Why Google's plan for the ultimate smart city went sideways.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

The keyside development on Toronto's waterfront was supposed to be the shining example of a tech-optimized smart city.

The urban environment reinvented from the internet up, as it was described by sidewalk labs.

That was a sister company to Google, which won a

government bid in 2017, to modernize the 12 acres of former dockland. There would be flexible

working spaces that transform into lively bars at night, robotaxies, heated sidewalks,

adaptive traffic lights, and lots and lots of data collection.

But in 2020, Sidewalk Toronto suddenly shut down before a single ribbon had been cut, turning from a shining

example to a cautionary tale. It's all chronicled in a new book from Globe and Mail reporter Josh O'Kane

called Sideways, the city Google couldn't buy. This was an era when people conflated the idea

of technological progress and societal progress. Now we are living in a society where all we're

thinking about is the consequences of the technology that was developed over the last 15 years. But back then, particularly Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, he was super stoked to show up to announcements like Facebook's going to announce hundreds of jobs. Alphabet or Google are going to announce hundreds of jobs. These are the kinds of things. It was really an economic development strategy, which was the relationship,

particularly in the Canadian government, but you see examples in the U.S. government all the time.

This was a fair bid process.

I spent a lot of time investigating it to get rid of the conspiracies that said it was not a fair bid process.

But in the end, a lot of concerns rose up from people who were thinking about privacy.

They were thinking about the relationship between technology and democracy before it became

a very public thing with the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal, which blew up about

six months after the Sidewalk Labs project was announced here in Toronto and really changed the narrative for everything, everywhere.

Right. So over the years of development of this project, these concerns became louder and louder.

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