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Why Alphabet's 'Smart City' in Toronto Failed (technologyreview.com) 111

Alphabet's "urban innovation" arm Sidewalk Labs planned to build a model "smart city" along a 12-acre patch of Toronto waterfront known as Quayside.

But they abandoned the project in 2020, points out MIT's Technology Review, "at the tail end of years of public controversy over its $900 million vision for a data-rich city within the city."

Sidewalk's big idea was flashy new tech. This unassuming section of Toronto was going to become a hub for an optimized urban experience featuring robo-taxis, heated sidewalks, autonomous garbage collection, and an extensive digital layer to monitor everything from street crossings to park bench usage. Had it succeeded, Quayside could have been a proof of concept, establishing a new development model for cities everywhere. It could have demonstrated that the sensor-Âladen smart city model embraced in China and the Persian Gulf has a place in more democratic societies. Instead, Sidewalk Labs' two-and-a-half-year struggle to build a neighborhood "from the internet up" failed to make the case for why anyone might want to live in it....

The project's tech-first approach antagonized many; its seeming lack of seriousness about the privacy concerns of Torontonians was likely the main cause of its demise. There is far less tolerance in Canada than in the U.S. for private-sector control of public streets and transportation, or for companies' collecting data on the routine activities of people living their lives. "In the U.S. it's life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," says Alex Ryan, a senior vice president of partnership solutions for the MaRS Discovery District, a Toronto nonprofit founded by a consortium of public and private funders and billed as North America's largest urban innovation hub. "In Canada it's peace, order, and good government. Canadians don't expect the private sector to come in and save us from government, because we have high trust in government."

With its very top-down approach, Sidewalk failed to comprehend Toronto's civic culture. Almost every person I spoke with about the project used the word "hubris" or "arrogance" to describe the company's attitude. Some people used both.

In February Toronto announced new plans for the area, the article points out, with "800 affordable apartments, a two-acre forest, a rooftop farm, a new arts venue focused on indigenous culture, and a pledge to be zero-carbon.... Indeed, the philosophical shift signaled by the new plan, with its emphasis on wind and rain and birds and bees rather than data and more data, seems like a pragmatic response to the demands of the present moment and the near future."

The article calls it "a conspicuous disavowal not only of the 2017 proposal but of the smart city concept itself."
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Why Alphabet's 'Smart City' in Toronto Failed

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  • Predictable (Score:5, Insightful)

    by freax ( 80371 ) on Sunday August 14, 2022 @03:02AM (#62787864) Homepage

    Vulture-like capitalists who seek to extract revenue out of the failing business of converting privacy and data into cash fail at convincing human beings who have been living in a well organized country for their entire lifetimes on giving up on the latter in exchange for being sucked dry from their privacy.

    News at 11

    • Nah, they just picked the wrong location. Americans would have been more welcoming. It is no more of a corporatocracy than Disney World. Plenty of Americans live in the DW-Resort residences, and more would like to.

      • by acroyear ( 5882 )

        There's also the factor of "tell me 1) when I can move in, 2) what my apartment will look like, and 3) just how many and what kinds of shops/restaurants will be around me" - you know, all the stuff that people need to know to move into a neighborhood, without which, they'll never commit.

        So an endless loop of catch-22's. Corporations wouldn't move in until there were people, people wouldn't commit to move in until there were businesses. And all either saw were promises and designs, but nothing real.

        EPCOT (in

    • Re:Predictable (Score:5, Insightful)

      by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Sunday August 14, 2022 @06:03AM (#62788030) Journal

      I think this is more relevant

      https://xkcd.com/1831/ [xkcd.com]

      I've met so many programmers, and Google seems infested with the type who believe programmers are super duper smart and really programming is the hard thing because smart people do it and everything else is easy so we can solve it with ALGORITHMS!

      Somehow magically sprinkling internet and algorithms on a city will style all the problems as opposed to doing the actually hard thing of redesigning the core infrastructure so it plays off human behavior in a way that works.

      You don't need sensors and the internet you know that a bench on an ugly ass 4 lane dual carriageway stroad is completely pointless.

      I'm sure the access to data is gravy for Google (though why they think it's useful is a bit mysterious), but fundamentally I think it's because they believe they are smart enough to solve human problems with code.

      Also they don't believe in privacy so there's that too.

      • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday August 14, 2022 @06:52AM (#62788078)

        It is naive to believe that every problem can be solved with algorithms: Some problems need AI and deep learning as well.

        • Fundamentally, an algorithm is behind every action. Animal brains create them all the time.

          • Fundamentally, an algorithm is behind every action. Animal brains create them all the time.

            Not really. Calling those behaviors "algorithms" is like calling a cooking recipe an algorithm; it's not in the same class of formal processes than computers or mathematicians do.

            The kind of information processing of Asynchronous Massively Parallel Cellular Automata in neural networks is not known to be reducible to algorithms; and animal brains are do continous processing, not state-based processing like automata, so they're even more complex than CAs.

            A more apt computational metaphor would be the recent u

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        The thing is, the answer is "sort of right". Everything that can be solved can be solved with algorithms. But this doesn't mean or imply the the right algorithm can be easy to discover or cheap to implement.

        If people can do it, it can be done with an algorithm. Many algorithms involve getting your hand dirty. Only a very few are almost entirely calculation.

        • by noodler ( 724788 )

          If people can do it, it can be done with an algorithm.

          Please, what is the algorithm for farting?

    • by noodler ( 724788 )

      for being sucked dry from their privacy.

      And that is just phase one.
      Phase two is using all that data to move money more efficiently from the wallets of the population to the wallets of the corporations. I mean, what do you think they want all that data for, right?

  • by LeeLynx ( 6219816 ) on Sunday August 14, 2022 @03:07AM (#62787868)

    Why Alphabet's 'Smart City' in Toronto Failed

    It was a really stupid idea?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Why Alphabet's 'Smart City' in Toronto Failed

      It was a really stupid idea?

      Just another in the VERY long list of stupid ideas by Alphabet Corp. If this was a movie people would say"give me a break, no company is THAT evil AND stupid."

      Once again, another example of what happens when a company has too much money. They can just continually play the game of "throw shit at the wall and see if anything sticks" with no regard for the problems they cause in the process..

  • by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Sunday August 14, 2022 @03:38AM (#62787890) Homepage

    The real reason it failed that Google didn't pay their protection money to the geese. Everybody in Canada knows they're the ones who really run the show.

  • by gosso920 ( 6330142 ) on Sunday August 14, 2022 @03:40AM (#62787894)
    that their "Don't be evil" motto failed.
  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday August 14, 2022 @04:00AM (#62787916)

    First, people don't like it when you waltz in and tell them you know everything better than them and what they did so far is just wrong, so you are going to right it. Twice so if you're a corporation, doing it in a country where distrust of corporations is part of the culture.

    And second, people in Canada love their privacy. They're very used to it. Trying to put them under total surveillance is going to make you as popular as foot fungus.

    • by MeNeXT ( 200840 )

      And second, people in Canada love their privacy.

      This can be seen by the phones they carry? Have you even looked, let alone read a new vehicle contract? A credit card contract? Canada's privacy laws are not worth the paper they are written on. There is nothing in those laws that can stop it. I would say it's the main reason bank fraud has been converted to identity theft. There is absolutely no way that a Canadian can keep their privacy. Too many services that collect information are intertwined with life. From schools to government services. It's all se

    • As someone who lives in Toronto belongs to Toronto's local Mold and Fungus Appreciation Club, I resent the aspersions you cast against foot fungus. Your comments are disgusting and racist. Foot fungus is just as worthy as any other fungus, and singling it out like that says more about you than foot fungus. No one was calling Staphylococcus Bacteria names when it turned out penicilin could be made from its mould.

      And if you're wondering if you too should join your local Mold and Fungus Appeciation Club

      • I wish to express my apologies to foot fungus. It was not my intention to insinuate that foot fungus was in league with Google, is affiliated with Google or has any dealings with Google whatsoever.

  • by khchung ( 462899 ) on Sunday August 14, 2022 @04:16AM (#62787942) Journal

    Google has ADHD and has a long history of abandoning projects that was no longer sexy and exciting. Starting new projects is exciting, taking feedback and slowly improving a product is boring.

    Unfortunately, many new concepts and products would not succeed without someone taking the effort of slowly improving it until it works well.

  • "In Canada it's peace, order, and good government. Canadians don't expect the private sector to come in and save us from government, because we have high trust in government."

    It's as if actually making the government work for you, instead making up bullshit about how your gun collection will allow you to overthrow the government when it goes bad, is the way to stop governments from going bad.

    • It also helps when you don't elect complete imbeciles who believe that wildfires are started by Jewish Space Lasers.
      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        Well, smart people who believe that wildfires are started by Jewish Space Lasers are kind of hard to find.
      • New tweets of wisdom include her call to “defund the FBI” and Rand Paul is calling to abolish the espionage act.

        Back the blue until it comes for you!

  • I'm 65 and remember other grand smart city schemes never made it far here in the U.S. for various reason. Big companies or idealists think they can do it better if people live to their vision.
  • nor a junkyard to dump all the bad ideas.

  • You don't take a piece of a city that has an established culture and try to change it. You go someplace that doesn't have any culture and try to create your own. In the past such efforts have failed because you couldn't find enough people who wanted to live there. In the present all you have to do is make it affordable and provide decent internet access and you'll have flocks of people lined up to relocate to wherever it is, because of the current severe housing shortage caused by fires, floods, airbnb, and investment bankers.

  • 800 affordable apartments

    This seems like the most bleeding obvious starting point. A quick search indicates that a 1-bedroom apartment was going for about $1,850CAD in 2019. Had Google led with 800 furnished 1B apartments for $1,000CAD/month, they may well have had some occupants, who in turn would have given those sensors some data to work with.

    Nothing is wrong with automated taxis, they're just not the biggest problem being faced. Nothing is wrong with automated garbage collection, it's just not the biggest problem being faced.

    • Nothing is wrong with automated taxis, they're just not the biggest problem being faced. Nothing is wrong with automated garbage collection, it's just not the biggest problem being faced.

      Indeed! The problem with cities isn't that dustbin lorries have dustmen to go along with them. Automation might make existing systems a little cheaper, but it won't fix any problems.

      I pine for Google Traffic Lights that can dynamically adjust to improve traffic flow (e.g. changing signal times when an intersection with 50

  • Planned cities always fail because people who believe they are smart enough to anticipate and solve all the organic problems of a vast number of people living in a concentrated space are never as smart as they THINK they are.

    Simple as that.

    The solutions to such situations are the (some times painfully) evolved compromises between thousands and thousands of people. One self-nominated wunderkind or even collection of them with a few good ideas can anticipate all the issues that human beings confront daily in

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      Planned cities don't always fail. But the ones that succeed have lots of slack areas penciled in with "let this part develop naturally". Washington, DC was a planned city, designed by a French city planner. It didn't work out as well as he envisioned, but it works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      Now the more complete and complex your plans, the likelier it is that your plans will fail. But there have been successes (or at least partial successes).

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      The nicely sums it up. Which is why truly smart people are aware of their limitations.

  • Quips like POGG are whatever the US claims as its founding myth is kind of irrelevant. People are people and donâ(TM)t like being sold a bad deal. Google sold hype and BS. The city and its residents saw through it.

  • "Instead, Sidewalk Labs' two-and-a-half-year struggle to build a neighborhood 'from the internet up' failed to make the case for why anyone might want to live in it...."

    "...sensor-laden smart city model embraced in China and the Persian Gulf..." Well, gosh-darn, I wonder why no one wanted to live there.

    "There is far less tolerance in Canada than in the U.S. for private-sector control of public streets and transportation, or for companies' collecting data on the routine activities of people living their live

  • This unassuming section of Toronto was going to become a hub for an optimized urban experience featuring robo-taxis, heated sidewalks, autonomous garbage collection, and an extensive digital layer to monitor everything from street crossings to park bench usage.

    OK, you've just listed four things that nobody wants.

    Robo-taxis are not quite safe enough yet (especially in an urban area with lots of unpredictable foot traffic). They don't suddenly become safer when you make them part of a "smart city".

    No one cares about heated sidewalks.

    No one cares about automated garbage collection. (Most garbage trucks are semi-automated anyway, except for the driving part, which brings us back to item #1).

    No one (except for marketers and data miners) wants "extensive" digital mo

  • The key is the "affordable" part. The thing is, the vast majority of the population do not have the productivity to support the high tech lifestyle without subsidies from the few who do.

  • Just throwing tech at things does not work, has never worked and will never work. You actually need a clear understanding what you want to achieve and it needs to be a clear improvement over the status quo. Tech-cheerleaders never understand that and hence routinely fail.

  • I find it ironic that people in Toronto don't trust private sector companies who can't really do anything to you but seem to implicitly trust government that can do anything they want to you and you have no recourse.

  • Something similar is being built in Saudi Arabia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    It will be interesting to see how it pans out compared to Goodle's attempt. Different climate (hot instead of cold), different attitude to human rights (the Saudis don't have any human rights, unless they're rich!), and a different evil outfit backing the project (oil dollars instead of tech/advertising dollars)

    I wouldn't live in Neom, but then again I wouldn't have lived in the milder Canadian version either.

  • "If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking is freedom"--Eisenhower (b. 1890)

Order and simplification are the first steps toward mastery of a subject -- the actual enemy is the unknown. -- Thomas Mann

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