CFE Blog

George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English language” is my suggested summer reading for Toronto city councillors and anyone interested in the ‘smart city’ plan that Sidewalk Labs/Google has proposed for Toronto’s waterfront. This is where you can peruse the multi-volume work, but if plowing through googlespeak for 1500 pages doesn’t appeal, you can instead read the informative ‘

If you care about corporations monetizing data generated by people’s desire to communicate, you may have read worrying stories featuring some of the Google octopus of companies, including Sidewalk Labs, whose ‘smart city’ proposals for Toronto’s waterfront have drawn much critical attention in this blog and elsewhere.

The ‘smart city’ proposal, concocted by Google-affiliated Sidewalk Labs behind the backs not only of citizens but of all our elected officials, was leaked to the Toronto Star on Thursday Feb. 15. 

Sidewalk Labs, a unit of Google’s parent company, with a big assist from Waterfront Toronto, started their career in magic over a year ago. They directed our collective attention to artsy pictures of imaginary buildings and gadgets – and away from anything financial. And anything legal. 

For over a year, Google’s Sidewalk Labs has flooded the Internet with watercolour images of bits of a future ‘smart city’ neighbourhood in Toronto’s Quayside district. But unlike normal developers, Sidewalk Labs has yet to make a complete and formal application to the planning department and city council. And citizens do not have any details about the business plan for the proposed development.

Once upon a time, Waterfront Toronto (WT) was a high-profile public agency that had largely succeeded in combining enthusiastic support for upscale waterfront condos with a progressive civic agenda – no mean feat in an age of increasing political polarization and urban inequality. For example, zoning bylaws for waterfront developments, put in place before any condo building be designed, require at least 20% of affordable housing.