Why Google’s “smart city” failed

The Quayside development on Toronto’s waterfront was supposed to be the shining example of a tech-optimized smart city, an urban environment reinvented “from the internet up,” as it was described by Sidewalk Labs.

That was a sister company to Google, which won a government bid in 2017 to modernize the 12 acres of former dockland. The vision included flexible working spaces that transform into lively bars at night. There would be robotaxis, heated sidewalks, adaptive traffic lights and lots of data collection.

But in 2020, Sidewalk Toronto suddenly shut down before a single ribbon had been cut, turning a shining example into a cautionary tale. It’s all chronicled in a new book from Globe and Mail reporter Josh O’Kane called “Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy.”

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with O’Kane to learn more about what went on behind the scenes of the Sidewalk Toronto project. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Josh O’Kane: This was an era when people conflated the idea of technological progress and societal progress. Now we are living in a society where all we’re thinking about is the consequences of the technology that was developed over the last 15 years. But back then, particularly [Canadian] Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, he was, you know, super stoked to show up to announcements, like Facebook’s gonna announce hundreds of jobs, Alphabet or Google are gonna announce hundreds of jobs. These are the kinds of things, it was really an economic development strategy, which was the relationship, particularly in the Canadian government, you see examples in the U.S. government all the time. This was a fair bid process. I spent a lot of time investigating it to get rid of the conspiracies that said it was not a fair bid process. But in the end, a lot of concerns rose up from people who were thinking about privacy. They were thinking about the relationship between technology and democracy before it became a very public thing with the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal, which blew up about six months after the Sidewalk Labs project was announced here in Toronto and really changed the narrative for everything everywhere.

Meghan McCarty Carino: Right. So over the years of development of this project, these concerns became louder and louder. What were the biggest challenges that arose?

O’Kane: So at the beginning, the first real challenges that people were discussing was around privacy. You know, I will say that from the very beginning, Sidewalk Labs hired this woman named Ann Cavoukian, who was the privacy commissioner for the province of Ontario for a long time. She came up with, as one of the people who worked to develop this concept called privacy by design, where privacy is inherently protected from the development of a technology. That was not necessarily really well known at the time. Plus, there were a lot of people who were just generally concerned of why would this big technology company want to come and install, potentially, sensors everywhere? And people were wondering, like, what could we do to protect ourselves against that here in Toronto, so that we can build in protections, both for our privacy, but also so that we can, you know, monetize our own data and have a little bit of a say in that? And this is where the intersection of technology and democracy really comes in because this was a public-private partnership, and Waterfront Toronto, which was the agency that had gone, you know, into contract with Sidewalk Labs about potentially developing this neighborhood, you know, they basically said, we are going to have checks and balances. But Sidewalk Labs kept stepping up and saying, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this. And Waterfront Toronto had to keep saying, well actually, you know, you might not get that. And it became this weird battle between, like, who actually has power here in this public-private partnership, and what does Sidewalk Labs want if it’s constantly stepping ahead of what Waterfront Toronto is trying to do?

McCarty Carino: So the plug was pulled on this kind of unceremoniously in May 2020. The proximal cause was kind of the uncertainty of the pandemic. But obviously, there were these other major forces behind the scenes. In the book, you cite a source kind of musing about this question of whether government doesn’t know how to work with tech, or whether it’s the other way around. How would you answer that question?

O’Kane: So government is slow here in Canada. Government is super-, super- cautious. Everything takes a superlong time to get anything done. Tech moves at the, you know, I think it was Mark Zuckerberg who said, let’s, you know, “move fast, break things.” Or maybe that was Steve Jobs. I can’t remember, all those slogans sound the same, you know, 15 years on, but these are two very different paces of working. And, you know, it manifested in a lot of controversies here in Toronto over the years, including in February 2019, when there was basically a leak that showed that Sidewalk Labs wanted to develop, you know, up to 16 times more land than Waterfront Toronto could even offer it. And then that was confirmed when they eventually revealed their master plan. Suddenly, people who were looking to buy a house were like, well, wait, what’s going on? What does Google want with it? Are they going to get this land for free? Why are they asking for this? And that blew things out out of proportion. Very begrudgingly, over the course of weeks, there are a bunch of background negotiations. Sidewalk Labs agrees, they’re like, OK, fine, we’ll go back to the 12 acres. We just really got to make sure we have an economic case for this. And here’s what happens, a couple of major things. One, obviously the pandemic, but two, Larry Page and Sergey Brin from Alphabet basically cede their power to Sundar Pichai. They elevate him to the top of Alphabet. He is a lot less interested than Larry Page is in these sort of wacky moonshot ideas, so he’s starting to give a lot greater scrutiny to side businesses like Sidewalk Labs at the exact moment where it was brought to heel by the Canadian government. And in the end, they just decided to cancel it.

McCarty Carino: What are some of the big lessons that we can take away from this situation? Obviously, there might not be, you know, this particular project in the works, but we are constantly talking about intersections of tech and government. You know, there’s this kind of tech utopian plan for a community north of Silicon Valley. I mean, obviously, right now, there’s a lot of discussion about kind of tech influencing the government in the form of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency. I mean, what kinds of lessons from this situation do you think apply to this meeting of these two very different forces?

O’Kane: Yeah. So the biggest thing that I think I learned, and that I really try to convey in the book, is that governments really need to think faster than technology companies. They need to be able to anticipate what the challenges of the future are going to be and really think about developing policy that really meets technology where it is and where it’s going to be, rather than react to technology. Reacting to technology is why we have so much power concentrated in a handful of companies on the American West Coast because they developed the economics of the internet and are now the most valuable companies in the world. Privacy matters being sort of at the forefront of all this, but also, who has power, you know, in a public-private partnership. These sorts of things are things that governments really need to think about. You know, the example you’re talking about in Northern California, there are actually some Sidewalk Labs alumni who are involved in one of the contractors involved in that project. And what that project is trying to do is build a city from scratch. If you build a city from scratch and you design the government from scratch, which, you know, Sidewalk Labs at earlier stages in its ideation process, they wanted to have powers on par with government. [So they’re] building a city from scratch and ideally trying to come up with how the local government is going to work. And that hasn’t been made 100% clear, of course, in California, but it’s something that kind of sidesteps the need for law, for regulation and for government thinking. And that’s really the direction we’re seeing the “smart city” movement going. We’re sort of seeing a push away from working with individual cities on this massive project-based basis, and just saying, let’s just do something completely separate and not make those mistakes.

More on this

We talked about the plan by a bunch of wealthy tech investors to build a town from scratch north of Silicon Valley in Solano County, California.

The head of the group backing the project, California Forever, told the LA Times this year the group wants to “show that it’s possible to move faster in California.”

But it’s now completing a lengthy environmental review process before it can put a ballot measure before local voters on whether to rezone the farmland for housing.

But back to Canada. In 2021, Waterfront Toronto issued a new request for proposals for the abandoned Quayside plot. The winning design includes plans for about 5,000 housing units, a new school and a cultural center.

The renderings are notably devoid of gleaming tech, opting instead for a green parklike landscape that, as MIT Technology Review described it, seems to be “a conspicuous disavowal not only of the 2017 proposal but of the smart city concept itself.”