Sidewalk Labs: Smart City Plans Beyond Toronto Quayside

Doctoroff describes Sidewalk Labs as “an urban innovation company”, and this mentality is set to be foundational to its future plans.

“At our core, we've developed a set of products and systems that help to improve life in cities,” he says.

“One example is a company called Cityblock, which has got a new approach to serving the urban disadvantaged and hardest-to-care-for, it’s a healthcare company. Another is a company called Replica, which has developed a new way of modelling urban mobility flows.

“We're focused on other things like mass timber buildings and affordable electrification, a new approach to doing the planning for large-scale developments.”

Many of the company’s upcoming projects, says Doctoroff, focus on “affordability and sustainability”, however he sees collaboration with planners and city governments as vital to their development.

“You've got to engage in physical places to actually not only implement those things, but develop the insights to make those products better and develop new insights over time.”

While Sidewalk has already produced a number of spin-off companies, the company has more planned ahead, with its renewed focus apparently being on tackling each problem individually rather than through a sprawling, multi-issue project similar to Toronto Quayside. And while that means it is unlikely to be challenging established property developers any time soon, it is likely to end up working with some of them.

One area it is particularly focused on is “the potential of mass timber to lower construction costs [and] to lower construction times”, particularly given the growing interest in timber as a sustainable construction material.

“We are in the process of creating a company to in effect commercialise the construction of mass timber,” he says.

“Out of our efforts in Toronto, we developed a very different approach to dramatically reducing carbon emissions.”

This focus on emissions cutting also extends to what Doctoroff calls “affordable electrification”, an area the company is also eyeing considerable commercial potential.

“Basically to use all electricity in – whether it's a building or in a district – without using fossil fuels. We think that there is a very important company that potentially could be created out of that.”

He adds that the planning tools developed during the Toronto project “can help to optimise using machine learning and computational design”, and also are set to become their own company.

However, it’s not all about spin-offs. Sidewalk also plans to work with developers on future projects to bring its insights and tools to other schemes.

“Separately, we will be engaging with developers using some of those innovations that were described in our plan for Toronto, some of which we ourselves will be building into companies to help developers achieve the sorts of quality-of-life improvements at the same time,” explains Doctoroff.

“In some cases, we will be a capital partner with them as well. So we expect to play a role in the building out of places and just do it in a more diversified way than we would have been in Toronto.”

Of course, one of the biggest issues that hounded the Toronto project were fears about the level of data collection it proposed and the privacy concerns that it raised.

However, while Doctoroff acknowledges that this was probably the most discussed area during the two-year Toronto project, he argues that this allowed the company to have a “more than robust dialogue” about the issue and so develop leading solutions.

“I think we've actually developed an approach that squarely leaves decisions about what the applications for the use of that kind of data in the hands of the public sector,” he says.

However, he argues that while there are understandable fears about such privacy concerns, data is becoming an increasingly present and vital part of cities, whether we like it or not.

“At the end of the day, there is a desperate need to get our arms around the use of data in public spaces, in particular around urban data,” he says.

“And the best way to do that is actually by having the public sector actually engaged, both with approving the applications [and] monitoring them over time, according to a set of principles and processes, all of which we actually laid out as part of our proposal.

“So we think it's doable. We think we also have to recognise that it's a problem everywhere. And I think what we did was set what could be a really global standard, at least produce a set of ideas that could morph into a global standard for the management of this data.”