Abstract
In this book, I have developed an approach the Quayside project that attends to journalism discourse and the smart city. In this chapter, I review and further contextualize the Quayside project story to explain why this smart city assemblage did not work out. Through retrospective assimilation, we can better understand how mediatized controversy unsettled the public image of a smart city project. In the narrative progression, a smart city frame was counterposed with two other frames that associated the project with three major problems: privacy, governance, and intellectual property. An oppositional dimension with persuasive force led to major modifications of the project. Outside of Sidewalk Toronto, government organizations had slower time scales for policy making. I conclude that mediatized controversy conditioned this particular smart city project’s alteration and dissolution. In closing, I return to journalism as curriculum to assess dialogical urban learning.
Today, however, these technical transformations occur so quickly that they leave the political and social realms behind, as well as public power in general, so that no new viable model of long-term social and economic development can emerge. Under the regime of radical and permanent innovation, regulation, legislation and knowledge always arrive too late…
— Bernard Stiegler, Bifurcate: There Is No Alternative
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Notes
- 1.
As Jane Jacobs used to say, somewhere that Google cannot find, communities have a right to say “no” to things that are going to harm them but a responsibility to say “yes” to things that will help. To appreciate how this project and civic action with proponents, supporters, and opponents in Toronto and New York both drew upon Jacob’s insights, see the documentary Citizen Jane: Battle for the City (2016). For her writing and organizing, Bianca Wylie was dubbed the “Jane Jacobs of the Smart Cities Age” (Bliss, 2018).
- 2.
Local academics in law and computer engineering also examined the nuances of the “urban data trust” in the border zone between the private and public sector. In Austin & Lei’s (2021) review, the urban data trust was based not only on faith in technical solutions to privacy questions but also “private ordering to provide more privacy protection than existing data protection laws” (259). In their view, Sidewalk Labs’ proposal bypassed data protection law and put the “urban data trust” outside a public regulatory framework. They conclude this was a short-lived, failed model that “increased legal complexity while at the same time reducing accountability and oversight apart from vague statements that the Urban Data Trust could eventually be transformed to a public entity through enabling legislation” (259).
- 3.
Skok (2020) was told by Sidewalk Labs staff that the October 17, 2017 press conference was the “original sin” because the photo-op signified the deal was done when it had not yet begun. As he elaborates: “From that point on, Sidewalk and Waterfront officials took great pains to point out they were still negotiating what their partnership might look like, but it was too late. The optics brought into question the selection process; the independence of Waterfront Toronto, the trilateral government agency in charge of developing the city’s lakeshore; and the amount of land that would be part of the Sidewalk project.”
- 4.
Given the lack of democratically informed governance since 2017, Wylie’s (2020) correspondence with Waterfront Toronto exemplifies how difficult it is to follow the Innovation Plan process and extract basic data about these “task forces” to understand what is happening while it is happening.
- 5.
In 2020, according to OECD surveys, 46.5 percent of American survey respondents have confidence in national government compared to 60 percent of Canadians (OECD, 2022).
- 6.
O’Kane’s book was then adapted for the stage in the form of satire in Michael Healey’s (2023) The Master Plan.
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Hanke, B. (2024). The Quayside Project: Some Reassembly Required. In: A Smarter Toronto. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41546-3_4
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