[...]
Sidewalk Labs promises to embed all sorts of sensors everywhere possible, sucking up a constant stream of information about traffic flow, noise levels, air quality, energy usage, travel patterns, and waste output. Cameras will help the company nail down the more intangible: Are people enjoying this public furniture arrangement in that green space? Are residents using the popup clinic when flu season strikes? Is that corner the optimal spot for a grocery store? Are its shopper locals or people coming in from outside the neighborhood?
In this distinctly "data is deity" Silicon Valley way, Alphabet joins the grand tradition of master-planned cities, places built from near-nothing with big social goals in mind. Historically, these have not worked out. Walt Disney’s Experimental Planned Community of Tomorrow—Epcot—died with its creator, transformed into a play park rather than viable community. South Korea's Songdo won't be finished until 2020, but the "smart city" has already
fallen well short of its business and residential goals. The Brazilian capital of Brasilia is largely the work of one architect, Oscar Niemeyer, and though it’s praised for its beauty and scale it doesn’t quite function as a place. These efforts flop because they never feel quite human. They can't shake the sense that they've been engineered, not grown. “The problem is that it's not a city. It's that simple,” the urban scholar Richard Burdett, an urban planning expert and sociologist,
told the BBC about Brasilia. “The issue is not whether it's a good city or a bad city. It's just not a city. It doesn't have the ingredients of a city: messy streets, people living above shops, and offices nearby.”
Sidewalk Labs seems well aware of the foibles of technologists building cities, the arrogant optimism that comes with seeing a place and deciding you can do it much better by razing and remaking. The company insists: This redevelopment will be extremely thoughtful. “This is not some random activity from our perspective,” Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt said Tuesday. “This is the culmination, from our side, of almost 10 years of thinking about how technology can improve people’s lives.”
That long gestating vision verges on the fantastical, with an tinge of
Minority Report dystopia. The waterfront redevelopment proposal outlines a community where everybody has their own account, “a highly secure, personalized portal through which each resident accesses public services and the public sector.” Use your account to tell everyone in the building to quiet down, to get into your gym, or to give the plumber access to your apartment while you're at work.
A mapping application will “record the location of all parts of the public realm in real time”—we’re talking roads, buildings, lawn furniture, and drones. Construction will prioritize walkers and bikers, not cars, though shared “taxibots” and “vanbots” will roam the hood. (The company will work with sister company Waymo to iron out those self-driving details.) It will test a new housing concept called Loft, packed with flexible spaces to be used for whatever the community needs. It will experiment with building materials like plastic, prefabricated modules, and
timber in the place of steel. And yes, Sidewalk Labs says it's working on a comprehensive privacy plan.
The company will then crunch the numbers. Sidewalk Labs' data scientists will analyze the firehose of data to figure out what’s working and what’s not. It says it will use sophisticated modeling techniques to simulate “what-if scenarios” and determine better courses of action.
No one's using that park bench, but what if we moved it to a sunnier corner of the park? “Sidewalk expects that many residents, in general, will be attracted by the idea of living in a place that will continuously improve,” the company writes in its project proposal.
That only works if Quayside improves with its human residents in mind. The good news is that Sidewalk Labs’ approach—fast, iterative, and based on observed facts—should take its cues from people, not lofty design principles. In fact, this is academic work that is badly needed: Despite decades of the scholarly research into how cities work, scientists still struggle through gaps in data. Governments mostly collect info about how pedestrians use sidewalks and cyclists use bicycle infrastructure by hand, and then only periodically. Sidewalk Labs could help agencies everywhere crack a few codes. [...]
