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Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

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Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#111

Post by asdff »

gamblor956 wrote: post #42
tyre wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can but change is measured in decades and even then often doesn't happen. Starting "fresh" with a single leading implementer is really how it needs to be done. Take San Francisco. There's the planning board, the planning department, environmental lawsuits, HOAs, abusing "historic landmarks" designations, political showmanship, developers, affordable housing, community meetings, unions, community groups (the cycli…

San Francisco has changed immensely in just the last decade. It may not be noticeable if you live there because you only see the incremental day by day changes, but as someone who only sporadically visits the Bay Area: it's nothing like it was in 2010. It's significantly more built up (and out), more skyscrapers, more apartments, more condos, more everything.

Housing prices would tell you there is actually less of everything, relatively. Demand has surged, sufficient supply has yet to be constructed, queue housing crisis. Not enough housing is being built in California's cities.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#112

Post by cal5k »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #76
cal5k wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not even a fan of that project in particular, but this is a common problem in Canada - the goalpost constantly shifts, the process becomes a political hot potato, and the foreign investor eventually just says "fuck this" and pulls out of the market. It's happened in oil & gas, banking, telecommunications, retail, and a whole host of other sectors.

Outside of retail, all of the rest of those have real national security implications. And if by retail you're referring to burger joints or Target, I'm afraid that's just market effect.

There's a big difference between considering national security issues and bungling foreign direct investment completely (except for real estate). It's also no excuse for the protection of oligopolies that don't act in the best interests of Canadians.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#114

Post by reaperducer »

cactus2093 wrote: post #45
nick_ wrote: post #39

Good. Toronto doesn't need condo neighbourhoods with gimmicky smart-phone integrations. It needs re-zoning of low density neighbourhoods to allow medium density to be built, thus more uniformly distributing the large and growing population.

But... condo neighborhoods are exactly that medium density housing. Every city does need more condos in their existing neighborhoods if populations are able to grow. (Unless Covid-19 will reshape the trajectory of urbanization, and major cities will mostly shrink for the next several decades. That actually seems somewhat plausible). But writing off all the sidewalk labs ideas as gimmicky smartphone integrations is pr…

There were ideas for greener construction methods using more timber and less concrete, more space optimized for walking and biking instead of cars, interesting communal space arrangements to make spaces that can be heated in winter and converted to outdoor space when the weather is nice.

None of those were innovative, or Google-first. They're all things that have been in the works by cities for decades.

The problem is that people who don't watch or attend city meetings don't know it because change at that scale is slow. Unlike computer code, you can't just delete a section of a city you don't like and rebuild it. A city is a living thing, and living things take time to change.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#115

Post by mcguire »

supernova87a wrote: post #57

Google doesn't need to invest in the gadgets and electronics in the walls that appear to make cities smarter. That money would be better spent on enabling city governments, elected policymakers, and especially their constituents to be smarter and able to make better choices and designs about city planning, building permits, incentives, taxation, traffic, etc better. The rest will follow. What we need is for people to…

How would that allow Google to collect personal data in order to better sell advertisements?

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#116

Post by ehsankia »

mdkrkeo9 wrote: post #61
cactus2093 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But... condo neighborhoods are exactly that medium density housing. Every city does need more condos in their existing neighborhoods if populations are able to grow. (Unless Covid-19 will reshape the trajectory of urbanization, and major cities will mostly shrink for the next several decades. That actually seems somewhat plausible). But writing off all the sidewalk labs ideas as gimmicky smartphone integrations is pr…

None of those things require Google per se Ultimately they require the community itself to take it upon themselves to do it Which is hard since they are tasked with using their time to prop up big corps profit machinery most days I wonder if there’s economic benefit to leaving peoples wealth in their communities instead of extracting it into silos for the investment whims of a minority of global elites Curious if tha…

> None of those things require Google per se

And it never did because it was never Google, it's Sidewalk Labs, which is a separate Alphabet company who's whole job is exactly to research and develop such plans.

> Ultimately they require the community itself to take it upon themselves to do it

I really dislike this argument. "We don't need AMP to make sites fast, webdevs can just spend time hand optimizing their sites themselves". Then you wait years and 95% of websites are still slow and bloated.

Every single city and community has had the power to do this for years yet there are very few who have actually creating anything like it. Just because it's doable doesn't mean it'll happen without some incentive and help.

> economic benefit to leaving peoples wealth in their communities instead of extracting it into silos

Expect a lot of these create more value and wealth within the communities than they take. People love to blame tech companies, but without food delivery services for example, most restaurants would have no business right now. Google Maps and these other services all bring orders of magnitude more value to a city than they "extract into silos".

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#117

Post by alexashka »

sudosysgen wrote: post #65
refurb wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Condos are too expensive in general to fulfill the needs of most cities. What the alternative? It's either single family home or condominiums (apartments).

Not necessarily, no. First, condominiums are not apartments, because they are supposed to be sold, and in general cannot be rented. This means that they are built for and priced for people that can afford a 450000$ mortgage plus large condominium fees every month. Which are not the people that need housing right now. There are also duplexes and triplexes, and apartments, as well as housing co-ops and subsidized or st…

Units within condos are rented all the time.

Your argument seems to be that there is a sizeable chunk of the population that cannot afford to own their own home. Yes, and?

We live in a global market and as a result, citizens of successful cities have to compete with people not just from that city, but from people outside, who are willing to bring in some cash. Oops, that means a bunch of people now can't afford to own a home.

That's the world we're living in. If you want to cancel inflow of capital into big cities, that's a political decision that has nothing to do with building or not building housing. If you want to 'just build affordable housing', you're really saying let's give permanent government assistance to a slice of the population. Are you qualified and knowledgable of all the side-effects of doing so? I'm not, so I don't even bother pretending I have a solution.

People need to become 1% smarter, to realize how complex human societies are and quit wishful thinking of 'just give/build more stuff for people who don't have enough'. You're a software developer, you know what a ball of mud most codebases are and how hard they are to refactor. Human societies are a worse version of that and it's a thankless job because by re-factoring one bit, you potentially break a dozen other places and boy will you hear from them.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#118

Post by drusepth »

I know there's gonna be a lot of people here that are happy about this for various reasons (anti-Google, anti-"smart cities", etc), but this is really disappointing for me.

It's true that the concept of "cities" (or even just "gatherings of people") predates the Internet by thousands of years, and that cities themselves haven't adapted much to the Internet and what it enables in the 40ish years it's been around. This project was inspiring because it embraced what's possible in a new way and enabled many new possibilities that wouldn't otherwise be possible in the typical piecemeal upgrades a city typically sees over time (especially in terms of construction guidelines and sustainability). People hated on Sidewalk Labs since its very inception, but I guess they bit off too much area and got shut down by the locals (and, I guess, covid-19 made a handy exit strategy).

Hopefully the next EPCOT equivalent will either be a new city that attracts the kind of people who would want to live there, or at least find a city that would be happy to host their "experiments".

FWIW I previously worked at a "smart cities" company that I won't besmirch, but I will say I would rather see a more well-known (and IMO trustworthy) company that has more experience managing and securing data at scale than them. In experimental projects like these, it just takes one "city's data leaks" headline and the whole market chills.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#119

Post by airstrike »

neom wrote: post #101
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you still exist?!

https://municipal.systems/ :)

Nice! Ever ran summary stats on which geographies have the most amount of data and possibly check for a correlation with developmental indices like HDI or GINI?

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#120

Post by ramshorns »

supernova87a wrote: post #57

Google doesn't need to invest in the gadgets and electronics in the walls that appear to make cities smarter. That money would be better spent on enabling city governments, elected policymakers, and especially their constituents to be smarter and able to make better choices and designs about city planning, building permits, incentives, taxation, traffic, etc better. The rest will follow. What we need is for people to…

Yes, though it depends on your goal. Alphabet's goal was probably not to actually make the city better to live in, but to find more ways to collect personal information for their own profit.

Anyway, Cory Doctorow wrote recently that cities full of sensors need not be used to spy on citizens, and could just be helpful instead.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2020/jan/17/the-case-for-...

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