july 8–21, 2019 | new york 65logical and financial tools to make it happen.
In some ways, the Sidewalk vision is that of
a preindustrial city, only more orderly, more
privatized, and with less early death.
And the high-tech material of the digital
city is ... trees. Sidewalk envisions putting up
a wooden skyline, an entire neighborhood
made of mass timber, fabricated in a com-
puterized Toronto mill. That marriage of
digital and timeless technologies is an excit-
ing prospect, which would boost sustainable
forestry, reduce emissions, speed up con-
struction, and yield buildings that smell like
northern forests. Sidewalk hired several
firms—Snøhetta, Heatherwick Studio, and
the mass-timber pioneer Michael Green
Architecture—to demonstrate how a kit of
prefabricated parts can be scrambled into a
varied catalogue of forms.
I hope the site plan acquires more variety
and nuance. It’s not yet architecture, but it’s
already a vast improvement over the usual
wall of waterfront towers. Here, buildings
that range from four to 30 stories curve
around a plaza that faces a marina. The
most antique of the innovative elements is
the stoa. In ancient Greek cities, that was
the public arcade, where citizens (a category
confined to adult men who weren’t enslaved
or foreign born) gathered to trade, talk, eat,
haggle, and politick. Sidewalk has repur-
posed the term to mean a flexible ground-
floor marketplace where shops and food
vendors can set up, expand, and contract—
without being locked into high-cost, long-
term leases. Exterior walls fold up in the
warm months, and plastic awnings deploy
in the rain.
There is a great deal in this vision that no
company or government can promise.
Sure, art studios could coexist with com-
munity meeting spaces and light-
manufacturing workshops—but will they?
Will sneaker chains gobble up prime
square footage and shunt cobblers and gro-
cery stores underground? Will anyone ever
actually move the movable walls? (Does
anyone, anywhere, ever?) Will savings and
affordability materialize? Will the whole
gemütlich lakeside village devolve into
exactly the kind of high-gloss mall that
Quayside was designed to avoid?
The plan, which challenges several layers
of government to get behind it with votes
and money, is an idealistic document. That’s
both exciting and worrisome. Tech compa-
nies regularly utter reams of drivel on uto-
pias as a distraction from their data-
plundering ways. Opponents warn that
Sidewalk, with Google’s might behind it, is
bullying Canada’s democratic institutions
into buying into its priorities. And Doctor-
off, who has been on the government side of
public-private partnerships, knows that
even the best ideas have to stand the test of
politics. His company has tried to inoculate
itself against charges of being anti-
democratic by citing the 21,000 Toronto-
nians who have flocked to community
meetings since the project was announced.
It’s dangling carrots for timid officials, too,
hoping to jump-start a long-discussed
light-rail line by advancing investors
$100 million in future revenue. The last
18 months were a test of how well the com-
pany’s leaders listened; the next six months
will measure their ability to compromise.
So far, the signs are promising. Doctor-
off ’s statement was remarkable for all the
things he said Sidewalk explicitly did not
want to do: develop proprietary technology,
control the broader waterfront area, collect
and sell data, or impose a prepackaged
urban vision on a citizenry with different
ideas. Sidewalk has vowed not to use data
to identify individuals or to sell it to other
companies. Yes, sensors will pick up if you’reshuffling slowly toward an intersection and
instruct the walk light to give you more
time. But you don’t have to worry about
your potential employer noticing that your
pace has fallen off since last week and
maybe you’re not in good-enough shape for
that promotion. Instead, the plan proposes
the creation of a government-run Urban
Data Trust, empowered to decide who col-
lects information about whom and why.
It’s precisely the justified suspicion about
monster corporations like Google that
makes this project important: It puts city
residents in a unique position to shape their
digital future rather than merely respond to
it. Some of the project’s most attention-
getting bells and whistles offer far more than
a frictionless lifestyle. A computerized
garbage-disposal system can cut down on
the need to ship waste to distant landfills.
The planners have given serious thought to
people with disabilities, too. Snow-melting
sidewalks make it possible for the less sure-
footed among us to leave their apartments
after a snowstorm. A network of way- finding
beacons would guide the blind through
tricky, congested terrain. Given that driver-
less cars are coming, it would be far wiser for
cities to design their streets for people thisway and demand that car companies adapt
than to wait and see what kind of road hogs
roll off assembly lines in the coming decades
and then retool streets accordingly.
We often need the next technology to
solve problems created by the slightly older
kind. Online shopping, for instance, has
turned the urban curbside into a mess of
idling engines. When you click complete
order, the question animating the com-
pany that’s rushing your purchase to your
doorstep is this: How can we move millions
of packages to millions of addresses as
cheaply and efficiently as possible? You may
have a completely different question: How
can I get my order delivered tomorrow and
also get rid of the trucks that are constantly
double-parked on my street? The first ques-
tion matters to business, the second to civic
life, and the answer to both may be in the
Quayside model: Semis unload in a vast
cargo-handling facility, where packages are
sorted and distributed by delivery robot.
You get your eBay purchase deposited at
your doorstep, and when you leave your
apartment, the street is quiet and clear.
Still, the master plan jumps from the
12-acre Quayside pilot project directly into
the creation of a much larger district, where
the company’s strategies for financing
affordable housing and manufacturing
wooden buildings could have the space and
scale to succeed. That expansiveness jolted
Waterfront Toronto, the public agency cre-
ated to oversee the development, into issu-
ing a tart warning not to move too fast or
assume too much. A corporation proposes;
government disposes.
Canada’s decisions will be watched
around the world. In theory, Sidewalk’s
ideas can be incubated in Quayside, refined
in the larger eastern waterfront, and
exported to cities everywhere. I wonder,
though, whether the Toronto experience
will actually spawn an uneven scatter of
digitally governed metropolitan islands in
an otherwise analog urban world. Side-
walk’s update of city living may plug right
into Copenhagen, but it’s not clear what it
can do for Lagos or Kolkata.
All this is cause for skepticism and care,
not cynicism and rejection. #BlockSidewalk,
a local organization that is trying to mobi-
lize the same anti-corporate fervor in
Toronto that drove Amazon away from
Long Island City, accuses the company of
“drown[ing] the public in detail.” Another
way to put it is that the company has helped
the public police it, rolling out a mile-long
list of promises and aspirations that politi-
cians and voters can hold it to. Details will
give the new city texture; they are not a dis-
traction but the substance of the plan itself.
Without them, Quayside is just another
megadevelopment deal. ■The site plan
is already a vast
improvement
over the usual
wall of water front
towers.