Alphabet’s ‘Sidewalk Labs’ Addresses City Issues
Date Posted: December 11, 2019
Posted In: Discussion, Ideas,
From Smart Cities Dive: Alphabet-owned Sidewalk Labs is promising a bright future for Toronto’s city dwellers by solving today’s urban pain points like congestion, affordable housing, long commutes and extreme weather.
The company plans to address these issues with Quayside, its futuristic city to be built on Toronto’s waterfront. The company, which hopes to secure $38 billion in investments by 2040, and its plans for the Toronto community are designed to disrupt five key pillars of a smart city: job creation and economic development; housing affordability; sustainability and climate-positive development; new mobility; and urban innovation.
“We want to emphasize the things that makes cities great: the people, the density, the creative friction; while trying to reduce the challenges of urban growth,” Sidewalk Labs told Smart Cities Dive in a written statement.
Despite the innovation represented in these plans, Sidewalk Labs’ futuristic city visions have also stirred up a fair amount of controversy and backlash, particularly over privacy concerns. In response to that pushback, Sidewalk Labs recently pledged not to sell the personal data that it collects at its Quayside project in Toronto, or leverage the data for advertising. The company said that each use of technology would be for a “beneficial purpose.”
But many opponents remain concerned about Sidewalk Labs’ seemingly unfettered access into people’s lives. And a recent article by The Globe and Mail seemed to compound those fears by unveiling a confidential document from 2016 that details how Sidewalk Labs’ planned to track the movements of residents and goods, and even outlined how residents would be granted access to certain spaces based on how much data they provide, or rewarding them for “good behavior.”