Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto
bbc.com
bbc.com
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.
I think cars are mostly to blame, roads are so large, no pedestrian-only streets, parkings take so much space, etc.
Europe has no such luxury due to the density of people cramped in tight corridors and old (but beautiful) architecture. There it makes sense to have a well organized city life.
IMO city life is overrated but that's just my opinion/perspective of society.
did you think the rest of the world didn't have that?
> Europe has no such luxury due to the density of people cramped in tight corridors and old (but beautiful) architecture. There it makes sense to have a well organized city life.
Come visit the countryside in Europe.
Bonus: if you don't want to live in the city (due to work) you can work outside of it and use public transport!
When I see the word "smart" applied to anything I just think of the big junket of smart conferences and and smart workshops that all these middle-management types go to, that's the real industry here: middle sized fish eating all the investment dollars before the little fish, innovative startups, can get a taste.
The bad news is that next few buzzwords are already starting to build their own money pit conference circuit if "smart" things become passé. I know this because my wife presents at one such, in the pre-CoV world we got to fly around and eat fancy food once or twice a year presenting buzzword laden solutions to other middle-management types.
Maybe all this will junketing will go away now, will the world be any poorer because of it?
Also, I don't know much about the smart-city idea, though I do know that you can design spaces, homes, blocks, etc. in a way that creates natural interaction -- which is something that Google has excelled at (possibly more than any other company). This is also discussed heavily in facilitator-culture (and can be seen with Zappos).
That's not what happened though. Google was free to continue the project but decided not too, using Covid-19 as a fig leaf.
I agree with the thrust of your comment (we need more experimentation with cities, not less) but this is Google doing what Google does: changing it's mind and abandoning projects.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/15/alphabets-sidewalk-labs-want...
https://betakit.com/ann-cavoukian-still-has-problems-with-si...
https://betakit.com/sidewalk-labs-announces-it-will-no-longe...
They would cede a part of proposal, propose another, only to have some sort of new outcry.
From Ars' article published today https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/alphabets-sidewalk-l...
> But Sidewalk Labs’ vision was in trouble long before the pandemic. Since its inception, the project had been criticized by progressive activists concerned about how the Alphabet company would collect and protect data, and who would own that data
> The partnership took a bigger hit last summer, when Sidewalk Labs released a splashy and even more ambitious 1,524-page master plan for the lot that went well beyond what the government had anticipated, and for which the company pledged to spend up to $1.3 billion to complete. The redevelopment group wondered whether some of Sidewalk Labs’ proposals related to data collection and governance were even “in compliance with applicable laws.” It balked at a suggestion that the government commit millions to extend public transit into the area, a commitment, the group reminded the company, that it could not make on its own.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...
https://www.wdrb.com/in-depth/google-fiber-to-pay-nearly-4-m...
Google Fiber prepares to pull the plug on Louisville customers tonight, the tech company has agreed to pay Metro government $3.84 million to fix damage to city streets, Mayor Greg Fischer’s said Monday.
The payments, to be made over 20 months, will cover removing fiber cables and sealant from roads, milling and paving streets “where needed” and removing Google’s above-ground infrastructure, according to a news release from Fischer's office.
this presumes in some sense that they are not already.
That's kinda what they were going after.
But... I think there's an institutional aspect here that needs resolution before we can. The internet is worryingly centralised. A small number of extremely profitable companies monopolise huge markets. Google tends to do this with data.
I think the reticence was justified: "Who owns the data? What kind of monopoly are google eventually going to have?" These are fair. A financial success case for google is some sort of data-centric monopoly. They don't really do business another way. It's fair to be dubious of their endgame.
Geez. I feel old now.
We need deep changes now to get ahead of the looming consequences of the patterns we've held as a society up until now.
Reminds me of a board game called Risk that I like playing where you have to capture territories by attacking owners of other territories. The moment any one player looks like they are gaining a good lead over others, the rest of the players gang up against that player to prevent him from getting too powerful.
The goal is to be the single largest player in the game and everyone is trying to do that. But the moment anyone is too ahead of the curve in doing that we don't like it. I guess we as a society are wired to hate a single large player. Maybe the last couple of centuries left a bad taste in our mouth.
(I have no affiliation with the organization)
I'm not sure 'smart city' would be the right phrase for it, but they seem pretty cool.
Think of it this way, let's say a fascist genocidal group become rulers of that city/country, or let's say Google's intentions change and Google becomes many times more evil than it is now. Will this technology preserve the power of the people to nit just freely express their opinions but to take action based on their beliefs. Who controls access,surveillance and information? Even if the majority approve, will this preserve the liberties of the minority?
It's too late to ask these questions after the fact. I think it will work really well at first, my fear is actually that it won't stop at Toronto, and it will in the short term make a lot of people happy.
Technology has changed a lot but human nature has remained consistent. It would be foolish to fail to take into account hisorical lessons about humanity and social power dynamics when considering such drastic changes. Unfortunately, those who should make such considerations often lack technical knowledge and those with technical knowledge are blinded by immediate benefits and possibilities. I think this is the curse of living in relatively free socieites, you lack the perspective of seeing how fragile the ground you stand on really is.
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
edit: a word
I think the idea that one organization existing to make the entire world a better place is utopian, but governments are much better equipped to bring positive change than private companies are because citizens are the direct beneficiaries of government resources. For example, a municipal government’s purpose is to administer public services, and a municipal government answers to its citizens. A private company, on the other hand, has a fiscal duty to its shareholders.
I’m not arguing that any organization is perfect because such an organization does not exist, and that’s true for companies and governments.
> how are those orgs doing in terms of impact and scale?
Let’s use various governments response to the coronavirus outbreak as an example. The US government opted to defer much of it’s responsibility to private companies and state governments, which has resulted in less testing, less access to PPE, and more reported deaths than any other country. Testing hasn’t scaled, and there have been numerous reports of corruption and interference in the medical community, some of which was alleged to have come directly from the White House.
Contrast that response with countries like Taiwan, who moved quickly to provide necessary resources and communicate effectively to mitigate the transmission of the virus.
The US has operated one of the most private-industry focused responses to this outbreak, and we’re likely to see 3k deaths per day by June. That’s a 9/11 death toll every single day.
I'd counter that if private companies were completely left in charge, the response may have been better (I would not have said this in January).
Private companies were called in because our public efforts failed. If private companies were leading the charge from day 1, I struggle to see how our response could have been worse than it is today. And I completely disagree that our poor response can be attributed to involvement of private companies.
That's the distinction being drawn. Pretending there's not a fundamental distinction between the two types of entities is disingenuous.
There are actually some "fundamental distinctions" between government and business. For example, most governments (democratic or not) are slow, monolithic, and effectively immortal. Since governments have tax and police authority, they can survive bad periods, including those caused by their own errors, for longer periods of time. Most businesses do not have tax and police authority and must face the market test on a daily basis. The businesses that fail the test typically die and new businesses replace them.
Have you looked at how Disney built Disney World, and the way they... govern... Disney World? There's a lot of similarities in Google's plan and their requests with what Disney built with the Reedy Creek Improvement District[0]. Essentially a company territory with government, policing, and regulation all managed by the company.
And did EPCOT actually create a world of tomorrow? No. But Disney World has made Disney a lot of money.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reedy_Creek_Improvement_Distri...
> That's what policies, mission statements and guidelines are for. Yes... but these obviously don't apply everywhere. That's like saying "that's what laws are for" then being confused that criminals exist.
> people were hired by other people who ultimately were hired by the people at the very top who set an example for the corporate culture they want to create Yes... and again, Google is rated by most agencies and people as having one of the best cultures out-there. This is not the end-all be-all predictive measure. Taking a hyperbolic example, one could imagine a world where Gandhi ended up recruiting someone who incited violence. You know, the whole Christian-crusades thing might be another example.
While you start off the sentence with an implicit agreement with mine ("I think it's equally important") you then go on to directly oppose it with views. It's not "equally important", you can't hold both side by side (not saying one or the other is more correct).
It's not hard to make an argument that Google has done _the best_ at keeping their "do no evil" culture at scale than any other company of their size (or even half their size). My point is the opposite of yours, which is you cannot control at a certain point, just as cells in your body do not replicate perfectly and produce mutations -- studies have shown that you only get around 13% of an accurate look at someone in the normal interview process, mistakes are bound to happen. People change for other reasons too, their are external pressures. No matter how perfect your values are, you will end up with people doing stupid shit.
* Not condoning any of the actions of Sidewalk Labs.
Any thoughts? Suggestions? Blog posts or points of entry you could point me to that might help me package this as useful info for my audience?
I wanted to filter the waze data and ran into a problem. I was trying to filter anything that wasn't a weather hazard and wasn't before 2020. Any combination of filters and orders I tried brought up some results from those exclusions.
As much as I think that webpages should work with cookies and localstorage turned off, this claim seems ridiculous.
How can testing a site for when cookies are disabled be considered the "bare minimum" of testing when it's a configuration that a very small minority of users will have?
How? Is it possible for a smaller company to defend against such hostility?
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.
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.
It may not be noticeable if you live there because you only see the incremental day by day changes, but as someone who only sporadically visits the Bay Area: it's nothing like it was in 2010. It's significantly more built up (and out), more skyscrapers, more apartments, more condos, more everything.
(Mind you that's just a 15 block area in East Cut/SoMA - I'm not even talking about ALL of Mission Bay which didn't exist 10 years ago or the Van Ness corridor or Mid-Market.)
The problem here is we only started building about 10 years ago (with One Rincon being the first major new building in a long time) and the rest of the Bay Area (for example, Brisbane notoriously) is nowhere near doing its fair share of building.
It's a game of moving goal posts.
Because planners' hubris, similar to the insane technocratic Silicon Valley hubris these days, led to them making terrible decisions with zero community input and a team of yes-men around them.
> I might not oppose a dictator coming in for two years and just having at it.
Ironic a culture that fetishizes free markets and an open marketplace of ideas favors totalitarianism because they find the idea of being part of a larger human community with all its flaws icky. Step away from the keyboard some more and maybe, I dunno, go outside and talk to people? Problems like these are never solved with Docker.
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.
Unless you've got a few billion to throw away you're going to have a hard time convincing any developers to build something other than the most economically productive building. and for that location, that's a big glass condo building that looks like every other big glass condo building and doesn't benefit anybody other than the people who can afford to live in big glass condo buildings.
I hope we can see the experimentation with wooden skyscrapers, etc, though.
These ideas are not lost.
The City of Toronto has already approved several wooden “skyscrapers”. This idea wasn’t unique to Google by any stretch of the imagination.
De-prioritizing roads also was not unique to this Google development. In fact, just walking distance from Google’s smart-city proposal are two significantly larger developments (Portland’s and Unilever) that lean heavily on the shared streets/woonerf concept.
I hope it's something a bit different. Looks like Waterfront Toronto will turn back to the community for new ideas for Quayside.
https://waterfrontoronto.ca/nbe/portal/waterfront/Home/water...
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.
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.
If you want to preserve your neighborhood, you are free to buy as many parcels as you like and leave them be. If you can't afford the fair market price to dictate what gets built on the land, then you have no ground to stand on imo, but there are also plenty of options for you. There are planned communities you can move to with tight HOA regulations if you insist on limiting what others can and can't do with their belongings. To move to a city like LA, which experiences double digit percent growth decade after decade since its inception, and to expect nothing to change at all the minute after you sign your mortgage, is baffling to me. It isn't grounded in reality. Move to Cleveland if you want stasis, the greater metro population there is virtually unchanged over the past 50 years.
Sounds like renters should start voting. Why would city council members do anything for the interests of people that don't vote? Not only is it against their own self-interest, it's anti-democratic. Elected representatives have to do what their voters want - it's the bedrock of democracy.
That reps are profiting off the system is a side-effect, not the root cause.
Lobby for vote-by-mail, early voting, and holidays on election day. I'm sorry, but that's the only way. Hard problems don't have easy solutions. You can't expect any council member to go against their voters' wishes on any issue. Local elections are personal and people who vote in them follow the issues closely. A council member who listens to "expert advice" rather their voters will be voted out or recalled, and the next person would simply vote to put things back the way they were.
If you want lasting change, you have to broaden the electorate and educate them on the issues.
Then the endless game theory rounds begin...
You're not wrong but this is kind of a naive way of looking at the problem. Making city employees more efficient means less jobs politicians can write the deadbeat nephew of a local construction mogul a recommendation for, a direct reduction in their power and influence. Even if you discount politicians government itself is often a bunch of competing fiefdoms where anyone who becomes more efficient can expect less resources thrown their way as a result. While there are many bureaucrats who do want to make things better and more efficient the incentives that the politicians and appointed department heads who ultimately call the shots have to work under cannot be discounted.
Google only has one hammer: the algorithm. It just comes in different colors.
Traffic? Waymo algorithm.
Municipal planning? Smart Cities algorithm.
Advertising? AdSense algorithm.
Journalism? Google News algorithm.
Google, and certain other tech companies, need to learn that not every problem can be solved by a computer.
No that's utterly absurd. What Google builds are platforms, markets and generally scalable systems. They involve algorithms and algorithms may more often than not be their competitive edge but an algorithm does not a system make.
What humans (or rather: our governments) don't excel at: accurately using the data that technology gives us. We know that climate change is real, man-made and will fuck up entire continents, but still there are world leaders actively rejecting science.
On the other hand, that's not such an easy problem for humans to solve either
“Computers are useless, they can only give you answers”
This is why the Play Store and Chrome Web Store are full of malware, and why human-curated app markets have effectively zero.
All those projects google shuts down? Those were problems they tried to solve but failed to.
If I were a Toronto resident I would not want a foreign, powerful, rapacious and often exploitative private company involved in those things, as they are better handled by democratic institutions.
First of all, it's not either/or.
Second of all, better democratic decisionmaking has nothing to do with Google's expertise. There are plenty of political scientists and think tanks working on better decisionmaking processes. Spending Sidewalk Labs' money on them makes as much sense as asking for Kraft Foods or ExxonMobil to do so.
But third, good democratic governance requires data and provides services. If Google can help generate real-time data to improve services (and inform better decisions), how is that not a win?
Anyway, Cory Doctorow wrote recently that cities full of sensors need not be used to spy on citizens, and could just be helpful instead.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2020/jan/17/the-case-for-...
It's disappointing. It is easier to get a contract and just do it you way.
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.
They're currently in the process of opening up certain roadways to pedestrian and cycle traffic and closing some of them off to cars save for local traffic. They've stated some of these changes are temporary, and some possibly permanent. This includes expanding the current bike paths and speeding up implementation of already approved paths.
The program is called ActiveTO. It was just announced.
https://www.toronto.ca/home/media-room/news-releases-media-a...
---
Edit: Adding the following quote as a decent summary of the intentions of the project:
> “Our streets are going to look different in many places in the post-COVID world. We will need more road space for walking. We will need quiet streets. We will need more bike infrastructure. We are going about this in a responsible, common sense way with Toronto Public Health, Transportation Services and local councillors all involved in making common sense, health-focused decisions which broaden out our transportation network."
- Mayor John Tory
I would not laud the city for "making some real changes" as much as I would criticize the mayor for being a stale, retrograde leader who is clearly in the business of delivering the barest possible minimum solution only after made to look like a fool.
Wake me up when he applies any pressure whatsoever to Toronto Police over their alarming lack of traffic enforcement and takes less than a year to support like the Bloor bike lane.
They did point to SF, Portland, and other cities as the inspiration for actually making the step—even though citizens and newspapers have basically been crying out for this very thing for weeks.
I'm just glad they're finally moving to do it. I was glad with how they stood strong on the King St traffic project. Hopefully many of these items will persist.
I've enjoyed the sweeter air due to the lessened traffic so, so much.
I'm hopeful, though. For all that can be said about Tory he has proven to react in the peoples' favour when he actual has to face the consequences of not acting. I'm referring to the case of our subways A/C breaking in the middle of summer heat waves. When he actually rode it end-to-end with someone who raised the issue with him and he stepped off at the end of the line drenched in sweat he actually acted and it tangibly improved.
I'm hoping this may be a similar situation and prove to be a silver lining.
Except that is in cities like Toronto/Vancouver more condos doesn't mean more people living in those condos. These are investment vehicles. Many of these new condo biuldings in trendy neighbourhoods sit empty, having been purchased as an investment rather than as a living space. What is needed is more rental units, not more places for rich people to park money.
Vancouver is finding that difficult to enforce. How do you tell if a unit is "occupied" or not? At the moment it is largely voluntary. The city cannot tell whether someone is living in a unit or it living overseas ten months out of the year. They aren't going to be sending inspectors to knock on doors.
I'm a good example of the difficulties. I was away on training (military) for six months. My apparment sat empty. Should I have been paying the tax? How would the government detect that I wasn't there?... Short of me or my landlord admitting to it and then paying the tax.
Well, why not? Arguably they would pay for themselves in a short time if implemented correctly.
Combine that with criminal tax fraud charges for cheats.
Oh, They can't really get hold of Vlad Q Oligarch because he's sailing his 100M yacht somewhere in the carribeans?
Expropriate the property.
Drastic? Maybe. I don't think unreasonable, however, for people gaming the system and cheating on their tax obligations.
Edited to add: Of course there should be exceptions for inhabitants with a good reason not to live in their home for a certain amount of time. I.e military, guest professorships, etc
The situation in Toronto is (and has been for some time) a stark contrast between low-density neighbourhoods of houses & small duplexes/triplexes, and high-density pockets of high-rise condos. This is bad for all the usual reasons of neighbourhood segregation.
Supply is supply. Harlem is largely former luxury units.
Anecdotally, the luxury building opening down the street let me negotiate down my rent. It sucked the highest earners out of my building (and renter pool), which reduced my landlord's leverage. And it let me compare perks (e.g. included gym offsetting a membership), which increased mine. End result was a modest rent reduction.
It does not work in the real world. Supply is not supply. For one, these condos being built can essentially not be rented, and that means that they are not supply for low and middle income individuals.
And the land is expensive because there are not enough places like them.
Non-occupancy tax. Vancouver has one.[1]
1. https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-t...
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/1/how-luxury-hous...
Why would you think that to be the case?
The Strong Towns link you provided gives two examples of apartments build approximately a century ago.
Trickle-down economics at its best.
Build luxury apartments, fine. Probably not exclusively though, as in many cities the need is more pressing than that.
luxury condos is also a loaded phrase. In an expensive city, all housing is expensive, even if it is 50 years old and used to house working class people. So-called "luxury housing" is just regular-sized new apartments, with a few thousand dollars of added perks like sleek recessed lighting and upgraded appliances to help sell it.
If you take out those loaded phrases, people are absolutely moving from existing, mid-tier market rate housing into only slighty more expensive new construction market rate housing. The more new construction housing you build, the more supply you have, and the more prices come down. Which allows market-rate housing to become affordable to more of the population. That was the case 10-15 years ago, and could be true again in the future if we just let people build enough housing to match the incoming demand of new residents moving into cities.
It's almost as if an equivalent amount of mid-priced housing would suddenly become available. I wonder who you think would move into that?
Build up.
However, if you build an apartment with pretty colors and a pool and grill and some artificial grass for your dog to poop on, that engineer working for google in that cigarette stained apartment in palms might just stomach the premium on rent for a better place, and that slumlord with the cigarette stained apartments might have a little bit more trouble finding tenants at top of market rent rates.
Based on your logic we should ban all new market-rate construction and magically prices will come down. That is nonsense.
I don't have a stake in this matter but there appears to be some evidence to support this idea.
> Between 2016 and 2019, the GTA added more than 325,000 jobs, but only 102,000 new homes. [1]
[1] https://www.thestar.com/business/opinion/2020/02/15/toronto-...
In most major cities in the U.S., any sort of property, even an empty dirt lot, is prohibitively expensive to the majority of the population. In LA in particular, the median home is unaffordable to 75% of the population. And the median home is a rotting bungalow precariously positioned on wooden posts built in 1947.
They would have to be really cheap though, because in NA condos can generally not be rented out.
Plop someone into an "affordable" unit and you are basically locking them there forever, as they cannot afford to move. That is a very bad situation to be in.
What the alternative? It's either single family home or condominiums (apartments).
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.
Your argument seems to be that there is a sizeable chunk of the population that cannot afford to own their own home. Yes, and?
We live in a global market and as a result, citizens of successful cities have to compete with people not just from that city, but from people outside, who are willing to bring in some cash. Oops, that means a bunch of people now can't afford to own a home.
That's the world we're living in. If you want to cancel inflow of capital into big cities, that's a political decision that has nothing to do with building or not building housing. If you want to 'just build affordable housing', you're really saying let's give permanent government assistance to a slice of the population. Are you qualified and knowledgable of all the side-effects of doing so? I'm not, so I don't even bother pretending I have a solution.
People need to become 1% smarter, to realize how complex human societies are and quit wishful thinking of 'just give/build more stuff for people who don't have enough'. You're a software developer, you know what a ball of mud most codebases are and how hard they are to refactor. Human societies are a worse version of that and it's a thankless job because by re-factoring one bit, you potentially break a dozen other places and boy will you hear from them.
None of those were innovative, or Google-first. They're all things that have been in the works by cities for decades.
The problem is that people who don't watch or attend city meetings don't know it because change at that scale is slow. Unlike computer code, you can't just delete a section of a city you don't like and rebuild it. A city is a living thing, and living things take time to change.
What is the benefit/cost ratio of 2-3 story houses vs 10 story housing vs 20 vs 30 vs 40?
Houses are for families with kids right? What do kids want? Kids want other kids to play with. Kids want to attend classes and learn stuff. The more options a kid has, the better.
Which area has more kids and therefore classes: low, medium or high density areas?
I understand that there is a trade-off where we don't want 100-story skyscrapers but to me, single family homes are an infrastructure luxury that hasn't been thought through and something we'd benefit from re-considering and re-educating people about.
-More natural settings shown to improve mental health
-"neighborliness" scales inversely with density to a point - less neighbors means you're more likely to get to know them, while with more people there are too many so the crowd of people gets depersonalized to a degree, because 50 neighbors are too many to keep track of.
-you don't have to go to some crowded city park full of garbage when friends have yards with their own stuff like sandboxes where they can have some privacy from for example sheltered city people or park cops freaking out over the kids having nerf guns
-other activities become more feasible like bike riding (I wouldn't feel good letting a kod bike around NYC), ATV's, fishing
-more outdoors setting prevents aesthma
-safer setting for the kids overall
Your concerns just don't work oout that way in my experience. I was in single-home-only towns as a kid and there was no problem playing with neighbors or anything. Even when houses are a mile apart it's really not a big deal just being driven to them.
And since when do kids want to attend classes?
From an environmental perspective there is no contest between single family suburban development (aka sprawl) and dense urban living with plenty of parks.
Also, you won't find bigger bike/transit activists than the people advocating for the abolishment of single family zoning.
The benefit/cost ratio is what makes this conversation worth having.
I don't think anyone seriously wants to replace every single family home with something more dense (even if the rhetoric indicates so). It's harmful and unnecessary. E.g.:
* There is an estimated 3-4 million housing unit deficit in CA, on 14 million total units (US Census). We'll take 4 million units to err on the extreme case.
* CA currently has 7 million single-family homes (US Census)
* Assuming 100% of that deficit is made from replacing a single family home with a quadplex, it would take 1.3 million single homes -> quadplexes to make up the 4 million unit deficit.
Even in that most extreme case, I can't imagine one quadplex per block would affect green areas or the totally legitimate choice to live a single family home.
In reality, I think most YIMBY advocates want mixed-use medium density, which requires an order of magnitude fewer buildings.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This marketing term piqued my interest. Turns out it is basically PoE. Ok.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For anything involving infrastructure, you need a much longer attention span than has been on display.
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.
https://medium.com/@biancawylie/debrief-on-sidewalk-toronto-...
Count me as one of the many happy people that this fell through, even though I'm generally positive about Google's other enterprises.
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.
Bureaucracy and elaborate processes slow things down. Every so often, that's a great thing.
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.
Not all investment is beneficial to the citizenry. I'd much rather my government err towards overcautious than overpermissive.
And if by retail you're referring to burger joints or Target, I'm afraid that's just market effect.
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.
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.
COVID has nothing to do with it.
In the end, Google is an ad tech company, so no thank you. The scorpion and the frog...
You're going to get a big real estate developer doing it instead.
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/w...
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."
"Google's 'Smart City of Surveillance' Faces New Resistance in Toronto", 2018-11-13. https://theintercept.com/2018/11/13/google-quayside-toronto-...
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-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.
Sure, some parts of the project looked like tech for tech's sake but I was excited about the urban design plans and architecture. And who knows, maybe some of the tech-y things would turn out to be good too. That's what experiments are for, and this wasn't a very large scale or risky one when compared to the size of the city so it's worth it to me to try new things even if many of the ideas don't work out. As for data issues, it seemed like the city and Waterfront Toronto were not afraid to exercise a lot of control on that front so Sidewalk Labs wasn't going to be able to do whatever they wanted, a lot of effort was going into ensuring it was in the public interest. This latest news supports the idea that the city was uncompromising in supporting what they see as the public interest - even to the extent that Sidewalk labs gives up entirely.
I don't know anyone with real experience in development, city planning, etc. who took it seriously though as anything other than a source of a few ideas. None of them thought google had the skills, experience, or even commitment to do the project - probably correctly.
It was more than that.
A sizable number of people carry Android-based surveillance, or data collection, devices in their pockets.
Imagine the upside for Google if people lived and worked inside Google devices.
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.
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
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.
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.
I'm not sure if SWL's plan would have worked in conjunction with that work or if they would have overridden it.
The city has the right at any time to revoke the MOU between the city and this group, so there wasn't really risk there. I understand that care should be taken, but at a certain point you begin having serious inefficiencies.
>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. This is through an IMBA chapter which accepts all liability and responsibility and includes insurance coverage. This is not some new, unique thing that is happening. There are many dozens if not hundreds of these agreements in place in other cities already.
>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. There aren't major structures being put in place, and most of the parks around here have very, very degraded ecosystems except in a few notable, well known locations.
>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. For what its worth I'm an electrical engineer, not a programmer, that deals more with manufacturing. My last job involved electronics for explosive atmospheres that were expected to last 10+ years minimum, so I have a good understanding of not being able to quickly send out fixes with a patch.
The process wasn't really transparent, so it really felt like people kind of dragging their feet and being very resistant to change. Something my city is known for (see famous Mark Twain quote about Cincy and the end of the world). I understand very well taking months to do things, but years for something like this is maddening.
On that sort of timescale, that's less down to "things move slowly" and more down to "you can't get anything done in the wrong political climate, so you have to wait until appointed officials die and/or an entire generational shift in your municipality produces a sea-change of political views."
So, basically, any municipal political plan that involves "waiting the problem out" as a strategy, should never actually be chosen/pursued, because if time has any associated overhead costs, then the indefinite amount of time required will cause the overall strategy to have predictably negative ROI.
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.
I'm half expecting an announcement that they're sunsetting their search business.
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.
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... (Ignore the title, Google decided not to repair anything.)
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/googl...
Most of their other ideas were similarly discount. They bought fiber in places it was already run, and their issue with ISPs revolved around a push to demand the right to move AT&T's equipment around on AT&T's poles to make room for their own without supervision.
ISPs have their problems but Google wasn't in it to build a long-term, quality infrastructure. They were trying to make a splash on the cheap, but the costs would be bound to go up anywhere they couldn't employ cheap hacks.
There is a disingenuous take. ISPs were provided $100Bs of taxpayer money to build out infrastructure in the last few decades. It is not theirs to control or monopolize. Everywhere Google Fiber was introduced, the incumbents' prices dropped and speeds increased. If they're able to operate at the reduced prices, why are they siphoning off additional profits after they were paid the aforementioned infrastructure money to provide these services? Google Fiber disrupting ISPs was exactly what people are clamoring to happen to other giants like Amazon and yet here you are bashing the initiative.
For the record, Google Fiber is still well loved everywhere it has been rolled out. I had Comcast and Verizon for decades and hated every moment of it -- constant battle for reliability, price increases, and hidden fees. Ever since I got WebPass (owned by Google Fiber), it has been nothing but bliss for a fraction of the price and 0% of the bullshit. You should be deeply upset by the fact that Google Fiber is no longer expanding. It is a hit against progress and we are all worse off for it.
That makes it sound like Google was being pushy here, but in reality, ISPs were being intentionally as slow and obtrusive as possible to cripple Google's expansion, which is exactly why Fiber failed. If they were given X days to do something, they would do it on the (x-1)th day on purpose to waste Google's time and delay them as much as possible.
This project reminds me of Google Fiber in that it had a kind of optimism backed by a tremendous amount of capital, both in cash and in goodwill. For fiber, of course I knew about the incumbents. The 1990s were an enormous giveaway to the telecommunications industry in terms of tax breaks in exchange for a nebulous set of promises and, as far as I can tell, no teeth -- what penalties for failure to deliver? They took the money and devoted it to lobbying and eventually as much regulatory capture as they could manage.
We knew going in that it would be tough. And of course infrastructure, physical infrastructure, is tough. You have legal requirements, like permits and easements. You have the "merely" physical task of digging all of these trenches, mile upon mile. You have an huge outlay of equipment, from ordering to configuration and maintenance. You have the relentless horror of the last mile. Most importantly, the competition wouldn't like it. Not one bit. They even spoke of it. I don't think anyone didn't know this going in, but the promise was that Google could and would deliver results because they knew all of this beforehand.
Somehow, despite all of that, it didn't work out, but they were very certain at the time it would. They even managed to convince me and I come with a fairly dour outlook on these kinds of pitches.
This has much the same smell as did Google Fiber. This I can be a little annoyed at because it sounds as if lessons were not learned.
Another rephrasing: it's the big shot in the bar running his mouth, someone says "What about X, Y, Z?" and he goes "Yeah yeah, got it covered." Waves his wallet around. Makes some boasts and some promises. Then it turns out that X, Y, and Z were not so easy as boasted.
And it's a pattern with them.
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-ci...
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.
Alphabet can kind of do this stuff because so far their still growing steadily and a majority of voting shares are with the founders.
So if there is any company I kind of buy, that they didn‘t necessarily have profit as the first priority, it would be Sidewalk Labs. They can always figure that out later.
Worst case they spend a couple hundred millions and nothing came of it. Except many theoretical ideas about city building would have been known to work or not.
Maybe I‘m naive. But imagine you had a gazillion dollars and owned one of the most powerful entities ever. Wouldn‘t you want to try crazy shit that you thought of as a kid. Well Page/Brin can I guess.
And therein lies the problem. If they don't have a business model for profitability then they'll just fall back on the corporate DNA, which is surveillance and tracking for profit.
What's next, Communist Vegans?
>> So even early on in the theorizing of capitalism it was understood that capitalism takes on different market forms and different eras in the context of different technologies. We’ve had mercantile capitalism, and we’ve had factory capitalism, and mass-production capitalism, and managerial capitalism, financial capitalism. And typically what happens in these new concepts is that modifier, like “mass production,” or in my case “surveillance” capitalism, what that modifier is doing is pinpointing the pivot of value creation in this new market form.
> engender anti-surveillance support from anti-capitalists
Every anti-capitalist I know has already been anti-surveillance for a long time.
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/shoshana-zuboff-q-an...