QUAYSIDE,a 12-acre (4.8-hectare) stretch of flood-prone land on Toronto’s eastern waterfront, is domestic to a huge, and pothole-filled parking lot,low-slung buildings and huge soyabean silosa crumbling vestige of the area’s bygone days as an industrial port. Many consider it an eyesore but for Sidewalk Labs, an “urban innovation” subsidiary of Google’s parent company, or Alphabet,it is an ideal location for the world’s “first neighbourhood built from the internet up”.
Sidewalk Labs is working in partnership with Waterfront Toronto, an agency representing the federal, and provincial and municipal governments that is responsible for developing the area,on a $50m project to overtake Quayside. It aims to make it a “platform” for testing how emerging technologies might ameliorate urban problems such as pollution, traffic jams and a lack of affordable housing. whether things go well, and its innovations could eventually be rolled out across an 800-acre expanse of the waterfront—an area as...
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Source: economist.com