Death of a Smart City
Alphabet bet big in Toronto. Toronto didn’t play along.
Published in
24 min readAug 12, 2020
In October 2017, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke at a VIP-laden press event in Toronto to announce plans for a new neighborhood in the city to be built “from the internet up.” The big reveal was the builder: Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. The mood was festive, optimistic…
