Sidewalk Toronto

Waterfront Toronto holds the right to develop the eastern downtown area of the Toronto waterfront, as the directing agency of the waterfront lands. In March 2017, Waterfront Toronto issued a request for proposal (RFP) to solicit bids for an "Innovation and Funding Partner" that would assist the organization with the planning for the future development of 4.9 hectares (12 acres) mixed-use mixed-income project called the Quayside development.[3]^: 6 The development was envisioned as a pilot project for Toronto's future urban planning as a world-class city. The RFP set objectives to meet C40 Climate Positive sustainability, test cleantech building materials, provide 500–800 units of affordable rental housing, establish a complete community with open public spaces and strong links to adjacent neighbourhoods, develop information infrastructures to aid decision-making and attract innovative businesses and talent, and secure funding and investment partnerships. The innovation and funding partner was expected to invest from short-term pre-development research and planning, and could be offered the opportunity to continue to work with Waterfront Toronto in future phases of work, helping to fund infrastructure and pilot projects.[3]^: 6–8

Sidewalk Labs won the RFP in October 2017 and officially launched Sidewalk Toronto. According to their press release, their plan was to "design a new kind of mixed-use, complete community" and apply new digital technology to "create people-centered neighborhoods". Sidewalk Labs committed US$50 million to work with Waterfront Toronto to develop a plan for the Quayside neighbourhood and test pilot projects that could potentially be used in Toronto or elsewhere. They began working on a Master Innovation and Development Plan (MIDP) to form the basis for the Quayside development.[4]

Sidewalk Labs' bid had proposed features such as roads optimized for self-driving vehicles, creation of a testbed for developing future urban planning ideas, and fully integrated physical and digital layers of the urban system. As envisioned, this digital layer would make the physical infrastructure – buildings, transportation infrastructure, utility infrastructure, and public realm – more adaptable and efficient, it would manage a repository of data and provide an application programming interface for third-party developers.[5] As the planning work progressed, there was an interest in relocating Google's Canadian headquarters to Quayside, and creating 2,500 net new jobs at Google Canada.

Sidewalk Labs' RFP submission envisioned urban planning in five layers. These were the physical layers of utility infrastructure, transportation infrastructure, the public realm and buildings, plus a digital layer which enabled the physical layers to be more efficient and adaptable. According to the proposal:[5]

• Utility channels below the public spaces would house conduits for electric wires, waste, and water, and allow access for maintenance without disrupting roadways or public spaces. The waste management system would use autonomous trash collection robots and a pay-as-you-throw metering system to incentivize reduced consumption.
• Buildings would use a proposed outcome-based zoning system. A system of embedded sensors providing real-time monitoring and automated regulation would allow the zoning code in the mixed-use environment to be changed dynamically, according to criteria such as maximum noise level or air quality.
• Transportation infrastructure is planned around adaptive roads and street lights. A self-driving electric shuttle is anticipated to make the streets safer and pedestrian-friendly.
• The public realm was proposed to use a "robust system of asset monitoring" to track usage patterns and change the usage designation on demand, such as temporarily changing bicycle lanes to a pedestrian laneway.

According to Sidewalk, deep integration of the digital layer demonstrates their aspiration about making a city "from the internet up".[8] However, because Sidewalk Labs' parent company is owned by Alphabet Inc., a giant technology company and produces profits using internet traffic-related advertisement, there have been numerous critics concerned of Orwellian privacy control.[9] As a result of continuous criticism about the privacy of residents and commodification of data collection, Sidewalk Labs shifted their direction for constructing the digital layer, introducing the concept of a civic data trust.

In an October 2018 press release, Sidewalk Labs renounced the right to own information generated from Quayside. The release argued that "urban data" – community data de-identified of personal information – should be considered as a public asset and be freely available. They proposed that the data should be owned and managed by an independent civic data trust, which would steward the data collected in the physical layers of the planned development, and approve and control its collection and dissemination. The proposed trust would be guided by a charter ensuring that data is collected and used in a way that is beneficial to the community, protects privacy, and spurs innovation and investment. If a company wanted to collect or use the data for more proprietary or commercial purposes, or it required personally-identifiable information, approval should be required from the trust.[10]

Sidewalk Labs provided examples of data repositories in other cities: In Barcelona, collected data is pooled into a central repository and access is managed by the city; in Estonia, companies store their own collected data but make it available via standardized protocols.

In November 2019, Sidewalk Labs delivered a Digital Innovation Appendix" to provide real-world examples and flesh out data governance plans for the project, including "responsible artificial intelligence" guidelines and data minimization and de-identification by default. They also incorporated feedback giving Waterfront Toronto the lead on data governance, rather than an independent Urban Data Trust.[11] In February 2020, Waterfront Toronto endorsed 144 of 160 innovation proposals from Sidewalk Labs, saying the other 16 could be dropped, altered or replaced.[12] Waterfront Toronto's advisory panel said it was premature to provide advice, and still had questions about the feasibility of some innovations proposed within the project. They wanted more clarity on the benefits that might justify the proposed collection and use of data.[13][14] They requested additional context for Sidewalk Toronto's earlier allegations regarding data security.

A final decision on whether the project can proceed was pushed back from March 2020 to June 25.[12][15]

According to open-government advocate Bianca Wylie, the fundamental problem of this project is the smart city model itself. She argues that the model is formulated because "corporations are seeking to exert influence on urban spaces and democratic governance".[16] She claims that not just Sidewalk Labs, but elected officials and politicians of Toronto considered the plan as a way of boosting the economy and brand the city as a world leader supported by a leading tech company.[17] Moreover, she argues that these kinds of development projects, especially digital government projects, have been considered as stable financial revenue for the companies involved. By embedding a technical product in a government system, it would be extremely difficult to pull out from the system, thus making the government market highly attractive.[18]

There have also been various criticisms about the proposed civic data trust. Opposing the argument that de-identified data is safe to be publicly available, a study published in Science has found that de-identified data can be de-anonymized when a dataset is associated with different datasets.[19] Even if the data does remain de-identifiable, the question of data ownership remains; only the managing entity was changed. If a company gained access to that public data, then only the company would earn the revenue. The producers of the data are external to those considerations.[18]

In November 2019, in response to feedback, the proposal for data governance was shifted from recommending an independent Urban Data Trust, to vesting authority in the existing Waterfront Toronto government partnership.[11]