Toronto wins the contest: it will be the Google City

7 years ago - Published in Finance, Technical Analysis

Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs will develop a futuristic, billion-dollar community along a sizable swathe of Toronto's waterfront.
On Wednesday, the City of Toronto and Sidewalk Labs  — which is the urban innovation arm of Google's parent company Alphabet — announced a partnership to radically re-imagine 800 acres of the city's largely vacant, post-industrial Eastern Waterfront, and turn it into a tech-integrated neighborhood called Quayside. 

The idea is that Quayside and the larger Sidewalk Toronto project will be a model city for the world. It will be constantly changing as it tests the latest technology and urban designs when it comes to everything from waste management and mixed-use buildings to transportation and business.

For inspiration, Sidewalk Labs looked at about 150 different projects from the last 50 years where companies or organizations tried to make a city of the future or so-called innovation districts. The one that resonated the most was Walt Disney’s original plan for EPCOT in Florida before he died in 1966 and his company eventually decided to turn into another theme park.

Alphabet pledged $50 million toward an initial planning phase with Waterfront Toronto, a multiagency organization, and agreed to relocate its Canadian headquarters from another part of the city to anchor the site, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at a news conference.

Alphabet’s investment comes amid a technology boom in the city, driven by a thriving startup scene, a surge in artificial intelligence research and increased funding into the sector from the federal government.

Earlier this year, Waterfront Toronto, a public corporation created by Canadian officials in 2001 to revitalize land along Lake Ontario, requested proposals to develop a new community called Quayside along with a private partner. Quayside would be a testbed for emerging technologies, materials and processes that will address these challenges and advance solutions that can be replicated in cities worldwide, according to city officials.

Sidewalk Labs, created in 2015, was one of Google’s first independent units before it turned into the Alphabet holding company. One of its most visible project’s so far has been LinkNYC, a network of ad-supported Wi-Fi kiosks in New York City run by Intersection, a Sidewalk Labs investment.