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= Sidewalk Toronto = This work is an addition to the [Sidewalk Toronto] article.

Sidewalk Toronto is an urban planning project that is to be built at Quayside, an undeveloped publicly owned waterfront area along the east lakeshore in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This project began in 2017 when the company Sidewalk Labs won a bid to develop this plot of land under the authority of Waterfront Toronto. Formed in 2015, Sidewalk Labs is a sister company to Google, both are owned by the media conglomerate Alphabet Inc. Daniel Doctoroff, a property developer and former deputy mayor of New York, is the director of Sidewalk Labs and heavily involved with the Sidewalk Toronto project.

The Quayside neighbourhood will be based off of the “smart city” model popular in contemporary urban development. Sidewalk Lab has seven urban innovation areas of focus, they are: Mobility, Housing, Buildings, Public Realm, Sustainability, Social Infrastructure, and Digital Innovation, these seven pillars are the foundation of their project goal. Sidewalk Labs’ goal is to create a technologically advanced, sustainable city that solves the problems of traditional city structures such as transportation, the cost of housing, and environmental sustainability. This project has been met with plenty of criticism, primarily citizens are concerned with the involvement of Google. Many see the involvement of a major technology giant as the infiltration of corporation into the city of Toronto, and many are fearful of the loss of privacy since Sidewalk Labs will be recording citizens data and use it for an unknown purpose. Majority of criticism has focussed on concerns for allowing city planning decisions to be made by a private data-oriented corporation.

Smart Cities
All of the information that has thus far been released about the Sidewalk Toronto project follows a smart city urban planning model. If the project is successfully completed, then Toronto will be home to a city neighbourhood that is grounded in technological and sustainable innovation. There are several problems that face urban development including: housing prices, effective use of space, pollution, transportation. The smart city model is supposed to be the solution to many of these problems. The term smart city refers to projects and planning strategies that combine sustainable and inclusive practices based on the knowledge economy through the distribution of information and communication technologies. Smart cities have primarily three categories of service which differentiate them from other urban models: cyberspace services, smart building services, efficient urban services. In smart cities privacy and public safety are primary concerns in the city planning. There has yet to be a perfect model of a smart city, many of the cities that have attempted to adopt this framework have encountered problems. In order to implement a successful smart city, there will need to be more legal, scientific, and political consideration.

A smart city is described by some urban studies researchers as being practically an empty signifier. This is because a smart city framework can be adapted to suit the needs and the goals of each specific city. Barcelona’s shift towards the smart city paradigm, for example, is framed as a reimagining of the city. The urban environment of Barcelona aims to create a new structural arrangement between environmental flows, objects, and citizens, and ultimately to become a self-sufficient city. The focus in urban development should not be on what a smart city is, but what a smart city does. Meaning, in discussion of smart city development, for example the town hall meetings being held since 2017 to discuss the planning of the Sidewalk Toronto project, individuals should not get caught up in the semantics of smart cities, but on the actual qualities and factors that could be successfully implemented into a city such as Toronto. Keeping in mind what a smart city should do, smart cities such as Toronto should be grounded in technological solutions, governance innovations, and political opportunities.

There are criticisms from within social science scholarship about the prevalence of smart cities in current urban development trends. The majority of cities in Europe and North America are now turning to this model of development to improve their existing cities. These scholars are critical of the smart city agenda as it is often portrayed as being driven by business, primarily an entrepreneurial approach to urban development. In many instances of media conglomerates, such as Google, creating their own campuses and urban utopias they have bought unoccupied land somewhere so as to have free reign over the project. Uniquely in the case of the Sidewalk Toronto project, Sidewalk Labs has chosen to create their urban project within the already existing city structure of Toronto. This complicates the project as they have to contest with government and policy restrictions. They argue that the real problem with the Sidewalk Toronto project is the smart city model itself. There is lots of literature about the concerns with smart cities as many different cities and countries have been trying to adapt this model, and very few have actually been successful.

Smart cities are not a new creation, various version of smart city urbanism have emerged over the 21st Century. Each of these model cities has been branded bigger and better than standard formats. For example, Songdo, owned by Gale International a private real estate developer in New York City emerged as the ideal model for smart city innovation. Songdo was built in Incheon South Korea and has plenty of technical and environmental improvements, including energy sensors, green spaces, and remote touch screen regulations. However, despite its promising improvements, Songdo residents have reported feeling isolated and lonely, and complain the city is unaffordable. Overall very few individuals live in Songdo, and those who do report feeling unhappy and depressed.

Sustainability in the Cities
Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation (TWRC) is built on a framework of sustainability. In their platform the TWRC defines sustainability as the interrelationship and balance of the three pillars of economic development, social growth, and environmental protection. The three-pillar concept of sustainability guides the Sidewalk Toronto project. Sustainability objectives are now very common in urban development plans in European and North American cities. The Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Task Force was created in 1999 by the federal, provincial, and municipal levels of government to begin public efforts at revitalising the waterfront area of Toronto. The waterfront area of Toronto is currently industrial land that is being underutilized considering its coveted and central location, this is why the city of Toronto and the TWRC wishes to recreate this plot of land. The building of a sustainable community in Toronto has a history in government incentives to encourage private sector land development in cities. This is because these private corporations are better able to absorb the potential risk associated with sustainably focused innovative projects.

Development
The organization Waterfront Toronto, a tri-government agency with its own appointed board, held a competition for pitches about what to do with the large plot of land along Toronto’s waterfront. Sidewalk Labs won the pitch in October 2017 with their Sidewalk Toronto pitch. In her article “Tech Billionaires Think SimCity Is Real Life” (2019) by Nicole M. Aschoff quotes Google’s chair Eric Schmidt with regards to the company’s vision of Toronto’s smart city: “all the things [they] could do if someone would give [them] a city and put [them] in charge”. This Quayside neighbourhood will be the first step in a proposed new district in Toronto called the Innovative Design and Economic Acceleration (IDEA) District. The following neighbourhood, River District, would be made up of five neighbourhoods: Villiers West, Villiers East, Keating East, McCleary, and Polson Quay. This proposed neighbourhood will make this project into an unstoppable new kind of urban space that combats the problems that the city of Toronto faces. By 2040, this project claims it will create 44,000 direct jobs and generate $14.2 billion in annual economic impact for Toronto. The Master Innovation Development Plan (MIDP) was created in 2019 through conversations with thousands of Torontonians.

Ken Greenberg is a Toronto-based urbanist, he has been an advisor to Sidewalk Labs since 2015. Quoting Greenberg “Sidewalk’s goal is to explore the way the city is evolving, [and how this] could be enhanced by the use of technology… to solve the problems of the city and enhancing how we do city building”. Greenberg wants to ensure that technology is being used selectively and is only be implemented in the city when it will benefit the citizens and their quality of life. In 2018, there was a series of public talks, roundtables, neighbourhood meetings, pop-up stations, reference panel on planning and policy guideline, design jams, fellowship programs, expert working groups, and summer camps hosted by Sidewalk Labs. Through all of these interactions with Torontonians, Sidewalk Labs sought to engage with Toronto’s citizens to collect and share their ideas, dreams, and fears about the project.

Sidewalk Labs had established its own core principles to guide the project. They state that the Quayside neighbourhood will not have tech for tech’s sake, will respect privacy, believe in open standards, will have strength through diversity, and will engage in continuous discussion with stakeholders throughout development. Sidewalk Labs promised to fund $50 million dollars to the city of Toronto for the project in 2017, but little information was provided about how that money was to be used.

Throughout the projects’ development several of its key planners and organizers have dropped out due to concerns about privacy issues and the lack of transparency that Sidewalk Labs has divulged to the public. Julie Di Lorenzo resigned from the Waterfront’s board due to concerns about Toronto’s independence in the summer of 2018. In the fall of 2018 Saadia Muzaffar, a member of the Waterfront Toronto Digital Strategy Advisory Panel resigned. As did Ontario’s former Information and Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian, who had been working as an advisor to Sidewalk Labs.

Criticism
The Sidewalk Toronto project has received plenty of criticism from concerned Toronto citizens as well as from authorities on urban development and environmental engineering. Sidewalk Labs has hosted multiple townhalls, conducted interviews with Torontonians in order to gather and hear the concerns of citizens and to understand what it is they want from their city. Citizen’s fear that there has been a lack of transparency with the planning development of this project. Many Torontonians feel that Sidewalk Toronto dresses up the project to look innovative and only positive but had not shared any real steps or addressed the concerns citizens have or the potential issues this project could encounter. This concerns many citizens as they feel that their space is being invaded by a conglomerate that will corporatize the independence of Toronto. Sidewalk’s plan to make a city from the “internet up” has many citizens’ concerned as they feel that technology will be implemented just because it can be, not because the technology will actually benefit citizens or improve the quality of living in the city.

Privacy is the primary concern Torontonians have about the Sidewalk Labs project. Plans for the Quayside neighbourhood include facial recognition and tracking the movements of citizens in this city space. Many citizens are concerned that Sidewalk Labs will sell the data they collect to third party agencies who will use the personal data for further capitalist reasons. Sidewalk Labs has stated that they will not be using or selling citizen’s data without their knowledge. However, many citizens are still not reassured as Sidewalk Labs primary business model would have to include some sort of selling of data in order to be viable. If they are not selling data and only selling real state, it is not a lucrative enough venture for Sidewalk Labs to invest billions of dollars to. In October 2018, Sidewalk Toronto announced the suggestion that they would create a civic data trust. This trust would protect the privacy of citizens as a privacy trust would house all of the data recorded by Sidewalk Labs. Information will only be able to be accessed or released based on the discretion of the trust. However, concerns about the structure of a data trust have continued to be raised, as many individuals who oppose the Sidewalk Toronto Project object to the collection of data on principle no matter what is done with the collections. Torontonians object to the very application of Google tracking tools, such as maps and facial recognition, into their city. There are many challenges that arise when cities partner with the private sector. The question of data ownership becomes blurred.

The fight to control urban spaces and the city is indicative of modern life. Billion-dollar conglomerates such as Apple, Google and Amazon hold so much wealth and power that they also are able to control much of political, social and economic life. This allows them the power to enclose and appropriate new spaces, including city spaces. For this reason, Torontonians are concerned about the implications of having the name Google attached to the city development in Toronto. Concerned parties have likened this branding to the Disneyfication that has occurred in other urban experiments such Disney’s Celebration. The town was supposed to be an urban project that was a model for the perfect American town. However due to branding it has become a part of the Disney branding, and became a public attraction under the brand’s umbrella despite the fact the Celebration is a functioning town that is home to many people. Individuals have raised concerns about the effects a Google branding will have on Toronto.

The urbanist Jane Jacobs had several values that were close to her philosophy for the development of city spaces. Jacobs values are streets for people, human-centered design, public realm, neighbourhood well-being, social infrastructure, and inclusive economic development. Sidewalk Labs has associated itself with these values and its plans for development show the company trying to design infrastructurally in a way that separates the project from technology. However, many critics of the Sidewalk Lab project have stated how far from Jane Jacobs’ values the Sidewalk Labs plans stray, they are taking the wellbeing of the human actors out of the development of the Quayside neighbourhood.

#Block Sidewalk
The #BlockSidewalk group stands in opposition to Sidewalk Labs. This group, created by thirty Toronto citizens, leads the charge against the Sidewalk city plan. What started with a small group of concerned citizens has grown into a movement of dozens of organizations and thousands of Torontonians. #BlockSidewalk states on their website’s platform “Development should prioritize city needs, first, not the needs and interests of a private corporation.” The groups’ goals are to educate Toronto citizens about the dangers of smart cities, and on their rights as citizens. The movements ultimate goal is to stop development of the Sidewalk Labs Toronto Waterfront project. The group takes action by using their collective voice to protest the Sidewalk Lab project. They also encourage other citizens to contact their city councillor representative to try and intervene at a municipal level. The #BlockSidewalk website contains every step by step movement in the development of the Sidewalk Toronto project, including all media coverage and directions for how other Toronto citizens can get involved with their movement. #BlockSidewalk is primarily concerned with questions of privacy, as the Sidewalk Toronto development will have facial recognition and surveillance that citizens cannot opt out of. Additionally, the #BlockSidewalk supporters are skeptical about the validity of Sidewalk Labs’ claims that the development will be environmentally sustainable and will build affordable housing for Toronto citizens. A strong voice that has emerged in the Block Sidewalk movement is Bianca Wylie. She has emerged as an advocate for Toronto’s interest and has attended every committee meeting and roundtable, constantly asking for more transparency and answers from Sidewalk Labs. She has stated how deeply it concerns her that it is Sidewalk Lab handling the majority of the communication about the project, including the interactions with the public. Waterfront Toronto is a government funded organization and they are technically in charge of the Sidewalk Toronto project. Wylie believes that Waterfront Toronto’s lack of transparent involvement with the plans' development and their silence at such meetings is indicative of private corporations taking over city spaces and replacing public policy. The axis of Wylie’s argument is that “cities are places people live, not in themselves ground for product-making”. Despite the criticism of smart cities and the plans that Sidewalk Labs has for Toronto, it is a true fact that with or without the help of these giant tech corporations, cities need to be rethought and restructured. Especially with regards to sustainability practices and infrastructure that is inclusive for citizens of various income brackets.

Fuck off Google
German citizens successfully kept Google out of Berlin, when the company tried to build one of their campuses in the city in 2018. Activists, who feared the project would gentrify the neighbourhood and displace citizens, organized a campaign entitled “Fuck Off Google”. #BlockSidewalk is taking notes from this movement and remain hopeful that they will be able to keep Google out of Toronto. Anytime concerned citizens express their anxiety that Google is too big a power to fight, Wylie and the #BlockSidewalk movement remind Torontonians of the success the community in Berlin were able to have in fighting off the giant tech conglomerate. In their article Aschoff states that, “as tech companies quantify and commodify new spheres of life, transforming them into private property, the city, has emerged as a key site in the digital frontier.” Despite successfully stopping Google from building their campus, the Fuck Off Google campaigners are still very active as they have stated that they continue to fear the conglomerates' involvement in their city, due to the size and power of the company. The Fuck off Google organization encourages other cities, including Toronto, to mobilize against the threat of the corporation owned smart city.