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== Google’s Guinea-Pig City - The Atlantic - 2018 ==
Will Toronto turn its residents into Alphabet’s experiment? The answer has implications for cities everywhere.
Alphabet division Sidewalk Labs (a sister company to Google) is poised to spend $50,000,000 to redevelop a piece of Toronto waterfront called Quayside, filling it with "modular, dynamic" buildings that can be reconfigured as their uses change, data-gathering sensors that will help Sidewalk refine its own products and also allow Quayside to tune its zoning, usage, and management from moment to moment, as well as a new Google headquarters and a bunch of startups, and "affordable" micro-apartments starting at 162 square feet.
Molly Sauter's excellent critical piece on the Sidewalk/Toronto deal in The Atlantic shows how masterfully Sidewalk played the process, presenting incredibly detailed plans for the development that wooed lawmakers and citizens, and then later quietly announcing that these plans were really just guidelines that may or may not be followed in the final build-out; they also managed to get their agreement with the City of Toronto declared a secret, so that virtually no one -- not even key city councillors -- have been allowed to see it.
Sauter interrogates the promises of Sidewalk's smart city, raising the questions the city should have answered before greenlighting any action on the project, such as whether all those shiny startups will benefit Canada, or, as is customary, whether they will relocate to Silicon Valley as soon as they're successful enough to do so -- and also, how families are supposed to live in 162-square-foot apartments.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/googles-guinea-pig-city/552932/
==Google wants to run cities without being elected. Don't let it - The Guardian - 2017==
