The End of Sidewalk Labs

In the fall of 2017, Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., announced a deal in Toronto to build a dream city “from the Internet up,” as CEO Daniel Doctoroff put it. The company’s 220-page proposal was heavy on the physical aspects of contemporary urbanity; its colorful illustrations showed gondolas, waste-disposal robots running underground, and mixed-use modular buildings.

But the illustrations were largely whims—drawn by a junior designer at Heatherwick Studio in New York—and the actual ideas never came any closer to reality. The company had imagined a 12-acre neighborhood with an efficient energy grid and all kinds of amenities, but it also wanted to place sensors everywhere. The network of sensors would not only record useful data about energy use and occupants’ behaviors, but transform this data into feedback to make the project’s systems run better—what Doctoroff dubbed an “urban-tech revolution.”