Toronto Sidewalk Toronto at Quayside | ?m | ?s | Sidewalk | Snøhetta

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My biggest concern is the one-sided narrative being crafted by the most powerful company in the world.

The Sidewalk Labs team has put together a "who's who" of people with direct access to city hall:

  • Sidewalk Labs Communications chief is a former Tory campaign comms staffer
  • Waterfront Toronto's Communications chief is a former Tory campaign staffer
  • Sidewalk Labs Community Outreach lead is a former Toronto councillor and Tory ally
  • Navigator, the nation's most powerful lobbyists, is working for Sidewalk Labs, and their principal is a former Director of Communications for Tory's mayoral office
 
TheSix said:
"The Canadian Civil Liberties Association says it’s making good on its threat to sue all three orders of government over Google’s plans for a high-tech neighbourhood in Toronto.
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... Because we all know that low-tech is so much more superior to high-tech. This is why we still use horse-drawn carriages instead of cars...
 
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I hope that Sidewalk/Google see hashing out these legal bits as a necessary cost of doing business, and that this project proceeds in a form that is acceptable to most rational people, in a way that doesn’t compromise personal data that is *actually sensitive*. I really wish I could get actual facts from both the media and Sidewalk, rather than all the sensationalist BS coming from the twittersphere and talking heads.
 
No Waterfront Toronto vote until this winter, but Sidewalk will submit development plans later this month- hopefully we'll get lots of details and pretty pictures to gawk at.

Waterfront Toronto says a vote on whether to move forward on Sidewalk Labs' contentious development project will be pushed back several months to allow for a thorough evaluation.

Spokesman Andrew Tumilty says Waterfront's board vote on the Quayside development plan, scheduled for September, is now expected sometime in December or January.
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Tumilty says the delay will allow the board to do a "full, thorough, and extensive evaluation process" of the development plan Sidewalk Labs is expected to submit later this month.

Waterfront Toronto, a collaboration between Toronto and the provincial and federal governments to oversee the city's lakefront development, says it will publicly release the plan for a stretch of the city's eastern waterfront within a week of receiving it.
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https://twitter.com/x/status/1136048737657204741

Excerpt from the letter:

Across its businesses, Google plays god, making choices for consumers about which they are not aware. Consider for example, Google Maps or Waze. In both cases, Google practices “load balancing,” diverting some drivers to slower routes to maintain relative efficiency for the rest. Google also accepts payment from merchants in exchange for routing potential customers past their location. Consumers are not aware that Google may route them suboptimally due to load balancing or commercial considerations.

At the scale of a smart cities project like the Toronto waterfront, Google’s authoritarian tendencies are likely to be far more intrusive – and potentially harmful – than is generally the case with Maps and Waze. The quantity of data collected will be unprecedented, as will be the potential for abuse. There are currently few restrictions on the commercial exploitation of private data, leaving consumers with no hope of safety and little recourse for harm.
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Open Letter from Waterfront Toronto Board Chair, Stephen Diamond regarding Quayside

To all members of the public interested in the future of Toronto’s waterfront,

Waterfront Toronto has been advised that Sidewalk Labs will be providing us with their proposed Master Innovation Development Plan (MIDP) shortly.

I am writing now to tell you about the public process that Waterfront Toronto will follow to develop its response to the MIDP prepared by Sidewalk Labs.

Along with you, Waterfront Toronto’s Board, staff, and independent consultants will review Sidewalk Labs’ proposed plan to determine under which conditions, if any, it could work for Toronto.

As part of this process, Waterfront Toronto will:
  • Make the proposed MIDP available to the public within one week of receiving it.
  • Consult the public on the proposed MIDP. We will hold the first round of consultation within four weeks of receiving it.
  • All feedback received will be rigorously documented and shared publicly.

We know that a number of concerns and cautions have been raised about this project and that there are many voices that want to be heard and considered. It is Waterfront Toronto’s responsibility to act in the public interest. We take this responsibility extremely seriously and we know that you are relying on us to fulfill it rigorously. We are committed to working with all of you to do exactly that.

Sincerely,

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Stephen Diamond
Chairman of the Board of Directors, Waterfront Toronto

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Waterfront Toronto Releases Master Innovation and Development Plan for Quayside
Today, Waterfront Toronto released the draft Master Innovation and Development Plan (MIDP) for Quayside to the public. Chairman of the Board, Stephen Diamond, has written an open letter — available on our website — addressing the evaluation process and offering insights from Waterfront Toronto’s initial review of the MIDP.

The MIDP is over 1500 pages long and has 3 volumes:

Volume 1 – focuses on the development plan and the physical manifestations of proposed innovations within that plan, including estimated economic impacts.

Volume 2 – outlines their proposed innovations for Mobility, Public Realm, Buildings and Housing, Sustainability, and Digital Innovation.

Volume 3 – describes the commercial proposal including governance, roles and responsibilities, transaction economics and implementation plans.

The MIDP is available on Waterfront Toronto’s QuaysideTO.ca website, physical copies will be coming to Toronto Public Library branches across the city, and public consultations will begin on July 15th.

To assist the public consultations, Waterfront Toronto is preparing a “Note to Reader” for the public. This will be finalized and available shortly.

It is intended to help the public navigate the document, offer questions for the public to consider, and demonstrate the unique perspective Waterfront Toronto brings to this process as stewards of the public good.

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Given the pall of incompetence associated with the current Ontario government and the backdrop of the Ontario Place commercialization, Sidewalk comes across as an informed breath of fresh air. Progressive, insightful and pedestrian focused. Like Haussman's rework of Paris (AGO for the win :)) it's not unreasonable to have a top down overhaul. The trade off is the concerns about privacy. Coming from a life time working with Silicon Valley, my read, much like all data concerns, is it's going to ebb and flow until some reasonable outcome is reached. GDPR forced everyone to change what user controls mean. Unease in the sales of user data, definitely affected right to use policies. I'm currently going through the build out of an AI project and front and center is data ownership and control. I'm not suggesting there won't be abuses be it through vision systems, pattern recognition or something more subtle (like recommendations, guidance). Still, as a planned community, I'll take this over Amazon's land and expand or a pure developers best efforts. This feels like a worthy experiment. Plus timber buildings!!!
 
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