Chris Selley clearly hoped the Google-affiliated Sidewalk Labs would turn out to be a benign addition to the Waterfront:
Sidewalk Labs Toronto demo, 17 April 2019.
Photo by Raysonho @ Open Grid Scheduler / Scalable Grid Engine via Wikimedia Commons.
It would be a mixed-income and family-friendly community: 20 per cent low-income and 20 per cent middle-income, with 40 per cent of units two-bedrooms or larger. It would be fantastically energy-efficient. It would discourage waste production using “pay-as-you-throw chutes” leading to pneumatic tubes that would rocket your trash, recycling and organic waste to the proper facilities.
Some of the details seemed a bit far-fetched, and some of the ideas came to naught at the design stage. But the Google family of companies is not known for wretched failure. To many Torontonians, it was a compelling vision.
Unfortunately, a lot of the very people it was designed to impress hated the hell out of it.
[…]
So there is blame to go around — and to be clear, no one is officially blaming the city bureaucracy or the project’s opponents for scuppering the deal. But the fact is, Sidewalk simply wandered into the wrong saloon. Toronto is an intensely conservative city in the strictest sense of the word. Its establishment doesn’t even believe things that work in other cities would work here. It’s why we pilot-project food carts to death, instead of just allowing food carts. It’s why we’re closing parks and crowding people on sidewalks during the pandemic, instead of following other the lead of other cities and dedicating roads to safely spaced pedestrians and cyclists. When Ontario loosened alcohol regulations, many Torontonians predicted tailgate parties and picnics-with-wine would lead to mayhem — and they really, really meant it.
Sidewalk wanted to do something no other city had ever done. You can imagine the terror and confusion it sowed. And that was over 12 acres — six football fields. Toronto has a great many things going for it. I have argued in the past that its conservatism, broadly speaking, has served it very well. But Sidewalk reminded us what we trade for that. If we can’t take a bit of a chance on 12 acres, it doesn’t bode at all well for the many hundreds of other acres in this city that have been begging for redevelopment my entire lifetime — not if we want them to be at all innovative or memorable, anyway.
