from the all-the-better-to-watch-you-with,-my-dear dept.
Google Is Building a City of the Future in Toronto. Would Anyone Want to Live There?
TORONTO—Even with a chilly mid-May breeze blowing off Lake Ontario, this city's western waterfront approaches idyllic. The lake laps up against the boardwalk, people sit in colorful Adirondack chairs and footfalls of pedestrians compete with the cry of gulls. But walk east, and the scene quickly changes. Cut off from gleaming downtown Toronto by the Gardiner Expressway, the city trails off into a dusty landscape of rock-strewn parking lots and heaps of construction materials. Toronto's eastern waterfront is bleak enough that Guillermo del Toro's gothic film The Shape of Water used it as a plausible stand-in for Baltimore circa 1962. Says Adam Vaughan, a former journalist who represents this district in Canada's Parliament, "It's this weird industrial land that's just been sitting there—acres and acres of it. And no one's really known what to do with it."
That was before Google.
This past October, a coalition of the Toronto, Ontario and Canadian governments contracted with Sidewalk Labs, a sister company of Google, to come up with a $50 million design for a dozen acres on the waterfront's far eastern end. The idea is to reimagine Toronto's derelict waterfront as "the world's first neighborhood built from the internet up," as Sidewalk describes it. The neighborhood, called Quayside, would leapfrog the usual slow walk of gentrification to build an entire zone, all at once, as a "smart city," a sensor-enabled, highly wired metropolis that can run itself.
Toronto's choice of the Google-affiliated firm immediately captured the attention of urban planners and city officials all over the world; magazine stories trumpeted "Google's Guinea-Pig City" and "A Smarter Smart City." Still in its early days, the partnership has left people curious but wary. Google? What does a tech company know about running a real live city?
In one sense, what's perhaps surprising is that it has taken this long. Silicon Valley's innovators have long had side obsessions with making the world a better place, driven largely by the confidence that their own brainpower and a near-total disregard for tradition can break old logjams. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel helped seed the "seasteading" movement to create offshore libertarian paradises; the tech incubator YCombinator is currently running a public-policy experiment in Oakland, California, giving residents a guaranteed monthly stipend to see how it might improve their quality of life.
Related Stories
Sidewalk Labs is under pressure to explain its smart city dream
Sidewalk Labs, the part of Alphabet focused on smart cities, is behind schedule. The company had planned to publish its grand vision for Quayside, a 12-acre site on Toronto's industrial waterfront, in the fall of 2018. Last June, however, the first version of its crucial Master Innovation and Development Plan (MIDP) was pushed back to early 2019. "It will be a comprehensive document, but still a work-in-progress," a press release clarified at the time. A complete MIDP would then be published in "spring 2019," the company said, following a public roundtable.
The draft version of the MIDP is yet to materialize. And for many, it's been an agonizing wait. Waterfront Toronto, a public steward created by the Canadian government, announced its search for an innovation and funding partner back in March 2017. Sidewalk Labs put its name forward with a beautiful "vision" document that suggested, among other head-turning ideas, buildings made from timber, a flexible thermal grid and subterranean tunnels for deliveries and garbage disposal. The company won the bid in October and has spent the past 18 months researching those ideas, consulting with experts and gathering public feedback.
[...] On Tuesday, a group of concerned citizens launched #BlockSidewalk, a campaign dedicated to informing the public "what the project is, and why it should be reset." Julie Beddoes, a waterfront resident and #BlockSidewalk supporter, told reporters at city hall, "In Toronto, [Sidewalk Labs] is aiming to take over the functions of government -- do we really need a coup d'état to get transit and nice paving stones?"
Previously: Google Launches "Sidewalk Labs" Spinoff Company
Toronto's Eastern Waterfront: Google's City of the Future?
Sidewalk Toronto Has Only One Beneficiary, and It Is not Toronto
Related: How Pervasive is Google in our Online Life?
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @12:27AM (2 children)
Why? Why was this happening? Why was this happening to Jeraldson, a profoundly kind gentleman? Why!? He had only wanted to fulfill his heart's most earnest desire. Was that so bad? And then this happened...
That's right. Jeraldson only wanted to rape in peace. Yet this woman - no, this filthy sow - dared to destroy the peace by coughing out blood, which she had absolutely no right to do. "How dare you! How dare you!!!" screamed Jeraldson, as he rapidly slammed his fists of justice into key parts of the nude woman's body. As this was happening, the woman coughed, spasmed, and gurgled even more, thereby violating Jeraldson's fundamental rights even further. Still, the fists did not stop, for Jeraldson knew he had to vanquish this evil there and then!
It didn't take long at all for the sow to become eternally silent. But, even so, Jeraldson's hopes and dreams had already been irrevocably shattered. When will the grotesque oppression of men finally come to an end...?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @12:43AM (1 child)
Tiresome and lame. Some of us have been on the internet for decades, there's nothing shocking or offensive any more -- try a SJW community.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @01:54AM
It's probably some 40 year trailer trash dude that can only get laid by taking off his glove, and only needs his thumb and index finger because he has microscopic dick.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @01:12AM (1 child)
Let's see what Google's proximity to Toronto does for their real estate and rent prices. Here's a hint: add a zero.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @02:07AM
Toronto housing is already overpriced thanks to the Chinese that overpriced themself (well they cause a tax on foreign housing ownership) out of Vancouver so the market in Toronto got red hot... I don't think that the Google thingy will have the effect you think
(Score: 1) by lars on Wednesday July 11 2018, @01:45AM (5 children)
The reason there is a bunch of abandoned industrial stuff there is that Toronto purposely ejected all industry to the suburbs with tax hikes. It can't be developed on since it is built on polluted landfill. I know the area well, grew up within walking distance.
Traffic is horrible, stop and go on the highway at midnight, there is even bicycle traffic jams on some streets in the morning. Public transit is painfully slow compared to other cities, with a tiny subway, and expensive (cash fare $3.75, monthly pass $146.25, gas +insurance for a motorcycle is a lot cheaper/faster)
Good luck finding a house for under $600k.
Want a job where you can work with your hands? Not in Toronto. I wish I had left earlier. Only good thing it has going on is restaurants.
Oh, car insurance is about 4x as much.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @02:12AM
600k will get you are deep in the suburbs, the center of Ford's Nation..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @04:08PM (1 child)
You think anyone at Google works with their hands?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @10:00PM
Gotta figure that -somebody- there is building the prototypes. [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday July 12 2018, @12:47AM (1 child)
The only good thing in Toronto are the restaurants? ;-)
I wonder if the radioactive dust from Fukushima have made any impact yet? because the Japanese did the smart thing to burn stuff from the accident and the winds did the rest.
Any recommendations on good locations in Canada despite bill C-16?
(Score: 1) by lars on Thursday July 12 2018, @11:12PM
I'm in Kingston, seems the right size for a city to me. Country is bicycle distance, affordable house prices, a younger city thanks to the University/military means more night life then is normal for a city its size. Being on Lake ontario means the weather gets moderated cooler during the summer, warmer during the winter.
Montreal is nice, it was my first choice before I found a really sweet job here.
West coast is pricey, I'd go to the East coast if being on the coast is your bag. Not sure about job market.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @03:32AM (1 child)
Apparently the terms are interchangeable.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday July 11 2018, @03:40AM
oops
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday July 11 2018, @02:50PM (1 child)
Planned communities are not new. How can anyone who's older than 13 think they are? Early European settlers in the American Colonies formed communes based on religious principles. They failed. At the opening of the 20th century, modernism spawned several approaches to planned communities; Marxism was essentially that, figuring technocrats could better plan how society could fulfill its material needs than markets could. Nazis came up with eugenics to scientifically plan the perfect people for the perfect future world. Modernists came up with ideas like "city as machines" and produced wonderful, big empty glass boxes that devolved into pits of crime and despair. When I was a kid Disneyworld had a display on Walt Disney's "City of the Future." In the 90's, I think it was, Microsoft tried to build such a city in Florida based on MS's technology.
World's Fairs have famously come out with many flavors of technotopias, from autotopias, to ones where everything was made of plastic, to others where everything was atomic powered.
Sadly, engineers do not have a record of engineering perfect human societies. Often, the results have been nightmarish, because engineers have a famously low tolerance for human imperfection, and, given the power to do so, are quite tempted to eliminate human imperfection by eliminating the humans who carry the imperfections.
Google shall do no better, and since they dropped "Don't be evil" from their motto I refuse to even let them try.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @10:21PM
Early European settlers in the American Colonies formed communes based on religious principles. They failed
The Shakers were a thing for well over a century.
So, clearly, "failed" is relative.
Now, just imagine how many of them there would be today if they didn't have a no sex rule.
The genders were housed separately and the men and women only got together to dance, which was their form of worship (thus, their name).
The sexes didn't touch each other when dancing either.
While their communally-owned means of production thing worked and holds an appear for some to this day, the dried-up old prune who founded that religion and her extreme prudishness by and large do not.
BTW, goods produced by The Shakers are still prized.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]