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A new venture, called Sidewalk Toronto, will oversee the development of 800 acres of the city into a new district, a digital utopia that will test and showcase a large variety of smart city technologies.
The new venture is an initiative of Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet, itself a spinoff of Google. Sidewalk Labs teamed up with city agency Waterfront Toronto to launch this initiative, which was announced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and top executives of Alphabet.
The new district, designed “from the Internet up’, instead of from the top down, will be developed on waterfront property on the shores of Lake Ontario. The cost of the project, currently known as “Quayside’, is envisaged to run over $1 billion, as it will be a huge showcase for the company’ s smart city technology.
While the details of what this new district will look like are not yet known, current teasers so far point to a bottom up design incorporating self-driving cars with dedicated lanes, public Wi-Fi hubs, new health care delivery solutions, and other city planning advances that modern technology makes possible.
According to a statement by Mr. Trudeau, “Today’s announcement is about creating a new type of neighborhood that puts people first. Sidewalk Toronto will transform Quayside into a thriving hub for innovation and a community for tens of thousands of people to live, work, and play.’
The original article can be found on THE VERGE.