64 new york | july 8–21, 2019
when the highest of high-tech master plans for Toronto’s waterfront,
issued by Google’s sibling company Sidewalk Labs, arrived at my doorstep,
I laughed. As I first riffled through the “Urban Innovations” section of the four-volume,
1,600-page boxed set (which you can also download), I came across a proposal for “light-
weight, adjustable street furniture”—a.k.a. market stalls. There’s even a photograph of
Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori, where these modular artichoke- and eggplant-vending plat-
forms pop up every morning and get stowed away by midafternoon, just as they have for
centuries. Awesome technology!
As I sat and read, though, it became clear that this forward-to-the-past approach is not
a gaffe or a ploy but a goal. Billed as a data- crunching techno-utopia, Sidewalk’s vision for
Quayside, the first 12-acre parcel of Toronto’s much vaster eastern waterfront, distills
old-city principles and revives them for the digital age. Streets are designed around
gasoline-free forms of transit: feet, wheelchairs, bicycles, and trolleys. Instead of having
roads coated in asphalt that must be constantly jackhammered up, relaid, and patched,
Quayside will have large hexagonal pavers that can be popped out and dropped back into
architecture / movies / popplace—essentially, oversize cobblestones.
It’s fascinating to see a software-powered
universe come to grips with the physical
world. The result is better than we had any
reason to expect. Sidewalk’s CEO is Daniel
Doctoroff, the deputy mayor under Michael
Bloomberg who bequeathed to New York
his signature project, Hudson Yards. Far
from being the sequel to that district of glass
megatowers, though, Quayside is the new
city that Hudson Yards might have been:
mixed, flexible, and humane. This is a mega-
development organized not only around a
corporate ledger, a politician’s ambitions, or
a tech guru’s fantasies—though all those
desires are in the mix—but also around a set
of thoroughly road-tested urban needs. At
Hudson Yards, financial mechanisms dic-
tated what could be built. In Abu Dhabi’s
showcase, Masdar City, technological goals
dictated what should be built. Quayside, on
the other hand, turns the paradigm around,
first determining what kind of place people
want to live in, then designing the techno- PHOTOGRAPH: SIDEWALK LABSThe CULTURE PAGESCRITICS
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ARCHITECTURE / JUSTIN DAVIDSON