Where the Sidewalk Ended

With Sidways, the Globe and Mail reporter Josh O’Kane catalogues the personalities, procedures, and problems surrounding a failed effort to create a city-within-a-city on Toronto’s waterfront. The story begins with the ambitions of Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, leaders of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, who envisioned a community on the shores of Lake Ontario that would operate efficiently and sustainably, while addressing the human needs that really matter. It would be an urban model guided not by conventional rules, regulations, and bureaucratic decision making but by revelatory data. Who wouldn’t want traffic to actually move? To have retractable canopies that automatically protect pedestrians from the weather, sensors that monitor for noise, or garbage that’s picked up whenever it needs to be?

Data and privacy issues, complexities of the procurement process, and the egos of those in charge all got in the way of Page and Schmidt’s vision...