Toronto’s waterfront is considered to be the largest area of undeveloped real estate in North America. Photograph: Creative Touch Imaging /NurPhoto via Getty Images Perhaps most importantly, the efficiency and environmental sustainability of the whole thing will be based on the use of huge amounts of data generated by its residents as they go about their daily lives. Sidewalk Labs says people’s privacy will be protected by the fact that anyone using data will have to sign up to a “responsible data impact assessment” and that the ownership of data will rest with an “independent civic data trust”, but to many people, these inevitably sound like opaque, abstract ideas.
Waterfront Toronto says it has “made a clear, public commitment to the protection of public privacy” and that it will abide by a “privacy by design” standard developed by Dr Ann Cavoukian, a leading Canadian privacy expert. But along with another adviser to the project, Cavoukian has now pulled out of the project because of privacy concerns: “I imagined us creating a smart city of privacy, as opposed to a smart city of surveillance,” she says.
Sidewalk Labs’ arrival in Toronto was formally announced in October 2017, when the-then executive chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, Eric Schmidt, shared a stage in the city with the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau. In the past, said Schmidt, he and his colleagues had thought “about all the things we could do if someone would just give us a city and put us in charge,” before he laughed, and added: “That’s not how it works, for all sorts of good reasons.” With his usual breezy enthusiasm, Trudeau said the development would be a “testbed for new technologies … that will help us build cleaner, smarter, greener cities.” Eighteen months on, polls say 55% of Toronto’s residents support the plan.
Opposition to it has only just started to cohere – chiefly in the form of a new campaign group called Block Sidewalk. One of its key voices is Bianca Wylie, whose expertise lies in technology and public engagement. “No one even asked for this thing,” she says: “The people of Toronto didn’t want a smart city or a smart neighbourhood – and now we’re having the wrong conversation. It’s all, ‘How do we pull this off?’ Not, ‘Do we even want it?’ That’s the slide that happens.”
Wylie can talk about the data and surveillance aspects of what Sidewalk Labs seems to have planned, much of which remain unclear. But she puts more emphasis on the fact that the authorities in Toronto seem to have moved into talking about the details of the project before anyone has thought through the much more basic stuff, about how to create the right legal and regulatory framework for such a mind-boggling vision: “We don’t have policies and laws to manage something like this,” she says. “That’s such a fundamental part of the problem. In a democracy, you’re supposed to get your policies and laws in order first. Now, you’ve got the vendor at the table, influencing all these things.”
At first, it looked like the Sidewalk Labs smart city would cover around 12 acres. But last month, leaked documents reported in the Toronto Star revealed plans for the redevelopment of the waterfront to actually cover 350 acres (and house as many as 75,000 additional people), and that Google would take a portion of property taxes, development fees and tax revenue generated by increased property values. This, says Wylie, finally catalysed hostility to the whole plan: “If all these things had been identified at the beginning,” she says, “a lot more people would have sat up. That’s why [the way] they have been allowed to operate has been so fundamentally anti-democratic. If they had come out and said, ‘We want to finance transit infrastructure, we want a cut of development fees, we want to get in on municipal revenue’, you would have a lot of people organising, But that only came out because of a document leak.”
Towards the end of our conversation, Wylie mentions one more remarkable thing – the fact that what is planned for Toronto is unprecedented, in every conceivable way: “The fascinating thing about this project is, Sidewalk Labs has no résumé. They haven’t done anything. Usually when you get awarded contracts like this, you’ve got 10 or 15 years of experience. But these guys have nothing.”
Back in East Palo Alto, as well as expanding its existing HQ, Facebook has just taken another step towards plans for a new development called Willow Village, which will include a huge office complex, shops, hotels and a town square, and employment for more than 8,000 people. There will also be housing, but only 225 out of 1500 units will be set aside for “low-income households and seniors”.
“They are going to do some major, major expansion,” says Faraji. “And when they do, I suspect the rest of the people that look like me and have been here for a long time – the ones who are renting, anyway – are going to be gone. I just don’t see how people are going to be able to afford to be here any more.”
I wonder: does he have any advice for people fighting big tech elsewhere?
“Come together as a community. Do not allow your leaders to accept money for their organisations from tech companies. That’s what happened here. If you’re not together, it will be an uphill battle.”
There is only one question left. Does he think he’ll stay, even as Facebook endlessly expands?
What he says next cuts straight to the simplest kind of resistance: just staying put, and remaining defiant: “Oh, I’m not going anywhere.”