The short answer is: We want to build the first truly 21st-century city.
The longer answer is we launched Sidewalk with the broad belief that if we combined the best in urban planning and design with the latest in technology and open digital infrastructure, we could meaningfully improve quality of life for people in cities. But one of the big challenges we saw was that no single city in the world could really stand out as a model how to do that. That’s what we hope to achieve with Waterfront Toronto: neighborhoods that pilot ideas, new and old, to solve big urban problems that cities everywhere are facing.
Of course, we are not going to build the whole thing ourselves, because real neighborhoods can never be completely planned. We’re going to need to work with all kinds of partners and groups in Toronto and beyond. We see our role with Waterfront Toronto as trying to put in place some of the underlying infrastructure — things like people-first street designs, an energy system that could one day be climate positive, buildings that can adapt to new uses. On top of those systems, all kinds of local innovators, civic groups, academics, etc, will fill in the details will their ideas and creations.
Sidewalk Toronto is our main focus. But there are also areas where we think real innovation is possible today that no one is working on yet, and when we find those opportunities we incubate companies to take them on. For example, we incubated a spin-off company called Cityblock Health that now works to improve health care delivered to low-income urban populations.