I think cars are mostly to blame, roads are so large, no pedestrian-only streets, parkings take so much space, etc.
Europe has no such luxury due to the density of people cramped in tight corridors and old (but beautiful) architecture. There it makes sense to have a well organized city life.
IMO city life is overrated but that's just my opinion/perspective of society.
did you think the rest of the world didn't have that?
> Europe has no such luxury due to the density of people cramped in tight corridors and old (but beautiful) architecture. There it makes sense to have a well organized city life.
Come visit the countryside in Europe.
Bonus: if you don't want to live in the city (due to work) you can work outside of it and use public transport!
When I see the word "smart" applied to anything I just think of the big junket of smart conferences and and smart workshops that all these middle-management types go to, that's the real industry here: middle sized fish eating all the investment dollars before the little fish, innovative startups, can get a taste.
The bad news is that next few buzzwords are already starting to build their own money pit conference circuit if "smart" things become passé. I know this because my wife presents at one such, in the pre-CoV world we got to fly around and eat fancy food once or twice a year presenting buzzword laden solutions to other middle-management types.
Maybe all this will junketing will go away now, will the world be any poorer because of it?
Also, I don't know much about the smart-city idea, though I do know that you can design spaces, homes, blocks, etc. in a way that creates natural interaction -- which is something that Google has excelled at (possibly more than any other company). This is also discussed heavily in facilitator-culture (and can be seen with Zappos).
That's not what happened though. Google was free to continue the project but decided not too, using Covid-19 as a fig leaf.
I agree with the thrust of your comment (we need more experimentation with cities, not less) but this is Google doing what Google does: changing it's mind and abandoning projects.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/15/alphabets-sidewalk-labs-want...
https://betakit.com/ann-cavoukian-still-has-problems-with-si...
https://betakit.com/sidewalk-labs-announces-it-will-no-longe...
They would cede a part of proposal, propose another, only to have some sort of new outcry.
From Ars' article published today https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/alphabets-sidewalk-l...
> But Sidewalk Labs’ vision was in trouble long before the pandemic. Since its inception, the project had been criticized by progressive activists concerned about how the Alphabet company would collect and protect data, and who would own that data
> The partnership took a bigger hit last summer, when Sidewalk Labs released a splashy and even more ambitious 1,524-page master plan for the lot that went well beyond what the government had anticipated, and for which the company pledged to spend up to $1.3 billion to complete. The redevelopment group wondered whether some of Sidewalk Labs’ proposals related to data collection and governance were even “in compliance with applicable laws.” It balked at a suggestion that the government commit millions to extend public transit into the area, a commitment, the group reminded the company, that it could not make on its own.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...
https://www.wdrb.com/in-depth/google-fiber-to-pay-nearly-4-m...
Google Fiber prepares to pull the plug on Louisville customers tonight, the tech company has agreed to pay Metro government $3.84 million to fix damage to city streets, Mayor Greg Fischer’s said Monday.
The payments, to be made over 20 months, will cover removing fiber cables and sealant from roads, milling and paving streets “where needed” and removing Google’s above-ground infrastructure, according to a news release from Fischer's office.
this presumes in some sense that they are not already.
That's kinda what they were going after.
But... I think there's an institutional aspect here that needs resolution before we can. The internet is worryingly centralised. A small number of extremely profitable companies monopolise huge markets. Google tends to do this with data.
I think the reticence was justified: "Who owns the data? What kind of monopoly are google eventually going to have?" These are fair. A financial success case for google is some sort of data-centric monopoly. They don't really do business another way. It's fair to be dubious of their endgame.
Geez. I feel old now.
We need deep changes now to get ahead of the looming consequences of the patterns we've held as a society up until now.
Reminds me of a board game called Risk that I like playing where you have to capture territories by attacking owners of other territories. The moment any one player looks like they are gaining a good lead over others, the rest of the players gang up against that player to prevent him from getting too powerful.
The goal is to be the single largest player in the game and everyone is trying to do that. But the moment anyone is too ahead of the curve in doing that we don't like it. I guess we as a society are wired to hate a single large player. Maybe the last couple of centuries left a bad taste in our mouth.
(I have no affiliation with the organization)
I'm not sure 'smart city' would be the right phrase for it, but they seem pretty cool.
Think of it this way, let's say a fascist genocidal group become rulers of that city/country, or let's say Google's intentions change and Google becomes many times more evil than it is now. Will this technology preserve the power of the people to nit just freely express their opinions but to take action based on their beliefs. Who controls access,surveillance and information? Even if the majority approve, will this preserve the liberties of the minority?
It's too late to ask these questions after the fact. I think it will work really well at first, my fear is actually that it won't stop at Toronto, and it will in the short term make a lot of people happy.
Technology has changed a lot but human nature has remained consistent. It would be foolish to fail to take into account hisorical lessons about humanity and social power dynamics when considering such drastic changes. Unfortunately, those who should make such considerations often lack technical knowledge and those with technical knowledge are blinded by immediate benefits and possibilities. I think this is the curse of living in relatively free socieites, you lack the perspective of seeing how fragile the ground you stand on really is.
Sure, there's something idyllic about the vision of a community driven by technology as a first-class citizen, but let's be real here: Google doesn't exist to make the world a better place, it exists to make money. Full stop. Some of what Google does may happen to improve quality of life for some, but they're also happy to do things like permanently lock people out of their accounts for TOS violations with no recourse, causing major disruptions some of for their users.
And then when they've decided that a project is no longer worth pursuing, they just kill it. How would you resolve the scenario where Google builds this smart city and then decides to bail on it? What happens to the people living there? Does the city of Toronto pick up the tab to keep it going? Google's mentality is fundamentally inconsistent with projects that require long-term stability, because not everything makes the kind of money that search ads do.
You really want that company dictating how the community should operate? I'll pass.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town#History
edit: a word
I think the idea that one organization existing to make the entire world a better place is utopian, but governments are much better equipped to bring positive change than private companies are because citizens are the direct beneficiaries of government resources. For example, a municipal government’s purpose is to administer public services, and a municipal government answers to its citizens. A private company, on the other hand, has a fiscal duty to its shareholders.
I’m not arguing that any organization is perfect because such an organization does not exist, and that’s true for companies and governments.
> how are those orgs doing in terms of impact and scale?
Let’s use various governments response to the coronavirus outbreak as an example. The US government opted to defer much of it’s responsibility to private companies and state governments, which has resulted in less testing, less access to PPE, and more reported deaths than any other country. Testing hasn’t scaled, and there have been numerous reports of corruption and interference in the medical community, some of which was alleged to have come directly from the White House.
Contrast that response with countries like Taiwan, who moved quickly to provide necessary resources and communicate effectively to mitigate the transmission of the virus.
The US has operated one of the most private-industry focused responses to this outbreak, and we’re likely to see 3k deaths per day by June. That’s a 9/11 death toll every single day.
I'd counter that if private companies were completely left in charge, the response may have been better (I would not have said this in January).
Private companies were called in because our public efforts failed. If private companies were leading the charge from day 1, I struggle to see how our response could have been worse than it is today. And I completely disagree that our poor response can be attributed to involvement of private companies.
in the u.s, how about other countries?
it seems like, uniquely among first-world countries, the u.s the govt (local or otherwise) is pretty inept at a lot of things (especially now)...
That's the distinction being drawn. Pretending there's not a fundamental distinction between the two types of entities is disingenuous.
There are actually some "fundamental distinctions" between government and business. For example, most governments (democratic or not) are slow, monolithic, and effectively immortal. Since governments have tax and police authority, they can survive bad periods, including those caused by their own errors, for longer periods of time. Most businesses do not have tax and police authority and must face the market test on a daily basis. The businesses that fail the test typically die and new businesses replace them.
they would if they could...
The only thing that keeps businesses from claiming tax and police authority is the government monopoly on violence; they'd happily take if they could. Same goes for having to face the "market test": businesses certainly don't want to that and would happily get rid of it if governments allowed them to (or did not exist).
If there was something that inherently made governments to be “good” actors more than a person or a business, we wouldn’t need checks and balances.
That can lead to good or bad outcomes in your judgment depending on your values. But it’s fundamentally a different dynamic than a for profit entity.
Have you looked at how Disney built Disney World, and the way they... govern... Disney World? There's a lot of similarities in Google's plan and their requests with what Disney built with the Reedy Creek Improvement District[0]. Essentially a company territory with government, policing, and regulation all managed by the company.
And did EPCOT actually create a world of tomorrow? No. But Disney World has made Disney a lot of money.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reedy_Creek_Improvement_Distri...
It's true that the concept of "cities" (or even just "gatherings of people") predates the Internet by thousands of years, and that cities themselves haven't adapted much to the Internet and what it enables in the 40ish years it's been around. This project was inspiring because it embraced what's possible in a new way and enabled many new possibilities that wouldn't otherwise be possible in the typical piecemeal upgrades a city typically sees over time (especially in terms of construction guidelines and sustainability). People hated on Sidewalk Labs since its very inception, but I guess they bit off too much area and got shut down by the locals (and, I guess, covid-19 made a handy exit strategy).
Hopefully the next EPCOT equivalent will either be a new city that attracts the kind of people who would want to live there, or at least find a city that would be happy to host their "experiments".
FWIW I previously worked at a "smart cities" company that I won't besmirch, but I will say I would rather see a more well-known (and IMO trustworthy) company that has more experience managing and securing data at scale than them. In experimental projects like these, it just takes one "city's data leaks" headline and the whole market chills.