data protection law. These are important lessons for the more general debate regarding data trusts and their role in data governance.

Global technology companies and the politics of urban socio-technical imaginaries in the digital age: Processual proxies, Trojan horses and global beachheads

In this paper, we take the concept of ‘new urban spaces’ as our jumping off point to engage with the efforts of Alphabet/Google affiliate Sidewalk Labs to cultivate a new integrated digital and infrastructural urban space on the Toronto waterfront. We interrogate the process and politics of imagining this new, digital urban space as an urban socio-technical imaginary. The paper critically examines the central role of ‘big tech’ in producing the urban socio-technical imaginary not as a snapshot but, rather, as a ‘process of becoming’. This processual focus on the role of big tech allows us to develop three interrelated analytical contributions. First, we generate in-depth understanding of the proxy politics of urban socio-technical imaginaries in constituting new digital urban spaces. Second, we argue that an urban socio-technical imaginary was used as a Trojan horse to promote private experimentation with urban governance. Third, we demonstrate attempts to imagine a global beachhead via ‘the global model’ of a new digital urban space predicated on the digital control of integrated urban infrastructure systems.

CrossTalk

SMART CITIES, LIKE many things, took a beating in 2020. Alphabet, Google's parent company, pulled its Sidewalk Labs subsidiary out of a smart-city project in Toronto. Cisco killed its plans to sell smart-city technology. And in many places, city budgets will be affected for years to come by the pan-demic's economic shock, making it more difficult to justify smart-city expenses.

From Thurii to Quayside: Creating Inclusive Blended Spaces in Digital Communities

The modern-day digital community provides an opportunity to follow the unifying threads of governance, physical spaces, and technologies, as played out through the deployment of local software-based sensors and gateways. As we will see, the now-defunct Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto highlights the challenges, and limitations, of developing such a comprehensive system of interfaces, in the absence of sufficiently inclusive and holistic mechanisms to govern their use. In this article, we will look briefly at two planned cities – the ancient Greek city of Thurii, and the modern cityscape of Quayside in Toronto, Canada—as exemplifying the different layers of control that can and should work well together in communities of trust. One proposed takeaway is the desirability of planning digital communities that invite active human participation in the blended spaces between the self and world, the private and public, and the physical and virtual. For the Quayside cityscape, the article focuses on two particular layers. First, we will explore inclusive governance, which spans from civic data trusts to urban trusts. That exploration includes consideration of the knowledge commons, and by extension the ancient Greek agora, as useful framing references. Second, we will dig into inclusive interfaces, using as an exemplar the evolving and still-incomplete work of the Sidewalk Labs’ design engineering team, the Digital Transparency in the Public Realm (DTPR) project. More human-agential versions of these interfaces exemplify what are introduced here as edgetech systems, as opposed to the cloudtech systems that dominate the Web today. The article establishes edgetech as incorporating three key elements: (1) the edge-to-all (e2a) design principle, (2) multiple end user-facing modalities of data, computation, and interfaces, and (3) a mix of edge-pushing and edge-pulling functionalities that empower the end user. Finally, the article observes how the personal digital fiduciary, paired with a Personal AI, could help the individual successfully navigate the inclusive new blends of physical and virtual spaces in their digital communities. Certain government policies are identified that would enable these more participatory governance and edgetech opportunities.

Techs and the Cities: A New Economic Development Paradigm?

Large technology firms pose new challenges for local economic development in the 21st century. They are attractive targets for local economic developers because they have the potential of providing permanent, well-paying jobs. This article examines two mega-economic development deals. Amazon’s proposed second headquarters in Queens and Sidewalk Labs’ Quayside proposal for the Toronto waterfront pit large and prosperous Big Tech firms against local governments with healthy economies. Amazon abandoned the New York City site it had chosen, rather than open new negotiations with local officials and citizens. Sidewalk Labs withdrew from the Quayside proposal after two and a half years of negotiation focusing mostly on the size of the proposed development. Although the potential benefits may be substantial, incentivizing Big Tech’s location decisions may be well beyond the means of most cities, especially those with distressed economies.

Where The Sidewalk Ends: The Governance Of Waterfront Toronto’s Sidewalk Labs Deal

In May 2020 Sidewalk Labs, the Google-affiliated ‘urban innovation’ company, announced that it was abandoning its ambition to build a ‘smart city’ on Toronto’s waterfront and thus ending its three-year relationship with Waterfront Toronto. This is thus a good time to look back and examine the whole process, with a view to drawing lessons both for the future of Canadian smart city projects and the future of public sector agencies with appointed boards. This article leaves to one side the gadgets and sensors that drew much attention to the proposed project, and instead focuses on the governance aspects, especially the role of the public ‘partner’ in the contemplated public-private partnership. We find that the multi-government agency, Waterfront Toronto, had transparency and accountability deficiencies, and failed to consistently defend the public interest from the beginning (the Request for Proposals issued in May of 2017). Because the public partner in the proposed ‘deal’ was not, as is usually the case in smart city projects, a municipal corporation, our research allows us to address an important question in administrative law, namely: what powers should administrative bodies outside of government have in crafting smart city policies?
 In Canada, the comparatively limited Canadian scholarly work regarding urban law and governance has mainly focused on municipal governments themselves, and this scholarly void has contributed to the fact that the public is largely unaware of the numerous local bodies that oversee local matters beyond municipal governments. This paper hones into the details of the WT-Sidewalk Labs partnership to understand the powers and limitations of WT in assuming a governmental role in establishing and overseeing ‘smart city’ relationships. It ultimately argues that WT has not been – nor should it be – empowered to create a smart city along Toronto’s post-industrial waterfront. Such tasks, we argue, belong to democratic bodies like municipalities. An important contribution of this paper is to situate the evolving role of public authorities in the local governance literature and in the context of administrative law.

Is civic data governance the key to democratic smart cities? The role of the urban data trust in Sidewalk Toronto

Over the two and a half years of its existence, Alphabet/Sidewalk Labs’ smart city project in Toronto, Canada has been at the center of successive controversies relating to its proprietary approach to personal data. To address these concerns, Sidewalk Labs suggested putting the data collected in the smart city in a trust. As a “steward of urban data and the public interest,” the Urban Data Trust was expected to protect residents’ privacy, establish responsible data sharing standards, and provide individuals with a share in the profits derived from the data gathered about them. This article proposes technoscientific/platform capitalism theories as a theoretical framework in the research on data governance. I situate the Urban Data Trust within a series of policy responses to the problem of extractive data practices. I posit that the company’s data governance approach appeals to and sustains a political-economic regime governed by the logic of rent seeking, which aims to entrench the economic dominance of technological monopolies.

#BlockSidewalk to Barcelona: Technological sovereignty and the social license to operate smart cities

AbstractThis article explores technological sovereignty as a way to respond to anxieties of control in digital urban contexts, and argues that this may promise a more meaningful social license to operate smart cities. First, we present an overview of smart city developments with a critical focus on corporatization and platform urbanism. We critique Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs development in Toronto, which faces public backlash from the #BlockSidewalk campaign in response to concerns over not just privacy, but also lack of community consultation, the prospect of the city losing its civic ability to self‐govern, and its repossession of public land and infrastructure. Second, we explore what a more responsible smart city could look like, underpinned by technological sovereignty, which is a way to use technologies to promote individual and collective autonomy and empowerment via ownership, control, and self‐governance of data and technologies. To this end, we juxtapose the Sidewalk Labs development in Toronto with the Barcelona Digital City plan. We illustrate the merits (and limits) of technological sovereignty moving toward a fairer and more equitable digital society.

Trojans of ambiguity vs resilient regeneration: visual meaning in cities

This paper presents a theoretical framework that helps identify visual sustainability in urban projects and evaluates its relevance for the use, design and making of public space. It is aimed at showing how the process of urban regeneration is far more nuanced and sophisticated than much of today’s building industry allows for. The first part of the article provides an outline of this framework, by drawing from the notion of ambiguity and discussing regeneration around a concept of trojans of ambiguity: by which we simply mean that modern-day regeneration projects are often a confusion of meaning. The framework is then applied to two case studies: Heygate, and Sidewalk Labs Toronto. The Heygate regeneration produced a negative emotionally charged process and social displacement. By contrast Sidewalk Labs Toronto exemplifies a technologically clean start for regeneration, on a site with little social vitality or history. The starting points for each ultimately point to two very different outcomes. Visual sustainability represents ‘the technology before the technology’ and future research must recognise how human needs, not technology, provide the meaning into ‘how’ we may create a successful, smart, and sustainable urban environment.

The Life of Technology and the Technologies of Living

For a project that promised to be the future of urban life, Google Sidewalk Labs’ Quayside project in Toronto, once touted as the best example of tech companies “getting into the business of making...

Googling the City: In Search of the Public Interest on Toronto’s ‘Smart’ Waterfront

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.

Sidewalk Labs closed down – whither Google’s smart city

Sidewalk Labs closed down – whither Google’s smart city