Drawing from the ‘Living Well’: Sidewalk Toronto’s Imagination of Healthy Futures

• In Event: Assembling Caring Geographies: How do Regions Care?

Abstract

In 2017, the City of Toronto and Alphabet Inc.’s Sidewalk Labs partnered to create Sidewalk Toronto--an “urban innovation organization” seeking to redevelop the city’s downtown waterfront. Sidewalk Toronto’s mandate is to create a neighbourhood that “combines the best in urban design with the latest in digital technology to address some of the biggest challenges facing cities” (Sidewalktoronto.ca). Popular response to Sidewalk Toronto has focused primarily on data collection and use, privacy, and transparency. The proposed presentation contextualizes these concerns by considering the affective worlds that Sidewalk Toronto’s imagined datafied community both draws on and builds, specifically regarding health and living well.

Building on STS scholarship on the datafication of urban space (Barreneche 2012, Shapiro 2017, Sumartojo et al 2016) and of health (Ruckenstein and Schull 2017, van Dijk and Poell 2016), we provide a discourse analysis of Sidewalk Toronto’s recent report, “Living Well on the Waterfront.” We draw attention to their construction of a “community of care” (Sidewalk Labs & Idea Couture 2019, 23), focusing on the metaphors they deploy in their imaginaries of healthy datafied communities. We consider how fostering individual and community wellbeing through digital connectivity creates an uneven spatialization of health. We ask: why the focus on health when designing the smart city? How does this summon existing insecurities around the future value of health? How does Sidewalk Toronto mobilize the affective ties among health, prosperity, and success to situate and frame their “smart city experiment” as a community practice, effectively creating communities as investment properties?

Authors

• Rebecca Noone, University of Toronto

• Karen Dewart McEwen, University of Toronto