"Google wants to build a city" (GOOG)

From StateScoop, May 4:

Sidewalk Labs — Google parent company Alphabet's urban innovation arm — unveils a plan for constructing its own metropolis for testing smart city and connected technologies at scale.

Sidewalk Labs, which Google kickstarted almost two years ago, may soon develop a “large-scale district” to serve as a living laboratory for urban innovation technologies, Dan Doctoroff, founder and CEO of the company, said at the Smart Cities NYC conference Thursday.

The company is having conversations now with city leaders across the country, Doctoroff said. While nothing is final, Sidewalk Labs could hold a competition — similar to the one held by the U.S. Department of Transportation last year — to spur excitement from leaders who want to make their cities smarter, while also providing a national model for what the cities of tomorrow look like.

“The future of cities lies in the way these urban experiences fit together and improve quality of life for everyone living, working and growing up in cities across the world,” Doctoroff said. “Yet there is not a single city today that can stand as a model — or even close — for our urban future.”

This city would be “built from the internet up,” Doctoroff said, and would test the theories and models that the company has asserted since its creation.

“We’ve found that applying urban innovations at scale could reduce cost of living by 14 percent compared to surrounding metro areas for an average family in America,” Doctoroff said.
But the focus on building a city like the one Google envisions goes beyond just reducing cost of living — construction would center around altering five “urban experiences” through the use of technology:

• Housing and real estate
• Transportation
• Environmental sustainability
• A new “public realm”
• Data-driven city services

Housing and real estate
The company would partner with construction and technology companies to investigate the feasibility of modular housing — pre-made portions of housing units — embedded with sensors that track structural health. The modular housing would be designed with the resident’s space usage needs in mind and made replicable to other spaces across the globe.

The approach could reduce construction costs by up to 30 percent, Doctoroff said.

Transportation
Doctoroff called for a “mobility system that is more convenient than the private automobile” and involved a mix of ridesharing, public transit, driverless cars, walking and cycling.

Once again, by eliminating the existing constraints on public transit — which Doctoroff said are often big limitations on funding and use — a newly-built city environment like the one Sidewalk is proposing would not be inhibited by these restraints.

“When you combine these advances, you get a mobility system that’s every bit as convenient as a private car, while saving families thousands of dollars a year,” Doctoroff said.

Environmental sustainability
The city would set “a new standard of sustainability,” Doctoroff said, by implementing thermal transfer technologies to save on heating and cooling costs and cut down on wasted energy.

New water pipe systems would help residents save and reuse non-potable water, and sensor-enabled garbage shoots would reduce solid waste by automatically separating trash, recyclables and compostable materials.

A new ‘public realm’
Sidewalks, parks and in-person experiences define life within a city, Doctoroff said.
“New York City and every great city is lived in its parks and spaces that we share, but that space is often limited by water, vehicles in traffic and poor maintenance,” Doctoroff said. “How can technology improve it?”

Echoing back to the transportation urban experience, he suggested self-driving vehicles would help return city space to cyclists and pedestrians. Alongside other technologies, they could “double the amount of public space per capita.”

Advances in plastics and retractable canopies could improve quality of life in cities, covering pedestrians or cyclists while on the roads. Sensor arrays – like Chicago’s Array of Things — can monitor air quality and assess conditions and usage in public spaces, making it easier for cities to respond to public needs.

Data-driven city services
None of the technologies included in Sidewalk Labs proposed city environment would be possible, Doctoroff said, without an infrastructure backbone for connectivity....MORE

StateScoop, for all your state and local government IT news.

Previously:
April 2017 
"Alphabet is plotting a digital city full of Google cars, high-speed Internet and maybe more!" (GOOG)

Dec. 2016  
"Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs is eyeing a contest to build its own internet city" (GOOG)
Here's Google's Sidewalk Labs' Pitch To Insert Itself Into America’s Urban Transportation Infrastructure (GOOG)
No, Google's Sidewalk Labs Doesn't Want To Take Over Urban Transit. Yet. (GOOG)
No, they have bigger plans.
There is big money and big politics behind this stuff and this June 2016 article is a good primer on what's coming....

July 2016
"Google’s sister company wants to be in charge of public transportation"
January 2016 
"2016 Google Tracker: Everything Google is working on for the new year" (now mit umlauts and not just in the Hästkött)

Money, Murder and Sadomasochism: A Look At the L.A. Tech Scene

"Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs is eyeing a contest to build its own internet city" (GOOG)

From The Verge, Nov. 30:

‘A living laboratory for urban technology’

For months, it was rumored that Sidewalk Labs, the Google spinoff focused on smart city solutions, wanted to build its own city-within-a-city to trial self-driving cars, public Wi-Fi, new health care solutions, and other city planning advances that modern technology makes possible. Today, the company confirmed that it was indeed interested in creating its own urban district “from the internet up,” and hinted that it may even make a contest out of it.

Dan Doctoroff, CEO of Sidewalk Labs, made it official in a Medium post today celebrating the company’s first year in existence. In it, he claims that by experimenting with new technologies in “real-world conditions,” there is the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to two-thirds, shorten commutes by an hour, and slash the cost of living for local residents by as much as 14 percent.

“A large-scale district holds great potential to serve as a living laboratory for urban technology  —  a place to explore coordinated solutions, showcase innovations, and establish models for others to follow,” Doctoroff writes.

He credits “internet rumors” with fueling heightened interest in Sidewalk Labs’ urban experiment. Indeed, the rumor mill has been churning about a mythical “Google Island” since even before the company spun-off Sidewalk Labs as its smart city incubator. This led to speculation that Sidewalk Labs was looking to purchase land on which to build a planned community that could house thousands of people. But in his essay, Doctoroff dismissed the idea of a walled-off district separated from the wider city. 

“Whatever we do, we know the world doesn’t need another plan that falls into the same trap as previous ones: treating the city as a high-tech island rather than a place that reflects the personality of its local population,” he said....MORE 

Recently:

Here's Google's Sidewalk Labs' Pitch To Insert Itself Into America’s Urban Transportation Infrastructure (GOOG)

"No, Google's Sidewalk Labs Doesn't Want To Take Over Urban Transit. Yet."

No, they have bigger plans.
There is big money and big politics behind this stuff and this June 2016 article is a good primer on what's coming.

As former Deputy Mayor to Michael Bloomberg, Doctoroff pretty much epitomizes the intersection of big money/big politics. That Medium post is not quite a blueprint but interesting nonetheless.

"Google’s plan to revolutionise cities is a takeover in all but name"

From the Guardian:

Parent company Alphabet would provide services in response to data harvested

Last June Volume, a leading magazine on architecture and design, published an article on the GoogleUrbanism project. Conceived at a renowned design institute in Moscow, the project charts a plausible urban future based on cities acting as important sites for “data extractivism” – the conversion of data harvested from individuals into artificial intelligence technologies, allowing companies such as Alphabet, Google’s parent company, to act as providers of sophisticated and comprehensive services. The cities themselves, the project insisted, would get a share of revenue from the data.

Cities surely wouldn’t mind but what about Alphabet? The company does take cities seriously. Its executives have floated the idea of taking some struggling city – Detroit? – and reinventing it around Alphabet services, with no annoying regulations blocking this march of progress.

All of this might have looked counter-intuitive several decades ago, but today, when institutions such as the World Bank preach the virtues of privately run cities and bigwigs in Silicon Valley aspire to build sea-based micronations liberated from conventional bureaucracy, it does not seem so far-fetched.

Alphabet already operates many urban services: city maps, real-time traffic information, free wifi (in New York), self-driving cars. In 2015 it launched a dedicated city unit, Sidewalk Labs, run by Daniel Doctoroff, former deputy mayor of New York and a veteran of Wall Street.

Doctoroff’s background hints at what the actual Google Urbanism – as opposed to its theoretical formulations – portends: using Alphabet’s data prowess to build profitable alliances with other powerful forces behind contemporary cities, from property developers to institutional investors.

On this view, Google Urbanism is anything but revolutionary. Yes, it thrives on data and sensors, but they only play a secondary role in determining what gets built, why, and at what cost. One might as well call it Blackstone Urbanism – in homage to one of the largest financial players in the property market.

Since Toronto has recently chosen Alphabet to turn Quayside, a 12-acre undeveloped waterfront area, into a digital marvel, it wouldn’t take long to discover whether Google Urbanism will transcend or accommodate the predominantly financial forces shaping our cities.

Sidewalk Labs has committed $50m to the project – mostly for hosting a year-long consultation after which either party can exit. Its 220-page winning bid provides fascinating insights into its thinking and methodology. “High housing costs, commute times, social inequality, climate change and even cold weather keeping people indoors” – such is the battlefield Doctoroff described in a recent interview.

Alphabet’s weapons are impressive. Cheap, modular buildings to be assembled quickly; sensors monitoring air quality and building conditions; adaptive traffic lights prioritising pedestrians and cyclists; parking systems directing cars to available slots. Not to mention delivery robots, advanced energy grids, automated waste sorting, and, of course, ubiquitous self-driving cars....MUCH MORE

HT: FT Alphaville's Further Reading post

Previously on the Sidewalk:
"Sidewalk Labs’ bid to build a smart city hub in Toronto may soon be a reality" (GOOG)

"Google wants to build a city" (GOOG)

"Alphabet is plotting a digital city full of Google cars, high-speed Internet and maybe more!" (GOOG)  

Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs is eyeing a contest to build its own internet city (GOOG)

As former Deputy Mayor to Michael Bloomberg, Doctoroff pretty much epitomizes the intersection of big money/big politics. That Medium post is not quite a blueprint but interesting nonetheless. 

No, Google's Sidewalk Labs Doesn't Want To Take Over Urban Transit. Yet. 

No, they have bigger plans.
There is big money and big politics behind this stuff and this June 2016 article is a good primer on what's coming.

Here's Google's Sidewalk Labs' Pitch To Insert Itself Into America’s Urban Transportation Infrastructure (GOOG)

"Google’s sister company wants to be in charge of public transportation"

"2016 Google Tracker: Everything Google is working on for the new year" (now mit umlauts and not just in the Hästkött)

Money, Murder and Sadomasochism: A Look At the L.A. Tech Scene 

"The Google city that has angered Toronto" (GOOG)

Yes, yes Alphabet.
Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs. Stupid name, Alphabet.
From the BBC:

It was meant to be a vision of how we will all live in future - a smart city built from the internet up - offering citizens the chance to experience the very latest technology.

That would include autonomous cars, innovative ways to collect rubbish and shared spaces for communities to come together in new ways.

Sidewalk Labs, a sister company to Google, had earmarked disused land in Toronto, Canada for this bold urban experiment, which it hoped would become a model for other cities around the world.

The fact that it would be collecting a lot of data from sensors placed all around the harbourside development unsettled some.
Now many are asking whether a private firm should take charge of urban improvement at all.

Radical mix
The project was announced to much fanfare in 2017 and the partnership between Sidewalk Labs and Toronto Waterfront, the agency charged with revitalising the area, promised great things.
Led by Dan Doctoroff, ex-deputy mayor of New York, working with a team of both government and digital experts, Sidewalk Labs promised a radical mix of offices, retail and makerspaces with a green agenda, robots and underground waste disposal. It would be, said Mr Doctoroff, a happy place to live.

Mr Doctoroff was due to speak at the TED conference, hosted on the other side of Canada in Vancouver, in April.
He cancelled his appearance at short notice. Meanwhile, back in Toronto, a group of citizens called Block Sidewalk held its inaugural meeting.

And none of the people attending seemed particularly happy, according to organiser Bianca Wylie.
She told the BBC that those gathered had a range of concerns, from the lack of transparency in the way Toronto Waterfront had awarded the contract to Sidewalk Labs, to doubts about whether the firm has a proven track record in delivering such an ambitious project.

There were also concern about what the company was planning to do with the area in the long term.
"This group was formed because leaked documents in the Toronto Star suggested Sidewalk Labs had a far grander vision than the 12-acre (48,500-sq m) site it had talked about. We were concerned that we were not getting transparency," Ms Wylie told the BBC.

The article she refers to alleged that the Google-affiliate wanted to build a much bigger neighbourhood at Quayside and provide new transport for it.

In return for its investment it wanted a share of property taxes, development fees and increased value of city land that would normally go to the city....MUCH MORE

"Are New York’s Free LinkNYC Internet Kiosks Tracking Your Movements?" (GOOG)

Good ideas gone whack-job.
Or, as a hard-bitten, some might say cynical, journo once wrote:

"The Urge to Save Humanity is Almost Always 

Only a False-Face for the Urge to Rule It"

—H.L. Mencken*

From The Intercept, September 8:

LinkNYC kiosks have become a familiar eyesore to New Yorkers. Over 1,600 of these towering, nine-and-a-half-foot monoliths — their double-sided screens festooned with ads and fun facts — have been installed across the city since early 2016. Mayor Bill de Blasio has celebrated their ability to provide “the fastest and largest municipal Wi-Fi network in the world” as “a critical step toward a more equal, open, and connected city for every New Yorker, in every borough.” Anyone can use the kiosks’ Android tablets to search for directions and services; they are also equipped with charging stations, 911 buttons, and phones for free domestic calls.

But even as the kiosks have provided important services to connect New Yorkers, they may also represent a troubling expansion of the city’s surveillance network, potentially connecting every borough to a new level of invasive monitoring. Each kiosk has three cameras, 30 sensors, and heightened sight lines for viewing above crowds.

Since plans for LinkNYC were first unveiled, journalists, residents, and civil liberties experts have raised concerns that the internet kiosks might be storing sensitive data about its users and possibly tracking their movements. For the last two years, the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a small but vocal group of activists — including ReThink LinkNYC, a grassroots anti-surveillance group, and the anonymous Stop LinkNYC coalition — have highlighted the kiosk’s potential to track locations, collect personal information, and fuel mass surveillance.
Now an undergraduate researcher has discovered indications in LinkNYC code — accidentally made public on the internet — that LinkNYC may be actively planning to track users’ locations.

You’re the Product
Plans to replace the city’s payphone booth network with Wi-Fi-enabled kiosks were first announced by de Blasio in 2014. Less than a year later, the city awarded a contract to a chameleon-like consortium of private companies known as CityBridge. It was an attractive deal: LinkNYC kiosks, at no cost to the city, would provide free internet coverage to anyone walking by. CityBridge, in turn, would be responsible for the installation, ownership, and construction of the devices, with plans to earn back its expenses through advertising. The twin 55-inch displays will eventually carry targeted ads derived from the information collected about kiosk users.

These terms raised alarms among internet researchers and privacy experts, who were quick to point out that nothing in life is truly free. “As we know,” Benjamin Dean, a technology policy analyst, told attendees at a New York hacking conference in 2016, “When you’re not paying, you’re not the customer — you’re the product.”

The key player in CityBridge is known as Intersection, and one of Intersection’s largest investors is Sidewalk Labs, with whom it also shares the same offices and staff. Sidewalk Labs CEO Daniel Doctoroff is the chair of Intersection’s board. Sidewalk Labs is owned by Google’s holding company, Alphabet Inc. In other words, the plan to blanket New York City with 7,500 camera-equipped obelisks has been largely underwritten by the company formerly known as Google — a corporation whose business model depends on selling your personal information to advertisers. As Doctoroff, who was also the city’s former deputy mayor of economic development, has said of the kiosks: “By having access to the browsing activity of people using the Wi-Fi — all anonymized and aggregated — we can actually then target ads to people in proximity and then obviously over time, track them through lots of different things, like beacons and location services, as well as their browsing activity. So in effect, what we’re doing is replicating the digital experience in physical space.”...

...MORE

*You may have seen the introductory quote mis-stated with "false front" rather than "false face" but Quote Investigator sets us right.

"London mayor Sadiq Khan taps ex-NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg's consultancy to help draft smart city strategy"

As we've mentioned, there are some gigantic financial interests behind all of this.
From City AM, Nov. 2:

The Mayor of London is tapping the former mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg to boost the capital's plans to become a tech driven connected "smart city".

Sadiq Khan will today announce that Bloomberg's consultancy which he launched after leaving office in 2013, Bloomberg Associates, will help draft a Smart London Plan that is expected to be unveiled next year.

The billionaire's firm advises cities around the world for free on tackling challenges such as transport, sustainability and infrastructure. London's strategy for using data and fostering digital innovation to improve the capital and its economy was originally launched in 2013 under former mayor Boris Johnson.

It comes as recently published research put Bristol ahead of London as the leading smart city in the UK and as the capital's record on transport innovation was knocked by several startups who have met with regulatory challenges....MORE

Dan Doctoroff, CEO of Sidewalk Labs which is making a huge push into the data-gathering biz for Alphabet was formerly Deputy Mayor to Bloomberg.

You may remember Doctoroff from such hits as :
Dec. 2016
No, Google's Sidewalk Labs Doesn't Want To Take Over Urban Transit. Yet. (GOOG)
No, they have bigger plans.
There is big money and big politics behind this stuff and this June 2016 article is a good primer on what's coming.
Dec 2016 
"Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs is eyeing a contest to build its own internet city" (GOOG)
May 2017 
"Google wants to build a city" (GOOG)
Oct. 2017
"Sidewalk Labs’ bid to build a smart city hub in Toronto may soon be a reality" (GOOG)
Oct. 2017 
"Google’s plan to revolutionise cities is a takeover in all but name"

And many more. 

"Alphabet is plotting a digital city full of Google cars, high-speed Internet and maybe more!" (GOOG)

From re/code:

When Google launched a new company to “fix cities,” speculation swirled as to what, precisely, that company would do. One idea: What if it built its own city, a laboratory vision of a thoroughly connected, techno-utopia?

Could be right.

According to a report in The Information, Sidewalk Labs, the company Google incubated in June and then turned into one of its Alphabet subsidiaries, is hatching a proposal to solicit bids from counties and states for a test bed “digital district.” Simultaneously, the company is plotting with high-profile consultants and urbanists about building out an entire city. Reportedly, the company is looking at parts of Denver and Detroit.

Here’s The Information:

The idea under consideration is for Sidewalk to create an area in the U.S. that serves as a testbed for new technologies from superfast Internet to autonomous cars, according to several people involved in the effort. Some 100 city planning experts, researchers and technologists have been involved with the project, including Stuart Miller, the CEO of home builder Lennar, Anthony Townsend, research director of Institute of the Future, Stanford professor Balaji Prabhakar and Harvard economist Ed Glaeser. The consulting firm McKinsey has also been advising.

Why build a city? A rep for Sidewalk Labs dubbed this “speculation” and refused to comment on it. An Alphabet rep declined, too.

A hunch: Its own urban district could serve as a test case, where Sidewalk Labs could point to the benefits of its new digital platform for urban governance — a toolkit that lets cities manage things like traffic and municipal Wi-Fi — as well as tech from its Alphabet sisters, like Google Fiber broadband and self-driving cars.

So far, the only project that Sidewalk Labs has on the ground is the LinkNYC initiative for public Wi-Fi in New York.

It’s a mighty feat, city-building — one that other companies (notably Disney), governments and techno-futurists have tried before. Sidewalk Labs certainly has the personnel with chutzpah for it. Its chief is Dan Doctoroff, the former deputy mayor of New York City. He has amassed an exec team and, as The Information claims, is working with an array of top-level municipal movers and shakers....MORE

"Sidewalk Labs’ bid to build a smart city hub in Toronto may soon be a reality" (GOOG)

From Curbed, Oct. 5:

The Alphabet subsidiary may soon develop 12 acres on Toronto’s waterfront

Google parent company Alphabet Inc.’s plan to build a smart city on Toronto’s waterfront may soon see the light of day. 

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Sidewalk Labs LLC, a subsidiary of Alphabet, is nearing a deal with the Canadian city to develop a 12-acre section of the eastern waterfront into a digital downtown. 

The board of Waterfront Toronto, the agency overseeing the Quayside project, as it’s called, is expected to vote at a meeting on October 20 whether to approve the agency’s recommendation to partner with Sidewalk Labs resulting from a competitive bid process after a request for proposals was launched in May, according to the Toronto Star.

Quayside, whose website envisions the district as “an exemplary waterfront community that achieves precedent-setting standards of sustainability, resiliency, innovation, inclusivity and design excellence,” is an attractive site for Sidewalk, which has been searching for a home for over a year....MORE 

Previously on the Sidewalk: 

"Google wants to build a city" (GOOG)

"Alphabet is plotting a digital city full of Google cars, high-speed Internet and maybe more!" (GOOG)  

Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs is eyeing a contest to build its own internet city (GOOG)

As former Deputy Mayor to Michael Bloomberg, Doctoroff pretty much epitomizes the intersection of big money/big politics. That Medium post is not quite a blueprint but interesting nonetheless. 

No, Google's Sidewalk Labs Doesn't Want To Take Over Urban Transit. Yet. 

No, they have bigger plans.
There is big money and big politics behind this stuff and this June 2016 article is a good primer on what's coming.

Here's Google's Sidewalk Labs' Pitch To Insert Itself Into America’s Urban Transportation Infrastructure (GOOG)

"Google’s sister company wants to be in charge of public transportation"

"2016 Google Tracker: Everything Google is working on for the new year" (now mit umlauts and not just in the Hästkött)

Money, Murder and Sadomasochism: A Look At the L.A. Tech Scene

"Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs cans Toronto smart city project" (GOOG; EVIL)

From ZD Net, May 8:

It's no longer financially viable, says the urban design business.

The Alphabet-owned urban design business Sidewalk Labs on Friday revealed that it would no longer be pursuing its smart city plans to transform Toronto's eastern waterfront into what it had dubbed as a "global model for combining cutting-edge technology and great urban design to dramatically improve quality of life".

Sidewalks CEO Daniel Doctoroff explained in a post that the decision to back out of the Quayside project was due to "unprecedented economic uncertainty".

"It has become too difficult to make the 12-acre project financially viable without sacrificing core parts of the plan we had developed together with Waterfront Toronto to build a truly inclusive, sustainable community," he wrote.

"And so, after a great deal of deliberation, we concluded that it no longer made sense to proceed with the Quayside project, and let Waterfront Toronto know yesterday."

The company had forecast the development would have cost an initial $3.9 billion, where the company had plans to invest $900 million.
Plans for the development had been in the works since 2017, and had previously faced pushback from Toronto leaders who were concerned about a variety of issues, including privacy and surveillance....

....MORE
Previously:
February 19
"Did the ‘techlash’ kill Alphabet’s city of the future?" (GOOG) 

Was there a tech backlash?
There has been a lot of blather and spiel—"Here at the firm of Blather & Spiel we believe..."— with opinion pieces in the Financial Times, NYT, The Week, The Economist and dozens of other outlets (including ours) arguing against one or another aspect of tech but that has resulted more in elegant posing (including ours) than in any action against "tech".

Smart speaker sales are still soaring, people are still sending Google as much personal information as they can via Chrome and search and gmail and will send more with Waymo and other aspects of the info-extraction biz that it seems techlash is not all it's cracked up to be....

*****

.... And that I think gets closer to the real reason things seem to have stalled out.
Google is having trouble figuring out how to make money off the idea.

December 2019
"Stepping Stones: Google’s smart city project links its quality-of-life improvements to the elimination of human workers" (GOOG)
November 2019 
"The “smart city” makes infrastructure and surveillance indistinguishable"
November 2019 
Knowledge@Wharton: "What’s Fueling the Smart City Backlash?"

I know, I know!!!
The oppressive boot of corporate tyranny smashing into the face of humanity. Forever?
[apologies to the Orwell literary estate]
No?

November 2019
"It’s time to get rid of the ideological misnomer 'smart cities.'”

Following up on yesterday's "Sidewalk Labs' Smart-Cities Will Create A For-Profit Social Credit System" (GOOG)", a tweet from LSE sociologist David Madden back in July:

It’s time to get rid of the ideological misnomer “smart cities.” What would be a more accurate way to describe this approach to city making—Corporate-controlled surveillance urbanism (CCSU)? Digital urban technocracy? Tracked cities? Big data towns?

— David Madden (@davidjmadden) July 17, 2019

The smart city appellation really is some first rate branding. That we can choose to accept or reject.

And some others:

Google Spinoff Sidewalk Labs Now Has a Spinoff of Its Own  
It's like a family, generation on generation.
Or a cancer metastasizing....

Mayor deBlasio Wants To Track New Yorkers, Whether They Know It or Not

"Google city sparks fresh controversy" (GOOG; Sidewalk Toronto)

"The Google city that has angered Toronto" (GOOG) 
Yes, yes Alphabet.
Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs. Stupid name, Alphabet....
 
December 2016
Here's Google's Sidewalk Labs' Pitch To Insert Itself Into America’s Urban Transportation Infrastructure (GOOG)
Following up on yesterday's "No, Google's Sidewalk Labs Doesn't Want To Take Over Urban Transit. Yet."

And many many more,

Here's Google's Sidewalk Labs' Pitch To Insert Itself Into America’s Urban Transportation Infrastructure (GOOG)

Following up on yesterday's "No, Google's Sidewalk Labs Doesn't Want To Take Over Urban Transit. Yet."

From Buzzfeed, Oct. 7:

Here’s Alphabet’s Pitch To “Smart”-ify Your City
Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs wants to insert itself into America’s urban transportation infrastructure. Here are the documents that show how it could happen. 

In April, a team of representatives from Sidewalk Labs — a subsidiary of Alphabet, which is also Google’s parent company — visited Columbus, Ohio, to pitch city officials on a sprawling, ambitious plan to overhaul the city’s transportation infrastructure.

Sidewalk proposed managing and expanding the city’s transportation data on transit routes, passengers, parking spaces, cars, and more. In the process, Sidewalk promised to give the city “new superpowers” and make it more accessible.

By mid-year, Sidewalk Labs had pitched at least six other tech-hungry cities — San Francisco, Austin, Pittsburgh, Denver, Kansas City, and Portland — on the same bold proposal.

In Columbus, the company’s representatives said, two systems called Flow and Link could “pinpoint the causes of congestion,” reduce the “emissions and distracted driving that results from circling for parking,” “encourage ride-sharing,” and provide “ultra-fast gigabit WiFi.” That could be a significant improvement in a city where an estimated 82% of commuters drive to work. And though Sidewalk’s presentation does not name the final cost of the systems — it’d depend on a range of factors — it claims that the new approach could ultimately return a profit to Columbus.

But outsourcing these traditionally municipal concerns to a private company — and a high-profile technological innovator, at that — would be a stark change that could have implications well beyond central Ohio.

Those promises and more are detailed in a set of documents BuzzFeed News obtained through a freedom-of-information request to Columbus. Among the contents:

• Sidewalk Labs’ slide decks presented to Columbus in the April meeting.

• A proposed “memorandum of understanding” that Sidewalk sent to city officials.

• A spreadsheet that Sidewalk shared to help the city estimate potential revenues and costs associated with the company’s proposal.

Some excerpts from these documents have been published by other outlets, including The Guardian and Recode. But until now the documents have not been reproduced in full. You can find them at the bottom of this post.

Sidewalk Labs targeted its pitch to cities competing for the Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge. In June the DOT named Columbus the competition’s winner, beating the six other finalists for the $40 million prize.

Columbus and Sidewalk Labs haven’t reached any formal agreements, according to Jeff Ortega, assistant director for the city’s Department of Public Service.

“At this point, discussions are centered around whether or not the company’s ‘Flow’ platform can help link health providers and residents in disadvantaged neighborhoods to facilitate transportation options,” Ortega told BuzzFeed News this week. “At this point, if Sidewalk Labs were to be engaged, the engagement would only be specific to this purpose.”

Sidewalk Labs declined to comment specifically on its pitch to Columbus. But in an op-ed published this summer, Daniel Doctoroff, the company’s CEO, wrote that its “conversations with city officials and urban planners” around the country “taught us many important lessons.” He continued: “Our role during these talks was to learn what the public sector is already trying, and discuss ways to help those trials become successful.”

The pitch
“Transportation is rapidly becoming consumerized,” the pitch deck begins. To keep pace, “cities must innovate with the private sector.”

At the heart of the proposed collaboration is Sidewalk’s data platform, which would integrate data from city records, digital sensors, and “third-party data providers” such as Google Maps, Waze (the navigation app acquired by Google in 2013), Uber, and Lyft....

....MUCH MORE

Why Toronto Didn't Play Along as Alphabet's 'Smart City' (GOOG)

From OneZero:

Death of a Smart City
Alphabet bet big in Toronto. Toronto didn’t play along.

In October 2017, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke at a VIP-laden press event in Toronto to announce plans for a new neighborhood in the city to be built “from the internet up.” The big reveal was the builder: Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. The mood was festive, optimistic. Schoolchildren were on hand with Lego models of future cityscapes, which Trudeau, flanked by Eric Schmidt, Alphabet’s then–executive chairman, and John Tory, the Toronto mayor, explored in a flawlessly staged photo op.

The prime minister spoke in earnest tones. Quayside, as the 12-acre waterfront project had been christened, would be “a testbed for new technologies,” he said, “that will help us build smarter, greener, more inclusive cities.” Not one to shy away from wholesome platitudes, he added, “The future, just like this community, will be interconnected.”

Then Schmidt rose to the lectern and said that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had long opined about “all of these things that we could do if someone would just give us a city and put us in charge.” Chuckles reverberated through the crowd.

News that Alphabet had leaped neck deep into the smart city business lit up tech media for weeks. Sidewalk Labs’ renderings for the project — autonomous carts delivering packages and hauling away waste maneuvered in underground tunnels, while barefoot kids, butterflies, and birds cavorted in a Jetsons-meets-organic-living neighborhood at street level — flashed across the internet. Local news stations covered the project dotingly, picking up the Sidewalk Labs talking point that a network of sensors and other IT infrastructure embedded in the community would enable a new era of urban efficiency. Homes and workplaces in Quayside would “study occupants’ behavior while they’re inside them to make life easier,” said a reporter on one evening broadcast after the press event. Quayside would be “the first neighborhood of its kind,” he said, and — as if one superlative wasn’t enough — it would be “a community like none other.”

Sidewalk Labs’ rosy vision for Quayside, however, will not come to be. In May, the company announced it was abandoning the project, citing economic infeasibility. But what wasn’t mentioned was that the project had also become politically infeasible. The Quayside announcement inspired a groundswell of resistance, first among civil liberties activists, and then, eventually, among the ranks of Canada’s most prominent businesspeople, local civic leaders, and Toronto residents. Objections ranged from fears of Orwellian surveillance to Canadians’ general skepticism of the American culture of exceptionalism, so perfectly embodied by a Silicon Valley–designed smart city.

The Quayside vision was born at the peak of the tech giants’ cultural prowess. Today, the era of techno-optimism seems all but dead. The demise of the most ambitious smart city project in North America, backed by one of the most powerful corporations on the planet, came at the hands of a small group of Toronto activists — and one disaffected tech billionaire. The story of their battle is a parable, not just for the smart city movement, but also for a growing sense that the tech industry, with its promise of data-driven solutions to structural and institutional problems, won’t save us.

---

Sidewalk Labs was founded in 2015 by Dan Doctoroff, a former Wall Street analyst and private equity managing partner who served as a deputy mayor of New York under Michael Bloomberg. Billed as an “urban innovation” startup and armed with the deep pockets of its parent company, Sidewalk Labs has incubated two urban planning tools and spun off a few subsidiaries of its own. Those include Coord, which sells curb management software to municipal governments, and Cityblock, which establishes health care clinics in low-income neighborhoods. Prior to Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ most public-facing project was LinkNYC, a series of curbside kiosks across New York City’s five boroughs that provide free Wi-Fi and broadcast ads on their 55-inch screens — all while collecting a variety of data with the three cameras and 30 sensors housed in each kiosk....

....MUCH MORE

No, Google's Sidewalk Labs Doesn't Want To Take Over Urban Transit. Yet. (GOOG)

No, they have bigger plans.
There is big money and big politics behind this stuff and this June 2016 article is a good primer on what's coming.

From CityLab:
No, Alphabet Isn't Conspiring to Take Over Public Transit in Columbus

Contrary to a recent article, “smart” transportation technologies like those from Sidewalk Labs aren’t really a big secret. Plus, cities want them.

Google drives about a third of all internet traffic and has the best digital map of the world. Every day, its databases process billions of thoughts and queries, secret and banal, typed into search engines and email subject lines. Among other things, Alphabet Inc., Google’s holding company, builds robots of formidable intelligence. Its technologies will soon be chauffeuring us from points A to B.

Reading about Alphabet’s hush-hush projects, interconnected products, and disruptions both welcome and unwelcome, wary minds may well wonder if its ambitions might include world domination. An article published Monday in the Guardian, about an Alphabet subsidiary’s work with the finalists of the U.S. DOT’s $50 million Smart Cities Challenge, seemed to lean toward that suspicion, starting with a fairly alarmist headline and opening sentence:

Sidewalk Labs, a secretive subsidiary of Alphabet, wants to radically overhaul public parking and transportation in American cities, emails and documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

It goes on to describe some of the services which would usher in this “radical overhaul,” as gleaned from the obtained documents: a platform that allows low-income bus riders to apply public subsidies to ride-sharing services; an app that unifies payment and service information for all modes of transit; public wi-fi kiosks with remote sensing capabilities; and “virtualized parking,” which would use camera-equipped vehicles to scan for empty spaces cities could sell on a virtual parking market.

As the article explains, all of the functions described here are proposed elements of Flow, the transportation-data collection and analysis platform. Flow is one of Sidewalk Labs’ two current, public products (the other is the aforementioned line of kiosks, some of which are in use now in New York City). Flow is currently being offered first to Columbus, Ohio, which won the U.S. DOT’s Smart Cities Challenge last week. The Guardian article goes on to examine a sample contract that describes the terms and conditions required of Columbus by Sidewalk Labs:

Cities like Columbus would be obliged to bring parking signs up to date, re-train enforcement officers and share parking and ridership information with Sidewalk in real time. The company also wants cities to share public transport data with ride-sharing companies, allowing Uber to direct cars to overcrowded bus stops.

All these conditions could mean expensive upgrades to existing technology. “Not every city would be ready to do that,” says [Alexei Pozdnoukhov, director of the Smart Cities Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley]. “Plus, you’ve got a variety of transit operators. Small ones might have to change their entire payment systems.”

Overall, the article gives the impression that Flow is some kind of top-down planning regime, conceived in secret by Sidewalk Labs and foisted on cities like Columbus. It makes it sound conspiratorial. But that isn’t really the case.

First, the Guardian article does not mention that Flow was announced in March, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Transportation, as technology offered for free by Sidewalk Labs to the Smart Cities Challenge victor. The exclusive documents obtained by the Guardian were, according to Sidewalk Labs, pitch materials shared with finalist cities that modeled some of the possible functions of Flow. Since the platform has still yet to be deployed in any city, the specific elements of Flow remain a work in progress.

This is not to say that the Guardian’s facts and images came out of nowhere. Flow will, in fact, aim to “increase the efficiency of roads, parking, and transit use,” says Anand Babu, COO of Sidewalk Labs. It will provide real-time transportation information to cities, and it “could be used to improve and plan public transportation, guide drivers directly to parking, or point commuters to shared mobility options they can use when public transportation is not an option.”

But the final product will ultimately be a result of a back-and-forth process with whatever city adopts it first—not a grand transit “fix,” ordained in the shadows. Sidewalk Labs’ CEO Dan Doctoroff writes in Co.Design that the company worked with the Smart Cities finalists to refine the functions of Flow. According to a number of officials from those cities, that is true. Sidewalk Labs reps flew to meet with each of the seven finalist cities to discuss how their services might work there. According to attendees, those meetings resembled meetings with any other vendor angling to sell young technology to a government: There was give and take....MORE

"Did the ‘techlash’ kill Alphabet’s city of the future?" (GOOG)

Was there a tech backlash?
There has been a lot of blather and spiel—"Here at the firm of Blather & Spiel we believe..."— with opinion pieces in the Financial Times, NYT, The Week, The Economist and dozens of other outlets (including ours) arguing against one or another aspect of tech but that has resulted more in elegant posing (including ours) than in any action against "tech".

Smart speaker sales are still soaring, people are still sending Google as much personal information as they can via Chrome and search and gmail and will send more with Waymo and other aspects of the info-extraction biz that it seems techlash is not all it's cracked up to be.

From Fortune:

Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs had a vision of an eco-friendly, tech-heavy tomorrow-land on Toronto's waterfront, but it's been drastically scaled back.

Jesse Shapins’s blue and orange polka-dotted Stan Smiths squish the refuse-speckled muck of Toronto’s harbor.

So far, the area consists of nothing much. A “poutinerie” food truck idles in an unpaved parking lot. Long-abandoned soybean storage silos loom nearby. A few run-down charter boats line a slip where a flotilla of mallards honk at passersby.

As he explains the interlocking technologies that may someday converge here, Shapins rotates his hands as though manipulating a Rubik’s cube. Sidewalk’s “urban design and digital integration director” (yes, it’s ungainly) outlines a mini-city of eco-friendly laminated timber, some dozen buildings soaring up to 35 stories. These mixed-use structures will be replete with solar arrays and rainwater-draining “blue roofs.” Underground, conduits to an efficient thermal grid will supply heat, and A.I.-powered pneumatic tubes will sort recycling.

The neighborhood Shapins describes will be a marvel—if it ever gets built. Sidewalk won a bid to propose plans for the area three years ago, pitching Quayside as a tech-centric model for urban reinvention. Since then, however, the project has been mired in controversy, amid an outcry over data mining and objections to the civic encroachment of a powerful corporation. While polling has found that only 17% of residents oppose the project, that minority has voiced its views loudly. Chief among the dissenters is Jim Balsillie, the former co-CEO of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, who says the deal “was mismanaged” from the start. One local leader compares Quayside to Guadalcanal, a similarly tiny tract of land where a particularly bloody World War II battle was fought.

Bureaucratic combat continues. “Anytime you do something bold and ambitious it’s going to have both ups and downs,” says Toronto Mayor John Tory, who backs the plan. Waterfront Toronto, the nonprofit development corporation that manages the minuscule patch of land, says it will decide by May 20 whether to proceed. But while Waterfront Toronto appears likely to approve Sidewalk’s plans, the Quayside vision has been drastically scaled back—offering a lesson in the perils of public-private partnership.

As more of the world’s population migrates to cities, the planet’s environmental crises are concentrating there too. Already cities are the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, while generating immense amounts of trash and consuming copious quantities of water and energy. “Cities need to be more efficient in the way they interact with the environment,” says Sasson Darwish, an RBC Capital Markets managing director and “smart city” financier. “The way you can do that is through data.”

Data, of course, is Alphabet’s business. And for Toronto—whose population is increasing at a faster clip than any other big city north of the Rio Grande—Sidewalk seemed like an ideal partner. When Waterfront Toronto welcomed Sidewalk in 2017, Eric Schmidt, then Alphabet’s executive chairman, joked that the company’s founders were excited about “all the things you could do if someone would just give us a city and put us in charge.”

Torontonians had concerns. Sidewalk’s arrival coincided with a mounting “techlash,” as consumers grew distrustful of Big Tech’s data gathering. And its plans for Quayside depend on sensors embedded throughout the environment—gathering data on where people go, how they live, and more.

Early on, opponents blasted Sidewalk as a thinly disguised attempt to gobble up data on citizens’ real-world habits, extending Google’s dominance from Internet to omnipresence. Sidewalk remained adamant it would anonymize Quayside data, where possible, and never use it to support Google’s advertising machinery. For some, those assurances fell flat. And Sidewalk’s proposal to establish an independent “data trust,” which could have put that data up for grabs by third parties, alarmed privacy advocates even further.

Dan Doctoroff, Sidewalk’s CEO, says ads play no part in its business model: “Zero—not one bit.” Still, Alphabet expects the unit to earn an “adequate financial return,” says the former CEO of Bloomberg, the news and financial-data company, and former New York City deputy mayor. Sidewalk plans to invest in real estate. It anticipates earning fees for advising developers. And the firm will invest in, sell, and manage new smart-city tech. (It already has a stake in such products as an energy-efficient alternative to traditional electric wiring.) ....

....MUCH MORE

And that I think gets closer to the real reason things seem to have stalled out.
Google is having trouble figuring out how to make money off the idea.

There Is Something Weird Going On With Google's Sidewalk Labs Project In Toronto (GOOG)

We've been posting on 'smart' cities' in general and Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs in particular for a bit over three years, with quite a few of the stories (see after the jumps) being techno-dystopia stuff.
Here's another, but more important are the links immediately following.

From Politico, July/August 2018: 

Google Is Building a City of the Future in Toronto. Would Anyone Want to Live There?
It could be the coolest new neighborhood on the planet—or a peek into the Orwellian metropolis that knows everything you did last night.

TORONTO—Even with a chilly mid-May breeze blowing off Lake Ontario, this city’s western waterfront approaches idyllic. The lake laps up against the boardwalk, people sit in colorful Adirondack chairs and footfalls of pedestrians compete with the cry of gulls. But walk east, and the scene quickly changes. Cut off from gleaming downtown Toronto by the Gardiner Expressway, the city trails off into a dusty landscape of rock-strewn parking lots and heaps of construction materials. Toronto’s eastern waterfront is bleak enough that Guillermo del Toro’s gothic film The Shape of Water used it as a plausible stand-in for Baltimore circa 1962. Says Adam Vaughan, a former journalist who represents this district in Canada’s Parliament, “It’s this weird industrial land that’s just been sitting there—acres and acres of it. And no one’s really known what to do with it.”
That was before Google.

This past October, a coalition of the Toronto, Ontario and Canadian governments contracted with Sidewalk Labs, a sister company of Google, to come up with a $50 million design for a dozen acres on the waterfront’s far eastern end. The idea is to reimagine Toronto’s derelict waterfront as “the world’s first neighborhood built from the internet up,” as Sidewalk describes it. The neighborhood, called Quayside, would leapfrog the usual slow walk of gentrification to build an entire zone, all at once, as a “smart city,” a sensor-enabled, highly wired metropolis that can run itself.

Toronto’s choice of the Google-affiliated firm immediately captured the attention of urban planners and city officials all over the world; magazine stories trumpeted “Google’s Guinea-Pig City” and “A Smarter Smart City.” Still in its early days, the partnership has left people curious but wary. Google? What does a tech company know about running a real live city?

In one sense, what’s perhaps surprising is that it has taken this long. Silicon Valley’s innovators have long had side obsessions with making the world a better place, driven largely by the confidence that their own brainpower and a near-total disregard for tradition can break old logjams. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel helped seed the “seasteading” movement to create offshore libertarian paradises; the tech incubator YCombinator is currently running a public-policy experiment in Oakland, California, giving residents a guaranteed monthly stipend to see how it might improve their quality of life.

The notion of the feedback-rich “smart city” has circulated for years, and in practice has mostly taken the shape of centuries-old cities like New York or Boston adopting sensor-enabled stoplights or equipping their residents with an app for spotting potholes. But the real dream, a place whose constant data flow lets it optimize services constantly, requires something different, a ground-up project not only woven through with sensors and Wi-Fi, but shaped around waves of innovation still to come, like self-driving cars. Thanks to a host of technological advances, that’s practical now in a way it never has been before. Mass-produced sensors now cost less than a dollar apiece, even for hobbyists; high-speed broadband and cheap cloud computing mean that a city can collect and analyze reams of data in real time.

In Toronto, Sidewalk sketches out a picture of a neighborhood where intelligent “pay-as-you-throw” garbage chutes separate out recyclables and charge households by waste output; where hyperlocal weather sensors could detect a coming squall and heat up a snow-melting sidewalk. Apps would tell residents when the Adirondack chairs on the waterfront are open, and neighbors would crowdsource approvals for block-party permits, giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down based on the noise the gathering was expected to produce. Traffic signals could auto-calibrate to ease pedestrian congestion during public events, or to ensure a smooth rush hour. The data from such systems would feed back into the city, which would constantly learn, optimizing its own operations from month to month, year to year. Sidewalk promises “the most measurable community in the world.”...MUCH MORE

It's a very solid overview of most of the issues.
On a more granular, and thus more useful-for-analysis level, there is Jamie Powell's series at FT Alphaville.
Spoiler Alert: there are some deep problems.
In chronological order (the sting is in the tail):

March 9
Embracing waterfront Google-fication in Toronto
March 22 
Google-fication, an update
May 9 
Google-fication, continued
July 1 
Sidewalk Toronto: delays and NDAs
July 6
Waterfront Toronto CEO departs

What we are guessing happened was that after the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica story broke at the NYT and Guardian on March 17 and was further investigated and disseminated in April and May the  backlash made the original big data business plan socially and politically untenable.

The model Sidewalk was using was to get one revenue stream from consulting/managing, another revenue stream from software (and even hardware, think GOOG's TPU's for AI) and the third and largest revenue stream from monetizing all the data collected.

And there's the rub.
And it's such a big part of what makes the project interesting to Google that unless they can figure out how to replace that leg the stool falls over.

Thanks Jamie.

And just to hammer the point home, this is our guess, Sidewalk has not invited us to any of the meetings and we could be way, way off.
And for the factual reporting, all glory and honor is Mr. Powell's.

Some of our previous posts, in no particular order:

Smart Cities: "Welcome to the neighbourhood. Have you read the terms of service?"
"London mayor Sadiq Khan taps ex-NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg's consultancy to help draft smart city strategy"
As we've mentioned, there are some gigantic financial interests behind all of this....
"Google’s plan to revolutionise cities is a takeover in all but name"
Smart City Report: Sidewalk Labs and Data In Toronto (GOOG)
NVIDIA Wants to Run Your City: Smart City Control Centers (NVDA)
Here's Google's Sidewalk Labs' Pitch To Insert Itself Into America’s Urban Transportation Infrastructure (GOOG) 
"Alphabet is plotting a digital city full of Google cars, high-speed Internet and maybe more!" (GOOG) 

Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs is eyeing a contest to build its own internet city (GOOG)

As former Deputy Mayor to Michael Bloomberg, Doctoroff pretty much epitomizes the intersection of big money/big politics. That Medium post is not quite a blueprint but interesting nonetheless. 

"Nvidia's Slightly Terrifying Metropolis Platform Paves the Way for Smarter Cities" (NVDA)

Although this article is 11 months old it is a good introduction to one piece of what we were foreshadowing with Tuesday's "NVIDIA Wants to Be the Brains Behind the Surveillance State (NVDA)". In fact the camera surveillance integration AI is only one part of the Metropolis platform which is itself only one part of what the rest of NVIDIA's offerings will consist of....

And many more, use the 'search blog' box upper left, if interested.
The reason we're paying attention?
Profit motive.
From Cision PR, March 6:

Smart Cities Market Size Worth $2.57 Trillion by 2025 | CAGR: 18.4%: Grand View Research, Inc.