In Toronto, Google’s Attempt to Privatize Government Fails—For Now
When it was announced in fall 2017, Sidewalk Toronto promised to be a new high-tech development, set on Toronto’s waterfront, that would prioritize sustainability and affordability. The product of a partnership between Sidewalk Labs, a Google sister company, and Waterfront Toronto, a Canadian public land development corporation, the neighborhood would also pilot new technologies and add a Google office lakeside. Last week, after roughly two and a half years of pursuing approval for the project, Sidewalk Labs walked away, citing economic uncertainty due to COVID-19.
Governments continually conflate growing the tech sector with being consumed by it.
While the failure is certainly in part due to a changed world, this explanation brushes under the rug years of sustained public involvement in the project, from supporters and critics alike. From its inception, the project failed to appreciate the extent to which cities remain strongholds of democracy and democratic process.
The pitch for Sidewalk Toronto included autonomous vehicles, underground garbage robots, green energy infrastructure, snow-melting sidewalks, modular construction, wooden buildings, and more. Importantly, the project was underpinned by a real estate transaction, which was a major component of the deal. Sidewalk Labs sought to acquire or create a plan for a large amount of prime public land.
And as a smart city project, it was going to collect and use data to manage and define how the neighborhood worked. Data can be used to adjust traffic light timings, to automate parcel delivery in residential buildings through the use of delivery robots, to assess and seek to improve people’s recycling activities—the list of ways to measure activity and design systems to use this information is endless. Many parts of urban life—for example, park, transit, bicycle, and parking spot usage—can be captured by sensors, and that data in turn used to adjust and define how those systems are used, both in real-time and in the future. As Sidewalk Labs encapsulated that aim in its founding vision: “ubiquitous internet connectivity, social networks, sensing, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and new design and fabrication technologies — would help bring about a revolution in urban life.”
But from the beginning, Toronto residents raised substantive objections about the project across almost every domain: affordable housing, the amount of public land involved and its value, the governance of the technology systems (digital governance), the economic development plans, and more. In response, Waterfront Toronto did its best to negotiate terms and conditions it felt were defensible for all the communities and residents it had to answer to. No one wanted the deal to succeed more than Waterfront Toronto.
Over time, and through the public process, Waterfront Toronto took public input from all sides and negotiated for public value with Sidewalk Labs—mostly, unfortunately, behind closed doors. This was doubly problematic because, as a real estate corporation, Waterfront Toronto is not subject to freedom of information legislation. And beyond failing to be adequately open about its negotiations with Sidewalk Labs, Waterfront Toronto also fully abdicated responsibility for a core part of the project, right from the beginning. The digital governance part of Waterfront Toronto’s procurement document asked the following of respondents:
Create the required governance constructs to stimulate the growth of an urban innovation cluster, including legal frameworks (e.g. Intellectual Property, privacy, data sharing), financial considerations (including investment opportunities and revenue sharing expectations), deployment testbeds and project monitoring (KPI’s, reporting requirements and tools to capture data).
The document was, in effect, calling for the outsourcing of public governance to a for-profit actor. It’s difficult to believe the document even passed legal muster—that lawyers paid with public money approved it. But it speaks to an important policy problem: many things related to digital public governance are currently legal by default—not because they should be, but because rules haven’t kept pace with the tech industry or are being cowritten by it through lobbying. As a result, through public technology procurements, governments continually conflate growing the tech sector (economic development) with being consumed by it (outsourcing and automating public governance). Technology procurement is thus one of the largest democratic vulnerabilities that exists today.