Sidewalk Labs seems well aware of the foibles of technologists building cities, the arrogant optimism that comes with seeing a place and deciding you can do it much better by razing and remaking. The company insists: This redevelopment will be extremely thoughtful. “This is not some random activity from our perspective,” Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt said Tuesday. “This is the culmination, from our side, of almost 10 years of thinking about how technology can improve people’s lives.”
That long gestating vision verges on the fantastical, with an tinge of Minority Report dystopia. The waterfront redevelopment proposal outlines a community where everybody has their own account, “a highly secure, personalized portal through which each resident accesses public services and the public sector.” Use your account to tell everyone in the building to quiet down, to get into your gym, or to give the plumber access to your apartment while you’re at work.
A mapping application will “record the location of all parts of the public realm in real time”—we’re talking roads, buildings, lawn furniture, and drones. Construction will prioritize walkers and bikers, not cars, though shared “taxibots” and “vanbots” will roam the hood. (The company will work with sister company Waymo to iron out those self-driving details.) It will test a new housing concept called Loft, packed with flexible spaces to be used for whatever the community needs. It will experiment with building materials like plastic, prefabricated modules, and timber in the place of steel. And yes, Sidewalk Labs says it’s working on a comprehensive privacy plan.
The company will then crunch the numbers. Sidewalk Labs’ data scientists will analyze the firehose of data to figure out what’s working and what’s not. It says it will use sophisticated modeling techniques to simulate “what-if scenarios” and determine better courses of action. No one’s using that park bench, but what if we moved it to a sunnier corner of the park? “Sidewalk expects that many residents, in general, will be attracted by the idea of living in a place that will continuously improve,” the company writes in its project proposal.
That only works if Quayside improves with its human residents in mind. The good news is that Sidewalk Labs’ approach—fast, iterative, and based on observed facts—should take its cues from people, not lofty design principles. In fact, this is academic work that is badly needed: Despite decades of the scholarly research into how cities work, scientists still struggle through gaps in data. Governments mostly collect info about how pedestrians use sidewalks and cyclists use bicycle infrastructure by hand, and then only periodically. Sidewalk Labs could help agencies everywhere crack a few codes.
But this section of Toronto will be a tiny city, not a private company, so Sidewalk Labs faces a particular challenge: building a place that works for all. Alphabet is very good at sucking in personal information and repackaging it to sell stuff. But the stuff, in this case, includes baseline city functions, like garbage collection, safe streets, efficient public transit. “I think the company needs to show that it can provide city services that are not restricted to white, male millennials,” says Sarah Kaufman, who studies transportation and technology at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation. “That means serving the elderly, the disabled, the poor—all populations that cities serve and private companies do not.”
Sidewalk Labs insists it wants to do this. It says it will spend a year hammering out the details of the community with local policymakers, city leaders, academics, and activists. When a local reporter asked CEO Dan Doctoroff about his company’s appetite for integration with the wider Toronto community, he called it “insatiable.” The frictionless tech city, the one that data could build, wants to work for everyone. But feeling like a neighborhood will be the real struggle.
UPDATE 3:05 PM ET 10/19/17: This story’s headline has been updated to clarify the relationship between Alphabet and Sidewalk Labs.
Life in the City
Source: Alphabet, Google, and Sidewalk Labs Start Their City-Building Venture in Toronto | WIRED
