In the Canadian city of Toronto, city officials are negotiating a project that will give a section of the city's waterfront to the US tech giant Google.
Under the arrangement, Google affiliate Sidewalk Labs will build and run a high-tech "radical mixed-use" site called Quayside.
This "smart city" plan involves creating a neighbourhood "from the internet up", powered and served by data; with sensors monitoring everything from air quality to pedestrian traffic, even the flushing of toilets.
Amenities like garbage disposal and goods delivery are to be coordinated and driven by AI and robotics.
The proposed parcel of land isn't huge, but it's not insubstantial either - it covers about half-a-square-kilometre, and there are already suggestions it could be extended.
Modest test-site, grand ambition
An official launch for the project last October was attended by the city's mayor, the premier of Ontario Province and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Trudeau lavished praise on the project, describing it as an "extraordinarily exciting" development that was destined to become "a model for cities around the world."
Sidewalk Labs, the Prime Minister promised, would transform Quayside into "a thriving hub for innovation and a community for thousands of people" while providing unprecedented opportunities for Canadian innovators.
The Google affiliate has already committed more than USD $50 million to the joint planning and pilot-testing phase, and is currently six months into a public consultation period.
For Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet — the parent company of both Google and Sidewalk Labs — it's the culmination of a long-held ambition.
"Give us a city and put us in charge," he once famously declared.
Among those enthused by the vision is local urban designer, Ken Greenberg. He says the project could ultimately help cities deal more effectively with major urban issues such as waste management, housing affordability and climate attenuation.
"Ultimately what we are really talking about here are concepts and ideas — tools that could be used generally throughout the urban region, and indeed in cities around the world.
"Think of this as a kind of R&D lab to test the validity of some of these ideas and their feasibility."
Urban lab or Guinea-Pig City?
Sceptics are numerous, and nervous.
Following the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, some, like Dr Jathan Sadowski at the University of Sydney, worry about the implications of putting a private tech company in charge of both urban development and urban life.
"What's in it for them? It's data," he says.
"It allows them to get really massive amounts of granular data about urban life and urban environments."
He worries that Canadian politicians are being blinded by tech dollars: "City leaders are looking to get a piece of that, and looking for the tech sector as a way to fight against austerity, as a way to win out in this competition for resources over other cities.
But he questions whether Toronto will gain any useful insights from the data collected by Google.
One of the biggest criticisms of the project involves transparency. Despite talk of an extensive public consultation process, those opposing the project say details have been scant, and there's been more hype than clarity.
"So far, they've been given the benefit of the doubt by the media, the general public and more or less all concerned," says London-based author and urbanist, Adam Greenfield.
He points out that tech companies like Google have a track record of opaque dealings and non-transparent operations.
"I think it behoves everyone involved to start asking questions about precisely what it is that's on the table. What are they proposing to do? I think there is an extraordinary lack of clarity about that, to date."
Concerns for democracy
Jason Sadowski also worries about the precedent that might be set for the rights of citizens in a democracy.
Allowing Sidewalk Labs to have charge of civic planning and urban managing, he says, risks eroding the "public good" priorities traditionally associated with city management.
"You'll have a city that's based on, or built around, proprietary platforms, data harvesting, corporate control.
"It really gets to issues around sovereignty, around accountability, and what the public good means and who is to deliver the public good."
Even Ken Greenberg, who has worked as an advisor to the project since 2015, says Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto have a responsibility to ensure that the project prioritises the needs of citizens.
His involvement, he says, has been predicated on ensuring that human values are not "submerged by the technology".
"I think that's a very critical aspect, and part of this initial formulation of the proposal is focused on those issues of consent and privacy and the anonymity of data. So this is really top of mind, I think, for people in Toronto."
A final decision on approval for the project won't be made until later this year.
Long-term critic of the smart-city concept, Adam Greenfield, says even if the project is given a green light, history shows there's no guarantee of success.
"Generally speaking, installations of network-technology at the scale of the city fail to benefit the public in the way that we are promised.
"We just see this time and time again. They invariably fall short of the very aggressive claims that are made for them."
He cites South Korea's New Songdo City and Masdar in Abu Dhabi as prime examples, both of which failed to live up to their original futuristic-city promise.
"It's really, really hard to assess, certainly in any particularly concrete way, whether technologies that are deployed in this way have ever benefited anybody but the people selling them. They don't seem to shed any greater benefit upon the public."
Future Tense sought an interview with a representative of Sidewalk Labs, but was unsuccessful.
Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-31/concerns-over-google-city-in-toronto/9815446