What Sidewalk Labs Got Right

Reflections on the fifth anniversary

Almost exactly five years ago—on 7 May 2020—Sidewalk Labs' plan to build ‘Quayside’, a neighbourhood of the future on Toronto's eastern waterfront, came to an end.

Sidewalk Labs was a Google subsidiary (or ‘Alphabet company’) that aimed to bring the best of urban design and the best of new technology together, in an integrated fashion, to make cities the best they could be: simultaneously more affordable, more sustainable, and more liveable. Having won a contract to develop part of the Toronto waterfront, Sidewalk arrived in the city in 2017 with great fanfare, and for a few years the firm and its plans were everyone’s favourite subject. Some loved it, most liked it, but a vocal few hated it; critics mistrusted Sidewalk as an American Big Tech firm out to steal Toronto’s precious data (for unspecified reasons). In the end Sidewalk terminated the project in the early days of the Covid pandemic; the firm itself wound up not long afterwards.

It’s only been five years on the calendar, of course. In terms of cultural change, it’s been much longer than that. Beyond the pandemic, we’ve lived through mask and vaccine mandates, inflation, excitement and fear about AI, and the shock-and-awe of the second Trump administration. As a consequence, the fears that Sidewalk provoked seem antiquated now. The screeds condemning the firm seem as dated as screeds condemning Dreyfus.

As Sidewalk’s former Associate Director of Mobility, and as I liked to style myself the ‘Toronto mobility lead’ for the project, I regret that Sidewalk’s Quayside project is yesterday’s news.