Contesting "Smart" Urban Infrastructure Ownership and Control in Google/Alphabet’s Sidewalk Toronto Experiment

• In Event: “Smart Infrastructure” as Relational Practice: Cities, Nations and Corporate Strategies in Framing Future Cities

Abstract

In October 2017 Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet subsidiary and corporate sister of Google, and Waterfront Toronto, a tri-governmental real estate development body, announced their ‘partnership' to create a complete urban neighbourhood “from the internet up.” This launched the world’s most ambitious and controversial foray of giant tech into its latest grand venture in digital transcendentalism - city building. The project envisions at its core a digital infrastructure consisting of an ubiquitous sensor network providing fine-grained monitoring data for radically transforming the management of a wide range of urban processes and services.

Of the several controversies the Sidewalk Toronto project raises, this paper focuses on ownership and control in relation to two infrastructural layers. From the perspective of an active member of Waterfront Toronto’s Digital Strategy Advisory Panel charged with assessing Sidewalk Toronto’s proposed Master Innovation Development Plan, I will focus specifically on the physical layer - the sensor network, and the application layer - the prospective uses of the voluminous data generated. In each case, ownership and control are contested. Is Alphabet usurping democratic institutions? With the physical infrastructure, the authority of city government is challenged. With data, challenges are to individual privacy as well as to national sovereignty for ensuring data remains within local jurisdictions. Sidewalk Labs has promised significant measures to allay these concerns, so outcomes are not yet clear. Through analysing interactions among the main actors, human and otherwise, this paper aims to elucidate the prospects for democratic governance of ‘smart’ city infrastructures.

Author

• Andrew Clement, University of Toronto