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posted by martyb on Saturday June 13 2015, @10:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the Next-up:-Barnyard-Labs-(Woof!-Woof!) dept.

Google CEO Larry Page has announced the launch of Sidewalk Labs, an urban living focused company that is similar in approach to the healthcare and anti-aging Google spinoff Calico:

Page says the new company will be "developing and incubating urban technologies to address issues like cost of living, efficient transportation, and energy usage." Sidewalk Labs will be run by Dan Doctoroff, former CEO of Bloomberg LP and the "Deputy Mayor of Economic Development and Rebuilding" for New York City.

There's a website up and running at sidewalkinc.com, which calls for a rethink of how we design cities. "By 2050, the population in cities will double, intensifying existing socioeconomic, public health and environmental problems. At the same time, innovations in technology can be used to design communities that are more efficient, responsive and resilient."

There's also a press release, that says Sidewalk Labs will work on "making transportation more efficient and lowering the cost of living, reducing energy usage and helping government operate more efficiently" and that it will "develop new products, platforms and partnerships to make progress in these areas." The press release calls out "ubiquitous connectivity and sharing, the internet of things, dynamic resource management and flexible buildings and infrastructure" as technologies it thinks can help with city life.

Sidewalk Labs seems to very closely follow the Calico model, Google's healthcare and anti-aging company: 1) find a leader in an up-and-coming-field (Sidewalk has Doctoroff, Calico has Art Levinson), 2) use Google's vast resources to start a spin-off company with said leader as CEO, and 3) have them work on moonshots. Like Calico, Sidewalk Labs is a separate company from Google and isn't part of Google[x] or any other division—we'd imagine Google has a large ownership stake in the new company, though.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by forkazoo on Saturday June 13 2015, @08:24PM

    by forkazoo (2561) on Saturday June 13 2015, @08:24PM (#195881)

    Well, land use will certainly play a role in it. I imagine mixed use high density urban will be as important as just having more residential land. If all your residential land is capped at two stories and is miles away from jobs and services, then the city will still be a clusterfuck. (See most of Los Angeles, which has lots more residential square miles than San Francisco, but is still very much a clusterfuck.) By moving to a high density mixed use model, you can have tall buildings with lots of retail and office space on the same block. That reduces transportation pressure,w hich means you need to invest less land and money on roads and such.

    Given this is "moonshot" thinking, I'd imagine they want to look at wacky things like no above ground roads so the whole surface is green space, and macroarchitecture where buildings connect at high floors so you can do elevated transit and tend your business while staying entirely above the 20th floor if all your destinations are high up, which reduces elevator trips in high density urban structures, which means more useful space per $ and per square meter of land. Intermixing urban agriculture can reduce the need to import food, which can moderate heavy truck traffic. This is Google. "zoning" won't be the limit of what they wind up trying to push.

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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday June 14 2015, @12:23AM

    It's uncommon that I can pull that off but that's among the reasons I chose Portland.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]