The “neighborhood of the future” is no more.
Sidewalk Labs, a sister company to Google, has walked away from a much-hyped plan to build Quayside, a high-tech smart city that would have been built “from the internet up” on 12 acres along the Toronto waterfront.
The company has blamed the economic uncertainty caused by COVID-19, which has also hit the real estate market in Toronto where property sales fell 69% year-on-year in April.
In a blog post, Sidewalk CEO Dan Doctoroff wrote, "As unprecedented economic uncertainty has set in around the world, and in the Toronto real estate market, 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.”
Reassessing Priorities Amid COVID-19
Sidewalk’s losses are significant, having spent $50 million on a 1,500-page master plan for the project and establishing an office in Toronto with a team of urban planners and public relations experts. It has also lost a valuable testing-ground for the many innovative elements it was planning to incorporate into Quayside, such as intelligent garbage chutes, underground delivery robots, and a shared network of driverless taxis.
The project’s demise also impacts Toronto itself. Quayside, which had the support of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, was projected to:
- Create 93,000 jobs
- Generate over $14 billion in annual GDP by 2040
- Attract a new Google headquarters to the city
Mayor of Toronto John Tory has indicated the city will look for other partners to push ahead with the development of a smart city on the waterfront location. “The current health emergency makes us feel even more strongly about the importance of reimagining cities for the future,” he wrote.
Innovation Met with Uncertainty
The demise of Quayside was greeted enthusiastically by some. The project was extremely unpopular with privacy advocates and has generated an ongoing debate over surveillance and data harvesting.
Critics of the project have suggested the real reason Sidewalk abandoned Quayside is because the company was blocked from its plans to expand the smart neighborhood to a 190-acre development, with the 12-acres project too small to be financially viable.
Doctoroff has indicated that Sidewalk will continue to invest in other innovation projects.
