Will Toronto become a ‘smart city’?
Though Sidewalk Labs’ Quayside development plans were abandoned in 2020, the city is still implementing smart-city tech.
What if Toronto could optimize how its garbage collection was run? Or what if the city could use sensors to learn which areas had more cyclist traffic than others — and then divert resources to building up bike infrastructure in them? All of this could be possible in a smart city.
Here’s what you need to know about smart cities, smart-city tech, and how Toronto might implement these ideas.
What are smart cities?
The term “smart cities” encapsulates a lot of different things, from specific technologies to mega developments.
“It basically refers to a fairly broad set of technologies and processes that create all sorts of digital connections within urban areas,” explains John Lorinc, a journalist and author of the award-winning book Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias. “This could include things like all sorts of transportation and mobility platforms, digital government technologies, smart grid technologies. It’s quite a broad range of stuff.”
Congratulations, @JohnLorinc! Dream States by John Lorinc has won the $60,000 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy, an award honouring nonfiction that contributes to Canadian policy.https://t.co/KKIRj9Pt9Z
— CBC Books (@cbcbooks) November 30, 2022
As Lorinc explains, a fundamental tenet of smart cities is collecting and synthesizing data. Smart-city tech uses all sorts of components — apps on our phones, sensors, GPS, Bluetooth, just to name a few examples — to collect data. That data is then used to manage a city’s assets, resources and services more efficiently.
The goal, at the end of the day, is to optimize the way a city functions.
For example, collecting data on how often people park at certain curbs (this is also called curb mapping) can lead to an understanding of where the most popular spots are and which spots are underutilized. Then the city (or a corporation that owns the data) can use that understanding to provide people with information about where parking is available.
Of course, this data can also serve other purposes outside the public good. In this case, a third party (or whoever owns the data) could use it to generate income.
“Say parking spots in this area are more in demand at a specific time,” says Lorinc. “Companies could say ‘We’re going to raise the price’ [on that spot], just like Uber.”
Where are some examples of smart cities?
Nowadays, most cities have components of smart-city technologies baked in.
“What tends to happen is that the technology becomes part of the urban system, right?” says Lorinc.
Philadelphia, for example, installed waste bins that were equipped with sensors that could detect when they’re full. This enabled the city to route garbage trucks more efficiently so that they only picked up from the full bins.
Lorinc also points to apps like Uber, food-delivery apps and e-scooters as other examples of smart-city tech that’s integrated into our lives and considered normal now.
There are also new mega-project developments popping up around the world that purport to build fully wired neighbourhoods with infrastructure and services driven by data. Hudson Yards in New York City is the most famous example.
Described as the world’s first “Quantified City,” Hudson Yards is a 28-acre cluster of modern buildings on the west side of Manhattan that have been outfitted with loads of smart-city tech. This includes the “microgrid,” a self-sufficient energy system that works independently from the rest of the city’s electricity grid. The project will cost over $25 billion and be fully completed in 2025.
What’s going on in Toronto?
Examples of smart-city tech are popping up all over Toronto.. At Exhibition Place, for example, the city has established a Transportation Innovation Zone (TIZ), an area that hosts testing of transportation and public approaches to tech in a real-world environment.
According to the City of Toronto website, this TIZ will allow various parties to test out transport methods in a part of town that has a huge range of infrastructure (including roads, local and regional transit hubs, sidewalks, cycling lanes, and parking areas). The hope is that TIZ data will be used to improve transportation around the city.
Another example is the King Street Pilot Project. The project shut down through traffic along a busy stretch of King St. between Jarvis and Bathurst in order to prioritize streetcars and pedestrians. Using smart-city tech like electronic traffic counters, vehicle detectors, and data from cycling apps, city officials were able to learn that streetcars indeed moved faster, and pedestrian and cyclist activity was way up.
Also, using data from point-of-sale devices, the city proved that businesses along that stretch of King didn’t lose profits — despite what business owners had feared. In 2019, the city voted to make the King Street Transit Priority Corridor permanent.
During the pandemic, smart-city tech helped Toronto adapt to the new way of living. Lorinc points to wastewater monitoring, which has been used by the province as an early detection tool for COVID-19 waves, as an example.
That said, not all planned projects have become a reality. Google-owned Sidewalk Labs wanted to redevelop Toronto’s Port Lands, a 12-acre site at the city’s eastern waterfront, into Quayside — an “inclusive urban development.” Announced in 2017, it was going to be a proof-of-concept for smart cities around the world, but the project was canceled in May of 2020.
Some of the ideas Sidewalk wanted to implement included using open digital infrastructure to improve residents’ quality of life. This would mean things like designing a fibre-optic network that would reach every building in Quayside and the use of Koala mounts to create connection points for digital devices (rather than installing a camera on a traditional traffic light).
Sidewalk Labs hoped to grow the area (and the city’s) economy by creating an estimated 93,000 jobs by 2040.
“For those working in the tech sector, and there are a lot of them, they thought that this was a great development,” says Lorinc. “Here's one of the world's leading tech companies that wanted to invest all this money in new technologies in Toronto and trial them here and so on. But there were also people who were very skeptical for a bunch of different reasons.”
Are there cons to smart cities?
The biggest concern is privacy. As all of these devices capture data and send it back to governments or third parties, there are fears the data could be used to surveil and police communities, especially ones that are already over-policed and lack other resources.
In Dream States Lorinc points to the example of ShotSpotter, a high-tech system that Toronto Police and City Council had endorsed deploying in target neighbourhoods. ShotSpotter is designed to alert police at the sound of gunshots, but there were concerns it would be able to eavesdrop on conversations or capture other sounds.
Privacy was a concern with Sidewalk Labs, too.
“They just kept saying, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ But when the whole project is based on deploying sensors in public space and the uses for that data isn’t very clear … well, we live in a society where there’s already so much surveillance and this was a bridge too far,” Lorinc says.
What might the future bring?
We’re likely to see more smart-city tech, not less. However, the big thing is that the tech needs to be in service of something, rather than just tech for tech’s sake, says Lorinc.
“Sidewalk Labs wanted this community to be a big lab, which rubbed people the wrong way. They wanted to trial different ideas and technologies and then implement it elsewhere,” he says. “That’s an instrumentalist view of technology. And I would say that you want tech to be supplementing systems to allow them to operate more efficiently … and not surveil people.”
Lorinc also points to Europe’s privacy and data laws as something Canada needs to adopt if we want to continue building with smart tech.
“The EU has very progressive privacy laws, so they make tech companies jump over a higher bar,” he explains. “It puts people’s minds at ease, in terms of their privacy.”
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