28 ms·

Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

325 points by colinprince 7y ago

cal5k 7y ago
People are cheering, but as a broader statement this is a small sample of how difficult it is to do business in Canada.
- na85 7y ago
  >how difficult it is to do business in Canada. Or, put differently, how difficult it is to exploit the public's privacy for financial gain in Canada? I'm Canadian, and I'm glad that Google didn't get carte blanche to come in and build their surveillance dystopia.
  - cal5k 7y ago
    I'm not even a fan of that project in particular, but this is a common problem in Canada - the goalpost constantly shifts, the process becomes a political hot potato, and the foreign investor eventually just says "fuck this" and pulls out of the market. It's happened in oil & gas, banking, telecommunications, retail, and a whole host of other sectors.
    - 52-6F-62 7y ago
      Outside of retail, all of the rest of those have real national security implications. And if by retail you're referring to burger joints or Target, I'm afraid that's just market effect.
      - alteria 7y ago
        Plus Target shot themselves in the foot with poor SAP integration among other blunders.
      - cal5k 7y ago
        There's a big difference between considering national security issues and bungling foreign direct investment completely (except for real estate). It's also no excuse for the protection of oligopolies that don't act in the best interests of Canadians.
        52-6F-62 7y ago
        In that case I'll take the likely unpopular opinion that: it's better our assholes than someone else's. And foreign direct investment in energy, food supplies, telecommunications absolutely has national security implications. I would be loathe to have a foreign entity become the major stateholder in our telecommunications infrastructure. I don't harbour any deep love of the Rogers family, but they are solidly Canadian at least.
    - FpUser 7y ago
      We already have foreign investors taking a lease of the section hwy 407 in Toronto and wrestling ministry of transportation to not extend license plates of people who did not pay fee. The reason included not sending bills, false billings, denying plates after official bankruptcy etc. And those ever increasing tolls. Thank you very much for your business and corruption.
    - na85 7y ago
      I'm not going to disagree that our governments tend to play political hot potato. You can downvote all you like but I don't feel any sympathy for abusive "investors" like Big Tech or Big Oil who all too often socialize the risks but privatize the profits. See for example Amazon trying to get billions in tax breaks for HQ2. See also the Keystone XL or Northern Gateway projects. The oil companies have excellent propaganda machines operating tirelessly to convince Albertans that the rest of the country is being unreasonable when they demand environmental controls and assurances. Not all investment is beneficial to the citizenry. I'd much rather my government err towards overcautious than overpermissive.
    - AlanYx 7y ago
      There's probably a lot more merit to your comment than most people realize. Absent from most of the media reports I've read today is that Sidewalk Labs was facing yet another approval decision on the project from Waterfront Toronto in less than two weeks (May 20, extended from an earlier March 31 deadline). My guess is that they heard through the grapevine that the decision was going to be highly conditional, and that the project was going to be saddled with yet another set of hoops to jump through, so Sidewalk Labs just decided to bail. It's basically exactly the same pattern we saw in late February with the Teck Resources decision. The company bailed literally days before the deadline for approval.
      - cal5k 7y ago
        Indeed. Everyone is spouting populist talking points (yeah! screw foreign money!) without explaining how Canada is going to fix its anemic productivity growth and compete globally, particularly as we're actively destroying our own resource industries.
- FpUser 7y ago
  Depends on what kind of business. "We the people" do not exist to feed corporations (at least in theory). As a business it is your own private headache.
- thinkloop 7y ago
  The article says the issue is Corona not Canada?
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    It's not, CNBC says "Toronto was expected to make its final decision on whether or not to let the project move forward on May 20." COVID has nothing to do with it.
  - ehsankia 7y ago
    Whether the final blow was due to COVID-19 or if it was just an excuse, it doesn't change the fact that it's been an uphill battle for over 3 years with very little progress.
- empath75 7y ago
  Not all business is good business.
- kspacewalk2 7y ago
  True, it's difficult to slash and burn through the political process with half-baked techie ideas and opaque data collection practices. Not to mention ones requiring huge taxpayer commitments for a project that is way beyond the bleeding edge (at best) or a priori only partially achievable "but let's try it and see" (at worst). Bureaucracy and elaborate processes slow things down. Every so often, that's a great thing.
AIME15 7y ago
The scope-limiting to 12 acres announced on October 31 was perceived as a win for the regulators, giving them more control over the project over time. At that point the project timeline became untenable for SWL's plans but couldn't back out due to PR concerns for Alphabet. The pandemic is a convenient excuse for the company to abandon the Quayside project. For the last three years SWL has bent over backwards to be transparent about its plans and address community concerns. Plans have repeatedly been scaled down to the point where it makes absolutely no financial sense to move forward. The calculation to bet the company on Toronto was made before this recent backlash against Big Tech. I suspect it would have been made differently had the company started a year later.
- ericzawo 7y ago
  Bent over backwards? I don't think we were attending the same public hearings about Sidewalk Labs. I went to three of them, and do not - at all - share that view. In fact, they deliberately obfuscated many key points around their continued goal-posting moving of public-private terms, which has been well documented[1]. https://medium.com/@biancawylie/debrief-on-sidewalk-toronto-public-meeting-3-a-master-class-in-gaslighting-and-arrogance-c1c5dd918c16 https://medium.com/@biancawylie/debrief-on-sidewalk-toronto-...
- eddyionescu 7y ago
  The 12-acres (just Quayside) was what Toronto's RFP asked for in the first place and Sidewalk Labs won out for (https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2017/10/17/google-firm-wins-competition-to-build-high-tech-quayside-neighbourhood-in-toronto.html https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2017/10/17/google-fir...), which now turns out to have not been financially viable for them given the high cost of their R&D (including those mass-timber buildings which aren't even in Ontario's building code yet). Sidewalk Lab's wider plans were really an unsolicited proposal that no one asked for, so it's unfair to blame "regulators" or the tech backlash.
  - AIME15 7y ago
    Agreed that the responsibility was 100% on SWL to build consensus among the community and decision makers in Waterfront Toronto and Toronto's government entities. I'm just saying that this became a lot tougher due to the change in public opinion on big tech.
oiasdjfoiasd 7y ago
And collectively, Torontonians breath a sigh relief
lostgame 7y ago
‘I’ve met thousands of Torontonians from all over the city, excited by the possibility of making urban life better for everyone.’ This is simply not true, in my experience as a Torontonian. The overall opinion of this project was incredibly low, from at least dozens of people it’s come up with - at work, at events, with friends - if anything, there’ll be a lot of people happy to hear this. There were even questions as to why our tax dollars would even support this when we’ve got issues like homelessness, etc. As Forbes said, it was ‘tech for tech’s sake’. Forbes: ‘In June of 2019, Sidewalk’s master plan was released, eliciting a barrage of controversy around privacy and participation. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association initiated a lawsuit against local, provincial and federal government over data privacy concerns. Vice called the proposal a “democracy grenade“.‘ https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellistalton/2019/09/26/why-sidewalk-labs-toronto-plan-is-flawed/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellistalton/2019/09/26/why-side... Edit: I’m shocked at the number of downvotes for similar comments - I guess backing up your points counts. If you don’t think this closure is good for Toronto, especially if you live here, I’d like to know why.
- annapurna 7y ago
  Couldn't agree more as a Torontonian. It didn't help that they conducted most of the discussions in bad faith with the whole "trust us with your data" approach when these were geniune concerns due to the amount of oversight and control they were provided.
  - brutus1213 7y ago
    I agree that this was a train wreck in slow motion. What is sad is I didn't see any significant open engagement with GTA's existing tech scene (did hear a lot of talk of it though). Maybe the VCs club had access but as a technologist, I certainly didn't. If this was happening in SF, there would be grass roots meetups all over the place, and a more serious focus on action rather than planning.
    - dirtyid 7y ago
      They did a series of town halls, funded a bunch of urban / tech meetups. Pretty proactive for a period. The townhalls were very... SF style, it didn't mesh with the local culture well. But I don't think they did a lot of work either, there's a pretty lackluster showroom and they put out some very middling concept sketches - not proper renders like you see in most smart city projects. Didn't seem like they were taking things seriously. A lot of words. Maybe too many. At least not enough right ones.
Wacko_dacko 7y ago
This is great news. As a Torontonian I found their plan to be nothing more than a money grab on public space and the public in general. They also massively overreached in all their applications to the city.
- stanski 7y ago
  Just a big tech company hyping up a project they were never really up to. Hopefully the city didn't spend a fortune on this. The fizzling out will come to no one's surprise.
- leoh 7y ago
  > I found their plan to be nothing more than a money grab on public space and the public in general You're going to get a big real estate developer doing it instead.
  - 52-6F-62 7y ago
    Maybe. Their plan would have implied the eradication of the properties of much of the film industry in the city who would have had to move to likely more expensive locations. Frankly, I was surprised they were cleared to build residences in that area (or were they?) When I worked in the film industry down on Commissioners—just a short bit west of Cherry St—there was still phosphorus seeping up through the ground on occasion... AFAIU Waterfront Toronto has rule over the area and they've done some pretty great work with the Harbourfront area, so I would put faith in them to do a good job with the region. I think their major roadblock (prior to the pandemic) is funding. https://www.waterfrontoronto.ca/nbe/portal/waterfront/Home/waterfronthome/projects https://www.waterfrontoronto.ca/nbe/portal/waterfront/Home/w... https://portlandsto.ca/project-details/ https://portlandsto.ca/project-details/
donpdonp 7y ago
$50M and two years later - where are the conclusions? The results? A blog post of what happened? Two years seems like enough time to say we tried some amazing things and this is how it did or did not work.
- reportingsjr 7y ago
  Two years is nothing when it comes with planning and development in the US, unfortunately. A little anecdote, here in Cincinnati I was peripherally involved with a local nonprofit taking over management of an abandoned bit of city part to build new multi-use trails. It took 20 years for the park board to even listen, then once an agreement was reached it took another /year and a half/ to get the paperwork to the point where they would officially sign it. Just for a group to build trails, with no money needed from the city, no permits, etc. Projects like what sidewalk labs was trying to accomplish frequently take 5-10 years+ to get anywhere. Planning in the US is absolute garbage. It is a big part of the reason SF and other large US cities are so expensive. Luckily there are some groups like YIMBY making headway here.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    local nonprofit taking over management of an abandoned bit of city This is why it took a long time. The city was handing over management over part of itself in perpetuity. That needs to be done with care and deliberation. Moreover, there are liability issues related to third parties making alterations to city lands that could result in ruinous liability to the city if citizens get injured on the altered lands and the city didn't fully inspect the alterations. You also have potential drainage and soil issues to deal with, which need to be reviewed by geologists. And that's not getting into environmental reviews if there are at-risk species dwelling in that park. All of those things take time. Programmers always complain about their customers wanting X in a few weeks when it really takes months. So why are programmers always complaining that it takes engineers, geologists, architects, and city planners months to do their jobs? Unlike programming, the stuff these professionals are doing/reviewing can't just be fixed with a patch.
    - 7y ago
owenwil 7y ago
I know the average Torontonian wasn't into this, but I live nearby and was really excited about what it could have been, even though it was fraught with missteps. This area is a concrete wasteland–just car-parks and abandoned lots–that's now going to be portioned off to more giant, glass condo buildings, and while Sidewalk's proposal had problems, it was focused on building something very different, community-oriented, without prioritizing roads. Sidewalk really pushed the technology angle way too hard, and it was a clear overstep– most of it wasn't necessary for any sort of quality of life improvements, but many of the ideas like wooden 'skyscrapers' and de-prioritizing roads were exciting, now lost.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  You can still advocate for such urban redevelopment and community planning without Big Tech behind it.
  - bbeekley 7y ago
    Local HOAs and similar have loud voices against these kind of projects. It might take another big voice (like Sidewalk Labs) to counter. I've tried calling my local reps to support walkable community projects and have been told, nearly verbatim, that if the HOA doesn't like it, they won't be voting for it. Then when big tech offices started moving in, the redevelopment projects finally started too.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - leoh 7y ago
    Sure, but it would have been really interesting to see what Sidewalk could have done here, especially given that it was a blighted area.
  - tyre 7y ago
    You can but change is measured in decades and even then often doesn't happen. Starting "fresh" with a single leading implementer is really how it needs to be done. Take San Francisco. There's the planning board, the planning department, environmental lawsuits, HOAs, abusing "historic landmarks" designations, political showmanship, developers, affordable housing, community meetings, unions, community groups (the cycling people are borderline militant) etc. etc. All of those can bring any change to its knees. And they have, repeatedly. There are good parts of this process and people shouldn't not have input, but I might not oppose a dictator coming in for two years and just having at it.
helen___keller 7y ago
Sidewalk labs has a LOT of good ideas but, even putting aside privacy concerns related to Google ownership, the simple fact is that these good ideas are nearly intractable even when planned by trusted organizations with the best of intentions. Western cities just don't move very fast nowadays, for better and for worse. Maybe this would work better in a country where cities develop faster and with less protest from citizens, but a lot of sidewalk labs best ideas boil down to "more affordable housing and less cars" which are mainly Western problems that derive from a lack of good urban development in the first place.
- AIME15 7y ago
  Works best if you can just steamroll through with the project from the start. PoC small scale (though much larger than 12 acres, which is about 2 Manhattan city blocks), then large scale. Requires feds to be totally on board, have the power to green light everything quickly, and have tons of capital to deploy. Unfortunately for SWL, it's not possible for an Alphabet company to build in Saudi Arabia or China.
  - asdff 7y ago
    They could try in Jakarta, or Singapore, or Japan, or Korea, or hundreds of other places around the world. There are plenty of places with a dearth of capital and labor coupled with a willingness to build modern cities that aren't Saudi Arabia or China.
dirtyid 7y ago
Shame, some genuinely descent ideas in terms of building science and urban design. 11/10 chance the technology elements would have gone the way of the Google Grave yard after 10years, but at least it will leave a set of interesting buildings to draw lessons from. Now nothing. Lots will stay empty or be filled with generic condo developments with questionable longevity. The Google branding and Silicon Valley outreach style didn't help. Simultaneously, the inability for western societies to at least entertain rapid urban experiments is going to backfire. I'm not a big fan of Google, but they have fuck you resources and at least tried to direct it in prosocial designs with the expected cost of privacy. If they can't succeed in Toronto then it doesn't bode well for anyone else.
martythemaniak 7y ago
The backlash against this is pretty ridiculous. Despite the dystopian rhetoric, in reality it was a small project of 12 acres that would have held a few condos. By comparison CityPlace is 44 acres and was also done by one company. So shat do people imagine will happen now? Instead of trying something new and interesting on a small scale, that same land will be given to another generic developer (Concord/Tridel/whatever) and they'll just do more of same. It's not bad, just meh. But honestly, Toronto is a fairly conservative place, so it makes sense.
- saltedonion 7y ago
  I think most people were bothered by the technology integration, and not the urban planning.
- hn_check 7y ago
  For most of its lifecycle it was a 190 acre project, not 12 acres. https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2019/06/21/google-sister-company-pitches-190-acre-toronto-plan-vows-quayside-will-be-economic-windfall-for-city.html https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2019/06/21/google-sister-co... "By comparison CityPlace is 44 acres and was also done by one company" That company owned the land, and via the normal development process they ended up dedicating 8 acres to parks, etc.
- cmdshiftf4 7y ago
  >that same land will be given to another generic developer (Concord/Tridel/whatever) and they'll just do more of same Pre-COVID I'd likely agree with you, however due the new realities of COVID I believe the future of cities has drastically changed. I personally don't believe Toronto will recover from COVID to anywhere near the state it held at the end of 2019 and therefore further expansion/housing/real estate development will likely look drastically different. >Toronto is a fairly conservative place, so it makes sense. Compared with where? And why would you believe that to be the case? My own interpretation, having lived there for years, is that the appetite for further infrastructure development has been strangled from Torontonians via very high costs of living, low wages compared to similar cities and high direct & indirect taxes.
- 7y ago
pupppet 7y ago
TO dodged a bullet. It's Google's nature to lose interest and abandon their products. You think it's bad with software, imagine them building part of your city.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Yeah. Tech companies almost by definition have (and should have) a very short attention span. I wouldn’t trust them with building anything that impacts people’s lives for decades and longer. It’s pretty much guaranteed that they will “pivot” away and jump on something shinier soon.
- leoh 7y ago
  The cynicism here boggles the mind. You can talk blue in the face about all the products they haven't killed that power the world and people will just shake their heads in dismay and walk away muttering about Google Reader.
  - OrangeMango 7y ago
    Categorize Google's products into two buckets - "home grown" and "bought the company". Then it starts to make a lot more sense.
    - Arelius 7y ago
      Hmm, I think I lack the insight to know what this means. Knowing that YouTube and Android were acquisitions, suggests that acquisitions may have more lasting potential, but I don't know enough about gmail, docs, maps, etc to know if any of them were home grown. And looking at the list of acquisitions don't really clarify anything, all of their successful products seem to have some amount of acquisitions involved, but it's unclear to me if they were all sourced from the company, or if they bought companies to bring in talent into an ongoing home grown environment.
  - acdha 7y ago
    The problem is that they have killed or mismanaged (Talk/Hangouts/Duo/Allo/Meet, Nest) enough products without any executive suffering consequences that it’s not unreasonable to ask how committed they are to anything which doesn’t sell ads. It’d be different if there was new management but absent a correction the same pattern seems likely to repeat for anything which isn’t a cure product. For anything involving infrastructure, you need a much longer attention span than has been on display.
Tiktaalik 7y ago
I followed the Google Sidewalk Labs/Toronto development for a while from a place of confusion more than anything else. Never really figured out what problem Sidewalk Labs was trying to solve or how technology was going to make a positive impact on peoples' urban lives. The dominant problems that cities face are really the ancient ones of class conflict, racism and land use, with the core issue being that of the rich making life worse for the poor through politics and exclusionary zoning. You could make cities dramatically better with only 19th century levels of technology (ie. the bicycle). Of course you'd need to have a political culture willing to share land and remove it from exclusive car use. Apparently a tall order. The core things holding NA cities back are entirely political in nature.
ericzawo 7y ago
What a colossal waste of time and money that confirms the obvious to anyone who actually lives in the city — they never really were about improving the downtown core neighbourhood of Quayside, which is ripe for development, and instead wanted to use public land and money for R&D. Good riddance and I hope people who are serious about aiding the public take note in the missteps Sidewalk made time and again, to fail to win the trust of the very city they were trying to become a community member of.
iclelland 7y ago
Discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23103610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23103610 as well
nick_ 7y ago
Good. Toronto doesn't need condo neighbourhoods with gimmicky smart-phone integrations. It needs re-zoning of low density neighbourhoods to allow medium density to be built, thus more uniformly distributing the large and growing population.
- cactus2093 7y ago
  But... condo neighborhoods are exactly that medium density housing. Every city does need more condos in their existing neighborhoods if populations are able to grow. (Unless Covid-19 will reshape the trajectory of urbanization, and major cities will mostly shrink for the next several decades. That actually seems somewhat plausible). But writing off all the sidewalk labs ideas as gimmicky smartphone integrations is pretty disingenuous. There were ideas for greener construction methods using more timber and less concrete, more space optimized for walking and biking instead of cars, interesting communal space arrangements to make spaces that can be heated in winter and converted to outdoor space when the weather is nice. There will always be some haters, but IMO all of these things would be amazing quality of life improvements in the majority of North American cities.
  - sudosysgen 7y ago
    Condos are too expensive in general to fulfill the needs of most cities. In general construction of new condos is focused on the luxury kind of condos Google was undoubtedly looking at, which are absolutely not what cities need right now. We need affordable housing.
    - refurb 7y ago
      Condos are too expensive in general to fulfill the needs of most cities. What the alternative? It's either single family home or condominiums (apartments).
      - sudosysgen 7y ago
        Not necessarily, no. First, condominiums are not apartments, because they are supposed to be sold, and in general cannot be rented. This means that they are built for and priced for people that can afford a 450000$ mortgage plus large condominium fees every month. Which are not the people that need housing right now. There are also duplexes and triplexes, and apartments, as well as housing co-ops and subsidized or state-built housing. These are much better, imo, than condos.
greendave 7y ago
> An independent panel was set up to scrutinise its plans and released a report suggesting some of its ideas were "tech for tech's sake", and potentially unnecessary. I wonder what could have given them that idea. > In his blog, Dan Doctoroff said the firm continued to invest in start-ups "working on everything from robotic furniture to digital electricity". Oh, right.
- Skunkleton 7y ago
  > digital electricity This marketing term piqued my interest. Turns out it is basically PoE. Ok.
- matheusmoreira 7y ago
  > hundreds of sensors collecting data on air quality and the movements of people > It was also told [by the independent panel] that any data it collected from its sensors would have to become a public asset. Wonder if that influenced their decision to end this project.
frereubu 7y ago
Enjoy the HN cynicism from July 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487838
- xhkkffbf 7y ago
  Such nonsense! Everyone loves the idea of pie-in-the-sky dreams.
- 3pt14159 7y ago
  For those of us that live in Toronto and have experienced Palmerston and City Place; Kensington Market and Metro groceries it's so obvious that another set of condos built by a giant corporation are not what we need. You can call me cynical all you like, I'd rather have my city move in the direction of Europe (Vilnius or Paris) than Manhattan or Tokyo. Count me as one of the many happy people that this fell through, even though I'm generally positive about Google's other enterprises.
  - nickff 7y ago
    What is the difference between the four cities you mention? At least three of them have been restricting density, resulting in steadily increasing prices.
    - thinkloop 7y ago
      I would guess skyscrapers vs. 4 stories. West/East Village in Manhattan are generally considered the most pleasant and they are skyscraper-free.
      - ehsankia 7y ago
        What is the source on Sidewalk Labs planning to build skyscrapers? The definition of a skyscraper is over 40 floors, the most I see in any of the mock designs are at most a dozen floors. Sure it's not 4-floor either, but Quayside is fairly small so if they put 4-floor apartments, you'd maybe fit 100 people total.
at_a_remove 7y ago
Does this count for the Google Graveyard? I'm still waiting for that miraculous Google Fiber to come rolling in here. I am wondering precisely how projects get the green light at Google. This kind of thing is just ... it's like someone read some shiny-eyed sci-fi story from the 1950s and decided to Brave New World it into being with metrics without asking if anyone would find it objectionable or even desirable.
- pb7 7y ago
  Google Fiber was a major success that got ousted by the incumbents with never ending lawsuits and resistance. Take your anger out on the monopoly ISPs across the country.
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    This is untrue. Talk to Louisville, where Google put trenches in the roadways, loosely covered them up with foam, letting the average snowplow rip up their network. Fiber used real cities as experiment grounds, and ended up with at least one solution so bad they left the city rather than fix it, and had to settle with the city for all the damages to their roadways. Pictures: https://www.wdrb.com/news/google-fiber-announces-plan-to-fix-exposed-fiber-lines-in/article_fbc678c3-66ef-5d5b-860c-2156bc2f0f0c.html https://www.wdrb.com/news/google-fiber-announces-plan-to-fix... (Ignore the title, Google decided not to repair anything.)
    - ehsankia 7y ago
      > Talk to Louisville, where Google put trenches in the roadways Yes, Louisville was indeed a failure. They tried something different to help speed up laying out lines, and it didn't work. All that is not really relevant to the comment above, which still is true regardless of the issue in Louisville. > Ignore the title, Google decided not to repair anything That's misleading, they decided to instead pay the city for the repairs instead of doing it themselves. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/google-fiber-exits-louisville-pays-city-3-8m-to-clean-up-the-mess-it-left/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/googl...
supernova87a 7y ago
Google doesn't need to invest in the gadgets and electronics in the walls that appear to make cities smarter. That money would be better spent on enabling city governments, elected policymakers, and especially their constituents to be smarter and able to make better choices and designs about city planning, building permits, incentives, taxation, traffic, etc better. The rest will follow. What we need is for people to understand how to choose better for themselves. Not a technology patch.
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  And that's what I thought the original mission of Sidewalk Labs was. They seemed to do more research and less city-building.
- asdff 7y ago
  What do you do when city council members profit off of the status quo? It's not that they are poorly informed, they are well aware of what they are doing and choose to ignore expert advice on city planning decisions. This is the frustration I have with my local government in LA. Most people who live in my city are renters, but most voters in local elections are homeowners so their voice is heard above all else, and council members are landlords or have multiple investment properties. When plans come up for building more density around transit, they overtly say 'this disrupts my view' but really mean 'this will limit the tax-free exponential growth I've enjoyed on my property values.' It's so frustrating, and I'm not sure how it can possibly be changed.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    So you give the tools to watchdog groups, and eventually the council has to adopt them in order to reason about how they're being measured. Then the endless game theory rounds begin...
  - ISL 7y ago
    My belief, from personal experience, is that those who say "this disrupts my view" actually mean it. They've moved early into a place that suits them, and the place itself is changing. My neighborhood is slowly being transformed by increased density -- it is less and less the neighborhood into which we moved. It isn't the change in property value, it is the change in quality of life that matters. Different people measure quality differently. It is that difference that gives rise to friction. The effect spans income brackets -- there are people who mourn the loss of community in impoverished neighborhoods as density increases at the same time that there are those who mourn the loss of trees and single-family dwellings in wealthier neighborhoods. Change is hard.
xozorion 7y ago
The idea of “smart cities” seems great, and a lot of prominent people in tech/VC seem to be on board. Yet at the same time, I just don’t see a realistic way to make this happen (zoning, NIMBYism) unless we’re talking about desolate places that still have cheap real estate, but where nobody wants to live anyways e.g. Montana and the Dakotas.
- asdff 7y ago
  History repeats itself. I'm willing to bet none of these people are aware of the failure of Epcot, the first smart city effort, when they take their families to Disneyworld. There are just too many people in this world who would prefer to say no to change.
annoyingnoob 7y ago
'Smart' is a marketing term that means 'useless BS'.
- OrgNet 7y ago
  It ends up being the case most of the time but of course it could be better.
- new2628 7y ago
  No, it means "collecting data, showing ads".
  - annoyingnoob 7y ago
    Its a euphemism for spying then.
    - new2628 7y ago
      Yes, to anyone paying attention, a product labeled as "smart" has been a non-starter.
      - annoyingnoob 7y ago
        Which is what makes it useless BS.
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
Seems like they are using COVID-19 as an excuse to dump a sinking ship while trying to save face. Real estate value isn't going up, interest rates are going way down. But since people found out what Google was trying to do with Quayside, they've had nothing but opposition. EDIT: Update from CNBC: "Toronto was expected to make its final decision on whether or not to let the project move forward on May 20."
FpUser 7y ago
The last thing we need is super rich foreign corporation building spyware company towns and buying our government.
neom 7y ago
4 years ago I co-founded a smart cities business. Basically a wysiwyg schema/api generator for non-technical municipal users. Idea being if you're procuring data generative "stuff" - municipal workers can define an integration point. In the first few months of starting the company, I met with sidewalk labs at their request. We talked about working together and I said that wouldn't be possible because we wanted to give a data tool to cities that was vendor agnostic. They asked me what would happen if we met in a city, I told them they would probably integrate with our platform so the city could have cross correlation of data with other vendors, they told me it was more likely they would make sure we wouldn't exist.
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
  Do you still exist?!
  - neom 7y ago
    https://municipal.systems/ https://municipal.systems/ :)
    - coopsmgoops 7y ago
      You beat Google!
    - airstrike 7y ago
      Nice! Ever ran summary stats on which geographies have the most amount of data and possibly check for a correlation with developmental indices like HDI or GINI?
    - 1_over_epsilon 7y ago
      Nice! How did you get your data?
    - the-dude-abides 7y ago
      Very cool :)
    - 7y ago
TLightful 7y ago
LOL .... man, google is a joke. I'm half expecting an announcement that they're sunsetting their search business.
drusepth 7y ago
I know there's gonna be a lot of people here that are happy about this for various reasons (anti-Google, anti-"smart cities", etc), but this is really disappointing for me. It's true that the concept of "cities" (or even just "gatherings of people") predates the Internet by thousands of years, and that cities themselves haven't adapted much to the Internet and what it enables in the 40ish years it's been around. This project was inspiring because it embraced what's possible in a new way and enabled many new possibilities that wouldn't otherwise be possible in the typical piecemeal upgrades a city typically sees over time (especially in terms of construction guidelines and sustainability). People hated on Sidewalk Labs since its very inception, but I guess they bit off too much area and got shut down by the locals (and, I guess, covid-19 made a handy exit strategy). Hopefully the next EPCOT equivalent will either be a new city that attracts the kind of people who would want to live there, or at least find a city that would be happy to host their "experiments". FWIW I previously worked at a "smart cities" company that I won't besmirch, but I will say I would rather see a more well-known (and IMO trustworthy) company that has more experience managing and securing data at scale than them. In experimental projects like these, it just takes one "city's data leaks" headline and the whole market chills.
- save_ferris 7y ago
  How much have you read on the exploitative history of company towns[0]? There are some really good reasons why people are skeptical of a private company coming in and trying to reshape the foundation of a community, particularly when that company happens to be Google. Sure, there's something idyllic about the vision of a community driven by technology as a first-class citizen, but let's be real here: Google doesn't exist to make the world a better place, it exists to make money. Full stop. Some of what Google does may happen to improve quality of life for some, but they're also happy to do things like permanently lock people out of their accounts for TOS violations with no recourse, causing major disruptions some of for their users. And then when they've decided that a project is no longer worth pursuing, they just kill it. How would you resolve the scenario where Google builds this smart city and then decides to bail on it? What happens to the people living there? Does the city of Toronto pick up the tab to keep it going? Google's mentality is fundamentally inconsistent with projects that require long-term stability, because not everything makes the kind of money that search ads do. You really want that company dictating how the community should operate? I'll pass. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town#History edit: a word
na85 7y ago
My issue with Sidewalk Labs was the incredibly obvious facade they put up: pretending to care about making cities better when it really was just a thin veneer over finding new ways to expand surveillance capitalism. In fact their "Head of Urban Systems" was quoted[0] as saying that public discussions over data ownership and privacy were "irresponsible". The true agenda is plainly obvious to anyone who cares to look. I'm heartened to see that there is a slow but growing opposition to parasitic business practices such as Sidewalk Labs' proposal and surveillance capitalism in general. Despite Zuckerberg's attempts to convince us that privacy is dead[1], I think people still realize on some base level that privacy, especially offline, is still valuable. [0] https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/09/how-smart-should-a-city-be-toronto-is-finding-out/569116/ https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/09/how-smart-should-a-ci... [1] https://youtu.be/LoWKGBloMsU https://youtu.be/LoWKGBloMsU
- verelo 7y ago
  So this comment is being downvoted a lot, but i've got to say there was a lot of concern from local residents. The largest concern everyone raised with me was that "Google will ditch this as soon as it suits them, leaving us with a mess of 'smart tech' to deal with for decades to come". Well, i hate to say it, maybe they were right? Turns out they ditched it before it even got moving, this might be a blessing in disguise.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - claudeganon 7y ago
    Unfortunately, a lot of people in tech ascribe to a kind of utopian imperialism. It doesn’t matter what people themselves want, it’s about what engineered fantasies can be imposed upon them.
    - na85 7y ago
      Yeah I dunno, I'm basically showering in downvotes right now but it seems to be just Silicon Valley types who are upset that Torontonians didn't welcome their dystopia with fanfare and adulation.
saeranv 7y ago
I'll add another perspective to this, beyond the privacy/data ownership debate. The global building stock currently supplies roughly 40% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions; and we are in the midst of the largest growth of urbanism in human history concentrated in neighborhoods least equipped to deal with it. I've worked in the architecture/urban design sector for 6+ years (half as an architect, half as a researcher), and one of the most critical problems we have to address is the way we are attempting to optimize the building energy/embodied carbon use of buildings. It's a messy multivariable optimization problem, tied to time-consuming, complex simulation engines, that the industry is forced to try and solve as single-variable optimization with various hacks and rule of thumbs. I am very biased on this topic since I work in this area, but I feel this is fundamentally a ML/AI problem and I had/have some hope that Sidewalk labs could add the resources and brainpower to move the needle further, faster with the existing SOTA. Personally, I felt this provided the project with a very straightforward, explicit ethical utility, so as a Torontonian I've never been against it. I also was excited about the prospect of building up a community of building science-focused ML/AI researchers tackling a currently underserved existential threat. I know this isn't the end of Sidewalk Labs, but I feel like this is a huge loss for us.
jungletime 7y ago
Thats a shame. I always thought Google would do a double plus good job of it. Who wouldn't want a listening device in their toilet. Just skip the town, and make a better smarter toilet Google. Control the world, starting with the throne. Thats where many are already watching youtube from anyway now. Take my temperature and test me for corona, update my social score and unlock the e-lock to leave my apartment. The Future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcUAG6t5aN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcUAG6t5aN8
rkagerer 7y ago
As a former Toronto resident I'm glad about this. In my eyes, Google lacks the track record or level of trust appropriate to make them a good fit for the project. They fall short on basics like privacy, user experience and commitment. Toronto has a thriving tech community; I'd love to see some of the less-controversial ideas pioneered on a smaller scale by local small businesses who will eat their own dogfood.
NN88 7y ago
Google has a pattern of pull out of high profile announcements. Its striking.
g8oz 7y ago
Google HQ never seemed to have to much to do with this. It was rather their subsidiary Sidewalk Labs that was going to make it happen. They always struck me as long on "vision" and short on execution.
- mrtron 7y ago
  I am a very optimistic individual, and have considered this project as vapourware since day one. All vision and posturing, and no execution over years.
neilv 7y ago
"Ann Cavoukian, former Ontario privacy commissioner, resigns from Sidewalk Labs", 2018-10-21. https://globalnews.ca/news/4579265/ann-cavoukian-resigns-sidewalk-labs/ https://globalnews.ca/news/4579265/ann-cavoukian-resigns-sid... "Google's 'Smart City of Surveillance' Faces New Resistance in Toronto", 2018-11-13. https://theintercept.com/2018/11/13/google-quayside-toronto-smart-city/ https://theintercept.com/2018/11/13/google-quayside-toronto-...
OJFord 7y ago
Isn't it ironic to blame the coronavirus? I imagine an alternate timeline in which it's a success story for the already-built 'smart city', with the masses of data it offers aiding crisis management in <ways>.
karmakaze 7y ago
The promised green-space would have been awesome. In all, I'm thrilled that Toronto won't be the first guinea pig testing out a privacy-flexible smart city. If it works well in other places and everyone's happy, we can get the new improved one with the quirks fixed.
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34679 7y ago
I'm all for smart cities, just not ones built by advertising companies.
iamleppert 7y ago
No doubt this was likely guided by some misguided desire to make everything look and function like one of their Google campuses. Google is one of the most dehumanizing companies in the entire history of civilization.
dade_ 7y ago
I consider it part of my neighbourhood. I am glad this is over. There are so many issues, but essentially the city is in over its head on this entire concept from the beginning. Further, I think Waterfront Toronto overstepped it's mandate. At the time, Google love was high, and politicians were enamoured with the attention and jumped into bed without even a thought. In the end, Google is an ad tech company, so no thank you. The scorpion and the frog...
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
"The city of the future" has been a passion of mine for several years now. I even co-founded a company driven by the desire to create one eventually (the company then moved to a cool product to digitize titles, US only for now; and secured seed funding long after I left). I always had a problem with this initiative by Google, and others in general. These things don't scale. You want to build the city of the future? It should be 10x more affordable, 10x less polluting, and be built 10x faster than traditional cities. It should find inspiration from Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, Leon Krier, etc. Sometimes I still dream about doing something about it. This blog post somehow summarizes where this desire comes from: "unf*ck" [0]. It's such a massive problem though. I keep thinking that I don't have the chops to be able to do anything about it. [0]: https://medium.com/the-naked-founder/unfuck-710afbaa4092 https://medium.com/the-naked-founder/unfuck-710afbaa4092
kgin 7y ago
They will find a city for the next go-around that has more to gain and less nimby-ism. A Pittsburgh or a Detroit.
iamgopal 7y ago
Could have tried in India...
reagular 7y ago
"Smart city" sound like a Orwellian dystopia
louislaccanore 7y ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52572362 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52572362
calvinbhai 7y ago
This should be next in the killedbygoogle.com entries

325 points by colinprince 7y ago

cal5k 7y ago

People are cheering, but as a broader statement this is a small sample of how difficult it is to do business in Canada.

na85 7y ago
>how difficult it is to do business in Canada. Or, put differently, how difficult it is to exploit the public's privacy for financial gain in Canada? I'm Canadian, and I'm glad that Google didn't get carte blanche to come in and build their surveillance dystopia.
- cal5k 7y ago
  I'm not even a fan of that project in particular, but this is a common problem in Canada - the goalpost constantly shifts, the process becomes a political hot potato, and the foreign investor eventually just says "fuck this" and pulls out of the market. It's happened in oil & gas, banking, telecommunications, retail, and a whole host of other sectors.
  - 52-6F-62 7y ago
    Outside of retail, all of the rest of those have real national security implications. And if by retail you're referring to burger joints or Target, I'm afraid that's just market effect.
    - alteria 7y ago
      Plus Target shot themselves in the foot with poor SAP integration among other blunders.
    - cal5k 7y ago
      There's a big difference between considering national security issues and bungling foreign direct investment completely (except for real estate). It's also no excuse for the protection of oligopolies that don't act in the best interests of Canadians.
      - 52-6F-62 7y ago
        In that case I'll take the likely unpopular opinion that: it's better our assholes than someone else's. And foreign direct investment in energy, food supplies, telecommunications absolutely has national security implications. I would be loathe to have a foreign entity become the major stateholder in our telecommunications infrastructure. I don't harbour any deep love of the Rogers family, but they are solidly Canadian at least.
  - FpUser 7y ago
    We already have foreign investors taking a lease of the section hwy 407 in Toronto and wrestling ministry of transportation to not extend license plates of people who did not pay fee. The reason included not sending bills, false billings, denying plates after official bankruptcy etc. And those ever increasing tolls. Thank you very much for your business and corruption.
  - na85 7y ago
    I'm not going to disagree that our governments tend to play political hot potato. You can downvote all you like but I don't feel any sympathy for abusive "investors" like Big Tech or Big Oil who all too often socialize the risks but privatize the profits. See for example Amazon trying to get billions in tax breaks for HQ2. See also the Keystone XL or Northern Gateway projects. The oil companies have excellent propaganda machines operating tirelessly to convince Albertans that the rest of the country is being unreasonable when they demand environmental controls and assurances. Not all investment is beneficial to the citizenry. I'd much rather my government err towards overcautious than overpermissive.
  - AlanYx 7y ago
    There's probably a lot more merit to your comment than most people realize. Absent from most of the media reports I've read today is that Sidewalk Labs was facing yet another approval decision on the project from Waterfront Toronto in less than two weeks (May 20, extended from an earlier March 31 deadline). My guess is that they heard through the grapevine that the decision was going to be highly conditional, and that the project was going to be saddled with yet another set of hoops to jump through, so Sidewalk Labs just decided to bail. It's basically exactly the same pattern we saw in late February with the Teck Resources decision. The company bailed literally days before the deadline for approval.
    - cal5k 7y ago
      Indeed. Everyone is spouting populist talking points (yeah! screw foreign money!) without explaining how Canada is going to fix its anemic productivity growth and compete globally, particularly as we're actively destroying our own resource industries.
FpUser 7y ago
Depends on what kind of business. "We the people" do not exist to feed corporations (at least in theory). As a business it is your own private headache.
thinkloop 7y ago
The article says the issue is Corona not Canada?
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  It's not, CNBC says "Toronto was expected to make its final decision on whether or not to let the project move forward on May 20." COVID has nothing to do with it.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  Whether the final blow was due to COVID-19 or if it was just an excuse, it doesn't change the fact that it's been an uphill battle for over 3 years with very little progress.
empath75 7y ago
Not all business is good business.
kspacewalk2 7y ago
True, it's difficult to slash and burn through the political process with half-baked techie ideas and opaque data collection practices. Not to mention ones requiring huge taxpayer commitments for a project that is way beyond the bleeding edge (at best) or a priori only partially achievable "but let's try it and see" (at worst). Bureaucracy and elaborate processes slow things down. Every so often, that's a great thing.

AIME15 7y ago

The scope-limiting to 12 acres announced on October 31 was perceived as a win for the regulators, giving them more control over the project over time. At that point the project timeline became untenable for SWL's plans but couldn't back out due to PR concerns for Alphabet. The pandemic is a convenient excuse for the company to abandon the Quayside project. For the last three years SWL has bent over backwards to be transparent about its plans and address community concerns. Plans have repeatedly been scaled down to the point where it makes absolutely no financial sense to move forward. The calculation to bet the company on Toronto was made before this recent backlash against Big Tech. I suspect it would have been made differently had the company started a year later.

ericzawo 7y ago
Bent over backwards? I don't think we were attending the same public hearings about Sidewalk Labs. I went to three of them, and do not - at all - share that view. In fact, they deliberately obfuscated many key points around their continued goal-posting moving of public-private terms, which has been well documented[1]. https://medium.com/@biancawylie/debrief-on-sidewalk-toronto-public-meeting-3-a-master-class-in-gaslighting-and-arrogance-c1c5dd918c16 https://medium.com/@biancawylie/debrief-on-sidewalk-toronto-...
eddyionescu 7y ago
The 12-acres (just Quayside) was what Toronto's RFP asked for in the first place and Sidewalk Labs won out for (https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2017/10/17/google-firm-wins-competition-to-build-high-tech-quayside-neighbourhood-in-toronto.html https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2017/10/17/google-fir...), which now turns out to have not been financially viable for them given the high cost of their R&D (including those mass-timber buildings which aren't even in Ontario's building code yet). Sidewalk Lab's wider plans were really an unsolicited proposal that no one asked for, so it's unfair to blame "regulators" or the tech backlash.
- AIME15 7y ago
  Agreed that the responsibility was 100% on SWL to build consensus among the community and decision makers in Waterfront Toronto and Toronto's government entities. I'm just saying that this became a lot tougher due to the change in public opinion on big tech.

oiasdjfoiasd 7y ago

And collectively, Torontonians breath a sigh relief

lostgame 7y ago

‘I’ve met thousands of Torontonians from all over the city, excited by the possibility of making urban life better for everyone.’ This is simply not true, in my experience as a Torontonian. The overall opinion of this project was incredibly low, from at least dozens of people it’s come up with - at work, at events, with friends - if anything, there’ll be a lot of people happy to hear this. There were even questions as to why our tax dollars would even support this when we’ve got issues like homelessness, etc. As Forbes said, it was ‘tech for tech’s sake’. Forbes: ‘In June of 2019, Sidewalk’s master plan was released, eliciting a barrage of controversy around privacy and participation. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association initiated a lawsuit against local, provincial and federal government over data privacy concerns. Vice called the proposal a “democracy grenade“.‘ https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellistalton/2019/09/26/why-sidewalk-labs-toronto-plan-is-flawed/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellistalton/2019/09/26/why-side... Edit: I’m shocked at the number of downvotes for similar comments - I guess backing up your points counts. If you don’t think this closure is good for Toronto, especially if you live here, I’d like to know why.

annapurna 7y ago
Couldn't agree more as a Torontonian. It didn't help that they conducted most of the discussions in bad faith with the whole "trust us with your data" approach when these were geniune concerns due to the amount of oversight and control they were provided.
- brutus1213 7y ago
  I agree that this was a train wreck in slow motion. What is sad is I didn't see any significant open engagement with GTA's existing tech scene (did hear a lot of talk of it though). Maybe the VCs club had access but as a technologist, I certainly didn't. If this was happening in SF, there would be grass roots meetups all over the place, and a more serious focus on action rather than planning.
  - dirtyid 7y ago
    They did a series of town halls, funded a bunch of urban / tech meetups. Pretty proactive for a period. The townhalls were very... SF style, it didn't mesh with the local culture well. But I don't think they did a lot of work either, there's a pretty lackluster showroom and they put out some very middling concept sketches - not proper renders like you see in most smart city projects. Didn't seem like they were taking things seriously. A lot of words. Maybe too many. At least not enough right ones.

Wacko_dacko 7y ago

This is great news. As a Torontonian I found their plan to be nothing more than a money grab on public space and the public in general. They also massively overreached in all their applications to the city.

stanski 7y ago
Just a big tech company hyping up a project they were never really up to. Hopefully the city didn't spend a fortune on this. The fizzling out will come to no one's surprise.
leoh 7y ago
> I found their plan to be nothing more than a money grab on public space and the public in general You're going to get a big real estate developer doing it instead.
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  Maybe. Their plan would have implied the eradication of the properties of much of the film industry in the city who would have had to move to likely more expensive locations. Frankly, I was surprised they were cleared to build residences in that area (or were they?) When I worked in the film industry down on Commissioners—just a short bit west of Cherry St—there was still phosphorus seeping up through the ground on occasion... AFAIU Waterfront Toronto has rule over the area and they've done some pretty great work with the Harbourfront area, so I would put faith in them to do a good job with the region. I think their major roadblock (prior to the pandemic) is funding. https://www.waterfrontoronto.ca/nbe/portal/waterfront/Home/waterfronthome/projects https://www.waterfrontoronto.ca/nbe/portal/waterfront/Home/w... https://portlandsto.ca/project-details/ https://portlandsto.ca/project-details/

donpdonp 7y ago

$50M and two years later - where are the conclusions? The results? A blog post of what happened? Two years seems like enough time to say we tried some amazing things and this is how it did or did not work.

reportingsjr 7y ago
Two years is nothing when it comes with planning and development in the US, unfortunately. A little anecdote, here in Cincinnati I was peripherally involved with a local nonprofit taking over management of an abandoned bit of city part to build new multi-use trails. It took 20 years for the park board to even listen, then once an agreement was reached it took another /year and a half/ to get the paperwork to the point where they would officially sign it. Just for a group to build trails, with no money needed from the city, no permits, etc. Projects like what sidewalk labs was trying to accomplish frequently take 5-10 years+ to get anywhere. Planning in the US is absolute garbage. It is a big part of the reason SF and other large US cities are so expensive. Luckily there are some groups like YIMBY making headway here.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  local nonprofit taking over management of an abandoned bit of city This is why it took a long time. The city was handing over management over part of itself in perpetuity. That needs to be done with care and deliberation. Moreover, there are liability issues related to third parties making alterations to city lands that could result in ruinous liability to the city if citizens get injured on the altered lands and the city didn't fully inspect the alterations. You also have potential drainage and soil issues to deal with, which need to be reviewed by geologists. And that's not getting into environmental reviews if there are at-risk species dwelling in that park. All of those things take time. Programmers always complain about their customers wanting X in a few weeks when it really takes months. So why are programmers always complaining that it takes engineers, geologists, architects, and city planners months to do their jobs? Unlike programming, the stuff these professionals are doing/reviewing can't just be fixed with a patch.
  - 7y ago

owenwil 7y ago

I know the average Torontonian wasn't into this, but I live nearby and was really excited about what it could have been, even though it was fraught with missteps. This area is a concrete wasteland–just car-parks and abandoned lots–that's now going to be portioned off to more giant, glass condo buildings, and while Sidewalk's proposal had problems, it was focused on building something very different, community-oriented, without prioritizing roads. Sidewalk really pushed the technology angle way too hard, and it was a clear overstep– most of it wasn't necessary for any sort of quality of life improvements, but many of the ideas like wooden 'skyscrapers' and de-prioritizing roads were exciting, now lost.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
You can still advocate for such urban redevelopment and community planning without Big Tech behind it.
- bbeekley 7y ago
  Local HOAs and similar have loud voices against these kind of projects. It might take another big voice (like Sidewalk Labs) to counter. I've tried calling my local reps to support walkable community projects and have been told, nearly verbatim, that if the HOA doesn't like it, they won't be voting for it. Then when big tech offices started moving in, the redevelopment projects finally started too.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- leoh 7y ago
  Sure, but it would have been really interesting to see what Sidewalk could have done here, especially given that it was a blighted area.
- tyre 7y ago
  You can but change is measured in decades and even then often doesn't happen. Starting "fresh" with a single leading implementer is really how it needs to be done. Take San Francisco. There's the planning board, the planning department, environmental lawsuits, HOAs, abusing "historic landmarks" designations, political showmanship, developers, affordable housing, community meetings, unions, community groups (the cycling people are borderline militant) etc. etc. All of those can bring any change to its knees. And they have, repeatedly. There are good parts of this process and people shouldn't not have input, but I might not oppose a dictator coming in for two years and just having at it.

helen___keller 7y ago

Sidewalk labs has a LOT of good ideas but, even putting aside privacy concerns related to Google ownership, the simple fact is that these good ideas are nearly intractable even when planned by trusted organizations with the best of intentions. Western cities just don't move very fast nowadays, for better and for worse. Maybe this would work better in a country where cities develop faster and with less protest from citizens, but a lot of sidewalk labs best ideas boil down to "more affordable housing and less cars" which are mainly Western problems that derive from a lack of good urban development in the first place.

AIME15 7y ago
Works best if you can just steamroll through with the project from the start. PoC small scale (though much larger than 12 acres, which is about 2 Manhattan city blocks), then large scale. Requires feds to be totally on board, have the power to green light everything quickly, and have tons of capital to deploy. Unfortunately for SWL, it's not possible for an Alphabet company to build in Saudi Arabia or China.
- asdff 7y ago
  They could try in Jakarta, or Singapore, or Japan, or Korea, or hundreds of other places around the world. There are plenty of places with a dearth of capital and labor coupled with a willingness to build modern cities that aren't Saudi Arabia or China.

dirtyid 7y ago

Shame, some genuinely descent ideas in terms of building science and urban design. 11/10 chance the technology elements would have gone the way of the Google Grave yard after 10years, but at least it will leave a set of interesting buildings to draw lessons from. Now nothing. Lots will stay empty or be filled with generic condo developments with questionable longevity. The Google branding and Silicon Valley outreach style didn't help. Simultaneously, the inability for western societies to at least entertain rapid urban experiments is going to backfire. I'm not a big fan of Google, but they have fuck you resources and at least tried to direct it in prosocial designs with the expected cost of privacy. If they can't succeed in Toronto then it doesn't bode well for anyone else.

martythemaniak 7y ago

The backlash against this is pretty ridiculous. Despite the dystopian rhetoric, in reality it was a small project of 12 acres that would have held a few condos. By comparison CityPlace is 44 acres and was also done by one company. So shat do people imagine will happen now? Instead of trying something new and interesting on a small scale, that same land will be given to another generic developer (Concord/Tridel/whatever) and they'll just do more of same. It's not bad, just meh. But honestly, Toronto is a fairly conservative place, so it makes sense.

saltedonion 7y ago
I think most people were bothered by the technology integration, and not the urban planning.
hn_check 7y ago
For most of its lifecycle it was a 190 acre project, not 12 acres. https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2019/06/21/google-sister-company-pitches-190-acre-toronto-plan-vows-quayside-will-be-economic-windfall-for-city.html https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2019/06/21/google-sister-co... "By comparison CityPlace is 44 acres and was also done by one company" That company owned the land, and via the normal development process they ended up dedicating 8 acres to parks, etc.
cmdshiftf4 7y ago
>that same land will be given to another generic developer (Concord/Tridel/whatever) and they'll just do more of same Pre-COVID I'd likely agree with you, however due the new realities of COVID I believe the future of cities has drastically changed. I personally don't believe Toronto will recover from COVID to anywhere near the state it held at the end of 2019 and therefore further expansion/housing/real estate development will likely look drastically different. >Toronto is a fairly conservative place, so it makes sense. Compared with where? And why would you believe that to be the case? My own interpretation, having lived there for years, is that the appetite for further infrastructure development has been strangled from Torontonians via very high costs of living, low wages compared to similar cities and high direct & indirect taxes.
7y ago

pupppet 7y ago

TO dodged a bullet. It's Google's nature to lose interest and abandon their products. You think it's bad with software, imagine them building part of your city.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
Yeah. Tech companies almost by definition have (and should have) a very short attention span. I wouldn’t trust them with building anything that impacts people’s lives for decades and longer. It’s pretty much guaranteed that they will “pivot” away and jump on something shinier soon.
leoh 7y ago
The cynicism here boggles the mind. You can talk blue in the face about all the products they haven't killed that power the world and people will just shake their heads in dismay and walk away muttering about Google Reader.
- OrangeMango 7y ago
  Categorize Google's products into two buckets - "home grown" and "bought the company". Then it starts to make a lot more sense.
  - Arelius 7y ago
    Hmm, I think I lack the insight to know what this means. Knowing that YouTube and Android were acquisitions, suggests that acquisitions may have more lasting potential, but I don't know enough about gmail, docs, maps, etc to know if any of them were home grown. And looking at the list of acquisitions don't really clarify anything, all of their successful products seem to have some amount of acquisitions involved, but it's unclear to me if they were all sourced from the company, or if they bought companies to bring in talent into an ongoing home grown environment.
- acdha 7y ago
  The problem is that they have killed or mismanaged (Talk/Hangouts/Duo/Allo/Meet, Nest) enough products without any executive suffering consequences that it’s not unreasonable to ask how committed they are to anything which doesn’t sell ads. It’d be different if there was new management but absent a correction the same pattern seems likely to repeat for anything which isn’t a cure product. For anything involving infrastructure, you need a much longer attention span than has been on display.

Tiktaalik 7y ago

I followed the Google Sidewalk Labs/Toronto development for a while from a place of confusion more than anything else. Never really figured out what problem Sidewalk Labs was trying to solve or how technology was going to make a positive impact on peoples' urban lives. The dominant problems that cities face are really the ancient ones of class conflict, racism and land use, with the core issue being that of the rich making life worse for the poor through politics and exclusionary zoning. You could make cities dramatically better with only 19th century levels of technology (ie. the bicycle). Of course you'd need to have a political culture willing to share land and remove it from exclusive car use. Apparently a tall order. The core things holding NA cities back are entirely political in nature.

ericzawo 7y ago

What a colossal waste of time and money that confirms the obvious to anyone who actually lives in the city — they never really were about improving the downtown core neighbourhood of Quayside, which is ripe for development, and instead wanted to use public land and money for R&D. Good riddance and I hope people who are serious about aiding the public take note in the missteps Sidewalk made time and again, to fail to win the trust of the very city they were trying to become a community member of.

iclelland 7y ago

Discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23103610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23103610 as well

nick_ 7y ago

Good. Toronto doesn't need condo neighbourhoods with gimmicky smart-phone integrations. It needs re-zoning of low density neighbourhoods to allow medium density to be built, thus more uniformly distributing the large and growing population.

cactus2093 7y ago
But... condo neighborhoods are exactly that medium density housing. Every city does need more condos in their existing neighborhoods if populations are able to grow. (Unless Covid-19 will reshape the trajectory of urbanization, and major cities will mostly shrink for the next several decades. That actually seems somewhat plausible). But writing off all the sidewalk labs ideas as gimmicky smartphone integrations is pretty disingenuous. There were ideas for greener construction methods using more timber and less concrete, more space optimized for walking and biking instead of cars, interesting communal space arrangements to make spaces that can be heated in winter and converted to outdoor space when the weather is nice. There will always be some haters, but IMO all of these things would be amazing quality of life improvements in the majority of North American cities.
- sudosysgen 7y ago
  Condos are too expensive in general to fulfill the needs of most cities. In general construction of new condos is focused on the luxury kind of condos Google was undoubtedly looking at, which are absolutely not what cities need right now. We need affordable housing.
  - refurb 7y ago
    Condos are too expensive in general to fulfill the needs of most cities. What the alternative? It's either single family home or condominiums (apartments).
    - sudosysgen 7y ago
      Not necessarily, no. First, condominiums are not apartments, because they are supposed to be sold, and in general cannot be rented. This means that they are built for and priced for people that can afford a 450000$ mortgage plus large condominium fees every month. Which are not the people that need housing right now. There are also duplexes and triplexes, and apartments, as well as housing co-ops and subsidized or state-built housing. These are much better, imo, than condos.

greendave 7y ago

> An independent panel was set up to scrutinise its plans and released a report suggesting some of its ideas were "tech for tech's sake", and potentially unnecessary. I wonder what could have given them that idea. > In his blog, Dan Doctoroff said the firm continued to invest in start-ups "working on everything from robotic furniture to digital electricity". Oh, right.

Skunkleton 7y ago
> digital electricity This marketing term piqued my interest. Turns out it is basically PoE. Ok.
matheusmoreira 7y ago
> hundreds of sensors collecting data on air quality and the movements of people > It was also told [by the independent panel] that any data it collected from its sensors would have to become a public asset. Wonder if that influenced their decision to end this project.

frereubu 7y ago

Enjoy the HN cynicism from July 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487838

xhkkffbf 7y ago
Such nonsense! Everyone loves the idea of pie-in-the-sky dreams.
3pt14159 7y ago
For those of us that live in Toronto and have experienced Palmerston and City Place; Kensington Market and Metro groceries it's so obvious that another set of condos built by a giant corporation are not what we need. You can call me cynical all you like, I'd rather have my city move in the direction of Europe (Vilnius or Paris) than Manhattan or Tokyo. Count me as one of the many happy people that this fell through, even though I'm generally positive about Google's other enterprises.
- nickff 7y ago
  What is the difference between the four cities you mention? At least three of them have been restricting density, resulting in steadily increasing prices.
  - thinkloop 7y ago
    I would guess skyscrapers vs. 4 stories. West/East Village in Manhattan are generally considered the most pleasant and they are skyscraper-free.
    - ehsankia 7y ago
      What is the source on Sidewalk Labs planning to build skyscrapers? The definition of a skyscraper is over 40 floors, the most I see in any of the mock designs are at most a dozen floors. Sure it's not 4-floor either, but Quayside is fairly small so if they put 4-floor apartments, you'd maybe fit 100 people total.

at_a_remove 7y ago

Does this count for the Google Graveyard? I'm still waiting for that miraculous Google Fiber to come rolling in here. I am wondering precisely how projects get the green light at Google. This kind of thing is just ... it's like someone read some shiny-eyed sci-fi story from the 1950s and decided to Brave New World it into being with metrics without asking if anyone would find it objectionable or even desirable.

pb7 7y ago
Google Fiber was a major success that got ousted by the incumbents with never ending lawsuits and resistance. Take your anger out on the monopoly ISPs across the country.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  This is untrue. Talk to Louisville, where Google put trenches in the roadways, loosely covered them up with foam, letting the average snowplow rip up their network. Fiber used real cities as experiment grounds, and ended up with at least one solution so bad they left the city rather than fix it, and had to settle with the city for all the damages to their roadways. Pictures: https://www.wdrb.com/news/google-fiber-announces-plan-to-fix-exposed-fiber-lines-in/article_fbc678c3-66ef-5d5b-860c-2156bc2f0f0c.html https://www.wdrb.com/news/google-fiber-announces-plan-to-fix... (Ignore the title, Google decided not to repair anything.)
  - ehsankia 7y ago
    > Talk to Louisville, where Google put trenches in the roadways Yes, Louisville was indeed a failure. They tried something different to help speed up laying out lines, and it didn't work. All that is not really relevant to the comment above, which still is true regardless of the issue in Louisville. > Ignore the title, Google decided not to repair anything That's misleading, they decided to instead pay the city for the repairs instead of doing it themselves. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/google-fiber-exits-louisville-pays-city-3-8m-to-clean-up-the-mess-it-left/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/googl...

supernova87a 7y ago

Google doesn't need to invest in the gadgets and electronics in the walls that appear to make cities smarter. That money would be better spent on enabling city governments, elected policymakers, and especially their constituents to be smarter and able to make better choices and designs about city planning, building permits, incentives, taxation, traffic, etc better. The rest will follow. What we need is for people to understand how to choose better for themselves. Not a technology patch.

52-6F-62 7y ago
And that's what I thought the original mission of Sidewalk Labs was. They seemed to do more research and less city-building.
asdff 7y ago
What do you do when city council members profit off of the status quo? It's not that they are poorly informed, they are well aware of what they are doing and choose to ignore expert advice on city planning decisions. This is the frustration I have with my local government in LA. Most people who live in my city are renters, but most voters in local elections are homeowners so their voice is heard above all else, and council members are landlords or have multiple investment properties. When plans come up for building more density around transit, they overtly say 'this disrupts my view' but really mean 'this will limit the tax-free exponential growth I've enjoyed on my property values.' It's so frustrating, and I'm not sure how it can possibly be changed.
- hinkley 7y ago
  So you give the tools to watchdog groups, and eventually the council has to adopt them in order to reason about how they're being measured. Then the endless game theory rounds begin...
- ISL 7y ago
  My belief, from personal experience, is that those who say "this disrupts my view" actually mean it. They've moved early into a place that suits them, and the place itself is changing. My neighborhood is slowly being transformed by increased density -- it is less and less the neighborhood into which we moved. It isn't the change in property value, it is the change in quality of life that matters. Different people measure quality differently. It is that difference that gives rise to friction. The effect spans income brackets -- there are people who mourn the loss of community in impoverished neighborhoods as density increases at the same time that there are those who mourn the loss of trees and single-family dwellings in wealthier neighborhoods. Change is hard.

xozorion 7y ago

The idea of “smart cities” seems great, and a lot of prominent people in tech/VC seem to be on board. Yet at the same time, I just don’t see a realistic way to make this happen (zoning, NIMBYism) unless we’re talking about desolate places that still have cheap real estate, but where nobody wants to live anyways e.g. Montana and the Dakotas.

asdff 7y ago
History repeats itself. I'm willing to bet none of these people are aware of the failure of Epcot, the first smart city effort, when they take their families to Disneyworld. There are just too many people in this world who would prefer to say no to change.

annoyingnoob 7y ago

'Smart' is a marketing term that means 'useless BS'.

OrgNet 7y ago
It ends up being the case most of the time but of course it could be better.
new2628 7y ago
No, it means "collecting data, showing ads".
- annoyingnoob 7y ago
  Its a euphemism for spying then.
  - new2628 7y ago
    Yes, to anyone paying attention, a product labeled as "smart" has been a non-starter.
    - annoyingnoob 7y ago
      Which is what makes it useless BS.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

Seems like they are using COVID-19 as an excuse to dump a sinking ship while trying to save face. Real estate value isn't going up, interest rates are going way down. But since people found out what Google was trying to do with Quayside, they've had nothing but opposition. EDIT: Update from CNBC: "Toronto was expected to make its final decision on whether or not to let the project move forward on May 20."

FpUser 7y ago

The last thing we need is super rich foreign corporation building spyware company towns and buying our government.

neom 7y ago

4 years ago I co-founded a smart cities business. Basically a wysiwyg schema/api generator for non-technical municipal users. Idea being if you're procuring data generative "stuff" - municipal workers can define an integration point. In the first few months of starting the company, I met with sidewalk labs at their request. We talked about working together and I said that wouldn't be possible because we wanted to give a data tool to cities that was vendor agnostic. They asked me what would happen if we met in a city, I told them they would probably integrate with our platform so the city could have cross correlation of data with other vendors, they told me it was more likely they would make sure we wouldn't exist.

onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
Do you still exist?!
- neom 7y ago
  https://municipal.systems/ https://municipal.systems/ :)
  - coopsmgoops 7y ago
    You beat Google!
  - airstrike 7y ago
    Nice! Ever ran summary stats on which geographies have the most amount of data and possibly check for a correlation with developmental indices like HDI or GINI?
  - 1_over_epsilon 7y ago
    Nice! How did you get your data?
  - the-dude-abides 7y ago
    Very cool :)
  - 7y ago

TLightful 7y ago

LOL .... man, google is a joke. I'm half expecting an announcement that they're sunsetting their search business.

drusepth 7y ago

I know there's gonna be a lot of people here that are happy about this for various reasons (anti-Google, anti-"smart cities", etc), but this is really disappointing for me. It's true that the concept of "cities" (or even just "gatherings of people") predates the Internet by thousands of years, and that cities themselves haven't adapted much to the Internet and what it enables in the 40ish years it's been around. This project was inspiring because it embraced what's possible in a new way and enabled many new possibilities that wouldn't otherwise be possible in the typical piecemeal upgrades a city typically sees over time (especially in terms of construction guidelines and sustainability). People hated on Sidewalk Labs since its very inception, but I guess they bit off too much area and got shut down by the locals (and, I guess, covid-19 made a handy exit strategy). Hopefully the next EPCOT equivalent will either be a new city that attracts the kind of people who would want to live there, or at least find a city that would be happy to host their "experiments". FWIW I previously worked at a "smart cities" company that I won't besmirch, but I will say I would rather see a more well-known (and IMO trustworthy) company that has more experience managing and securing data at scale than them. In experimental projects like these, it just takes one "city's data leaks" headline and the whole market chills.

save_ferris 7y ago
How much have you read on the exploitative history of company towns[0]? There are some really good reasons why people are skeptical of a private company coming in and trying to reshape the foundation of a community, particularly when that company happens to be Google. Sure, there's something idyllic about the vision of a community driven by technology as a first-class citizen, but let's be real here: Google doesn't exist to make the world a better place, it exists to make money. Full stop. Some of what Google does may happen to improve quality of life for some, but they're also happy to do things like permanently lock people out of their accounts for TOS violations with no recourse, causing major disruptions some of for their users. And then when they've decided that a project is no longer worth pursuing, they just kill it. How would you resolve the scenario where Google builds this smart city and then decides to bail on it? What happens to the people living there? Does the city of Toronto pick up the tab to keep it going? Google's mentality is fundamentally inconsistent with projects that require long-term stability, because not everything makes the kind of money that search ads do. You really want that company dictating how the community should operate? I'll pass. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town#History edit: a word

na85 7y ago

My issue with Sidewalk Labs was the incredibly obvious facade they put up: pretending to care about making cities better when it really was just a thin veneer over finding new ways to expand surveillance capitalism. In fact their "Head of Urban Systems" was quoted[0] as saying that public discussions over data ownership and privacy were "irresponsible". The true agenda is plainly obvious to anyone who cares to look. I'm heartened to see that there is a slow but growing opposition to parasitic business practices such as Sidewalk Labs' proposal and surveillance capitalism in general. Despite Zuckerberg's attempts to convince us that privacy is dead[1], I think people still realize on some base level that privacy, especially offline, is still valuable. [0] https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/09/how-smart-should-a-city-be-toronto-is-finding-out/569116/ https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/09/how-smart-should-a-ci... [1] https://youtu.be/LoWKGBloMsU https://youtu.be/LoWKGBloMsU

verelo 7y ago
So this comment is being downvoted a lot, but i've got to say there was a lot of concern from local residents. The largest concern everyone raised with me was that "Google will ditch this as soon as it suits them, leaving us with a mess of 'smart tech' to deal with for decades to come". Well, i hate to say it, maybe they were right? Turns out they ditched it before it even got moving, this might be a blessing in disguise.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- claudeganon 7y ago
  Unfortunately, a lot of people in tech ascribe to a kind of utopian imperialism. It doesn’t matter what people themselves want, it’s about what engineered fantasies can be imposed upon them.
  - na85 7y ago
    Yeah I dunno, I'm basically showering in downvotes right now but it seems to be just Silicon Valley types who are upset that Torontonians didn't welcome their dystopia with fanfare and adulation.

saeranv 7y ago

I'll add another perspective to this, beyond the privacy/data ownership debate. The global building stock currently supplies roughly 40% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions; and we are in the midst of the largest growth of urbanism in human history concentrated in neighborhoods least equipped to deal with it. I've worked in the architecture/urban design sector for 6+ years (half as an architect, half as a researcher), and one of the most critical problems we have to address is the way we are attempting to optimize the building energy/embodied carbon use of buildings. It's a messy multivariable optimization problem, tied to time-consuming, complex simulation engines, that the industry is forced to try and solve as single-variable optimization with various hacks and rule of thumbs. I am very biased on this topic since I work in this area, but I feel this is fundamentally a ML/AI problem and I had/have some hope that Sidewalk labs could add the resources and brainpower to move the needle further, faster with the existing SOTA. Personally, I felt this provided the project with a very straightforward, explicit ethical utility, so as a Torontonian I've never been against it. I also was excited about the prospect of building up a community of building science-focused ML/AI researchers tackling a currently underserved existential threat. I know this isn't the end of Sidewalk Labs, but I feel like this is a huge loss for us.

jungletime 7y ago

Thats a shame. I always thought Google would do a double plus good job of it. Who wouldn't want a listening device in their toilet. Just skip the town, and make a better smarter toilet Google. Control the world, starting with the throne. Thats where many are already watching youtube from anyway now. Take my temperature and test me for corona, update my social score and unlock the e-lock to leave my apartment. The Future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcUAG6t5aN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcUAG6t5aN8

rkagerer 7y ago

As a former Toronto resident I'm glad about this. In my eyes, Google lacks the track record or level of trust appropriate to make them a good fit for the project. They fall short on basics like privacy, user experience and commitment. Toronto has a thriving tech community; I'd love to see some of the less-controversial ideas pioneered on a smaller scale by local small businesses who will eat their own dogfood.

NN88 7y ago

Google has a pattern of pull out of high profile announcements. Its striking.

g8oz 7y ago

Google HQ never seemed to have to much to do with this. It was rather their subsidiary Sidewalk Labs that was going to make it happen. They always struck me as long on "vision" and short on execution.

mrtron 7y ago
I am a very optimistic individual, and have considered this project as vapourware since day one. All vision and posturing, and no execution over years.

neilv 7y ago

"Ann Cavoukian, former Ontario privacy commissioner, resigns from Sidewalk Labs", 2018-10-21. https://globalnews.ca/news/4579265/ann-cavoukian-resigns-sidewalk-labs/ https://globalnews.ca/news/4579265/ann-cavoukian-resigns-sid... "Google's 'Smart City of Surveillance' Faces New Resistance in Toronto", 2018-11-13. https://theintercept.com/2018/11/13/google-quayside-toronto-smart-city/ https://theintercept.com/2018/11/13/google-quayside-toronto-...

OJFord 7y ago

Isn't it ironic to blame the coronavirus? I imagine an alternate timeline in which it's a success story for the already-built 'smart city', with the masses of data it offers aiding crisis management in <ways>.

karmakaze 7y ago

The promised green-space would have been awesome. In all, I'm thrilled that Toronto won't be the first guinea pig testing out a privacy-flexible smart city. If it works well in other places and everyone's happy, we can get the new improved one with the quirks fixed.

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34679 7y ago

I'm all for smart cities, just not ones built by advertising companies.

iamleppert 7y ago

No doubt this was likely guided by some misguided desire to make everything look and function like one of their Google campuses. Google is one of the most dehumanizing companies in the entire history of civilization.

dade_ 7y ago

I consider it part of my neighbourhood. I am glad this is over. There are so many issues, but essentially the city is in over its head on this entire concept from the beginning. Further, I think Waterfront Toronto overstepped it's mandate. At the time, Google love was high, and politicians were enamoured with the attention and jumped into bed without even a thought. In the end, Google is an ad tech company, so no thank you. The scorpion and the frog...

simonebrunozzi 7y ago

"The city of the future" has been a passion of mine for several years now. I even co-founded a company driven by the desire to create one eventually (the company then moved to a cool product to digitize titles, US only for now; and secured seed funding long after I left). I always had a problem with this initiative by Google, and others in general. These things don't scale. You want to build the city of the future? It should be 10x more affordable, 10x less polluting, and be built 10x faster than traditional cities. It should find inspiration from Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, Leon Krier, etc. Sometimes I still dream about doing something about it. This blog post somehow summarizes where this desire comes from: "unf*ck" [0]. It's such a massive problem though. I keep thinking that I don't have the chops to be able to do anything about it. [0]: https://medium.com/the-naked-founder/unfuck-710afbaa4092 https://medium.com/the-naked-founder/unfuck-710afbaa4092

kgin 7y ago

They will find a city for the next go-around that has more to gain and less nimby-ism. A Pittsburgh or a Detroit.

iamgopal 7y ago

Could have tried in India...

reagular 7y ago

"Smart city" sound like a Orwellian dystopia

louislaccanore 7y ago

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52572362 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52572362

calvinbhai 7y ago

This should be next in the killedbygoogle.com entries