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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsGoogle Is Building a City of the Future in Toronto. Would Anyone Want to Live There?
PoliticoTORONTOEven with a chilly mid-May breeze blowing off Lake Ontario, this citys western waterfront approaches idyllic. The lake laps up against the boardwalk, people sit in colorful Adirondack chairs and footfalls of pedestrians compete with the cry of gulls. But walk east, and the scene quickly changes. Cut off from gleaming downtown Toronto by the Gardiner Expressway, the city trails off into a dusty landscape of rock-strewn parking lots and heaps of construction materials. Torontos eastern waterfront is bleak enough that Guillermo del Toros gothic film The Shape of Water used it as a plausible stand-in for Baltimore circa 1962. Says Adam Vaughan, a former journalist who represents this district in Canadas Parliament, Its this weird industrial land thats just been sitting thereacres and acres of it. And no ones really known what to do with it.
That was before Google.
This past October, a coalition of the Toronto, Ontario and Canadian governments contracted with Sidewalk Labs, a sister company of Google, to come up with a $50 million design for a dozen acres on the waterfronts far eastern end. The idea is to reimagine Torontos derelict waterfront as the worlds first neighborhood built from the internet up, as Sidewalk describes it. The neighborhood, called Quayside, would leapfrog the usual slow walk of gentrification to build an entire zone, all at once, as a smart city, a sensor-enabled, highly wired metropolis that can run itself.
Torontos choice of the Google-affiliated firm immediately captured the attention of urban planners and city officials all over the world; magazine stories trumpeted Googles Guinea-Pig City and A Smarter Smart City. Still in its early days, the partnership has left people curious but wary. Google? What does a tech company know about running a real live city?
In one sense, whats perhaps surprising is that it has taken this long. Silicon Valleys innovators have long had side obsessions with making the world a better place, driven largely by the confidence that their own brainpower and a near-total disregard for tradition can break old logjams. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel helped seed the seasteading movement to create offshore libertarian paradises; the tech incubator YCombinator is currently running a public-policy experiment in Oakland, California, giving residents a guaranteed monthly stipend to see how it might improve their quality of life.
The notion of the feedback-rich smart city has circulated for years, and in practice has mostly taken the shape of centuries-old cities like New York or Boston adopting sensor-enabled stoplights or equipping their residents with an app for spotting potholes. But the real dream, a place whose constant data flow lets it optimize services constantly, requires something different, a ground-up project not only woven through with sensors and Wi-Fi, but shaped around waves of innovation still to come, like self-driving cars. Thanks to a host of technological advances, thats practical now in a way it never has been before. Mass-produced sensors now cost less than a dollar apiece, even for hobbyists; high-speed broadband and cheap cloud computing mean that a city can collect and analyze reams of data in real time.
That was before Google.
This past October, a coalition of the Toronto, Ontario and Canadian governments contracted with Sidewalk Labs, a sister company of Google, to come up with a $50 million design for a dozen acres on the waterfronts far eastern end. The idea is to reimagine Torontos derelict waterfront as the worlds first neighborhood built from the internet up, as Sidewalk describes it. The neighborhood, called Quayside, would leapfrog the usual slow walk of gentrification to build an entire zone, all at once, as a smart city, a sensor-enabled, highly wired metropolis that can run itself.
Torontos choice of the Google-affiliated firm immediately captured the attention of urban planners and city officials all over the world; magazine stories trumpeted Googles Guinea-Pig City and A Smarter Smart City. Still in its early days, the partnership has left people curious but wary. Google? What does a tech company know about running a real live city?
In one sense, whats perhaps surprising is that it has taken this long. Silicon Valleys innovators have long had side obsessions with making the world a better place, driven largely by the confidence that their own brainpower and a near-total disregard for tradition can break old logjams. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel helped seed the seasteading movement to create offshore libertarian paradises; the tech incubator YCombinator is currently running a public-policy experiment in Oakland, California, giving residents a guaranteed monthly stipend to see how it might improve their quality of life.
The notion of the feedback-rich smart city has circulated for years, and in practice has mostly taken the shape of centuries-old cities like New York or Boston adopting sensor-enabled stoplights or equipping their residents with an app for spotting potholes. But the real dream, a place whose constant data flow lets it optimize services constantly, requires something different, a ground-up project not only woven through with sensors and Wi-Fi, but shaped around waves of innovation still to come, like self-driving cars. Thanks to a host of technological advances, thats practical now in a way it never has been before. Mass-produced sensors now cost less than a dollar apiece, even for hobbyists; high-speed broadband and cheap cloud computing mean that a city can collect and analyze reams of data in real time.
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Google Is Building a City of the Future in Toronto. Would Anyone Want to Live There? (Original Post)
brooklynite
Jul 2018
OP
dembotoz
(16,804 posts)1. toronto is nice....could forgive alot and toronto would still be a nice place to live
do something like this in milwaukee and detroit and lets check the concept
Javaman
(62,530 posts)2. Let me fix the headline...
Google Is Building a City of the Future in Toronto. Would Anyone be able to afford to Live There?