Projets de Toronto - Nouveautés et progressions

[Jasonzed]

Monde

Pic by Razz

[Jasonzed]

Mississauga's Edge Towers promo...

 

[Jasonzed]

More from Steveve

Mid-town Toronto

What's Going Where - Midtown Toronto (5 part infographic)

Full sizes:
1) https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevevephotostream/39988350051/sizes/o/
2) https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevevephotostream/39956987912/sizes/o/
3) https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevevephotostream/39956977332/sizes/o/
4) https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevevephotostream/39090387925/sizes/o/
5) https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevevephotostream/39090384765/sizes/o/

 

[Jasonzed]

 

by steveve

Modifié 1 février 2018 par Jasonzed

[IluvMTL]

https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/02/tech-companies-should-not-plan-our-cities/552074/?utm_source=SFFB

 

In October 2017, Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff (R) look at city models built by children before a press conference where Alphabet Inc, the owner of Google, announced its project in Toronto. 

Mark Blinch/Reuters

Tech Companies Should Not Plan Our Cities

1. MARIANA VALVERDE

 7:24 AM ET

The Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto represents a radical departure from the principles that have guided city planning in Canada since Jane Jacobs moved north.

• Sidewalk Labs, a firm owned by Google parent company Alphabet that is aiming to branch out into city planning, has come up with a futuristic vision for a chunk of the lakefront in Canada’s biggest city.

The plan for Quayside, a data-oriented high-tech neighbourhood in the city’s east end, has attracted a lot of attention because it seems to be “a built-form version of Facebook,” in the words of urban affairs expert John Lorinc.

But the proposed project’s risks go far beyond Google’s data collection and data use.

As an expert on the governance of urban development, with particular expertise in the growing use of public-private partnerships, I fear that the raging debate between “smart city” advocates and critics of big data may prevent Canadians from appreciating that the Google plan may involve software, but it’s a city plan, not an app.

As such, it represents a radical departure from the principles that have guided city planning in Canada since citizen participation and accountability came to the fore in the era of Jane Jacobs, a renowned Canadian-American urban planner.

 

Turning large areas over to private corporations so that they can not only build but even plan and control neighbourhoods or towns has happened in many Asian cities: Manila, Singapore and Hanoi have all witnessed the emergence of exclusive “Urban Integrated Megaprojects.” They may not have data sensors everywhere, but they otherwise resemble the Sidewalk Labs’ plan for Toronto.

Canary Wharf: a corporate mega-project

Privatized planning also exists in democratic Western countries. In the Margaret Thatcher era, London saw the creation of several “Urban Development Corporations” designed specifically to go over the heads of local city councils, which were often dominated by Labour politicians opposed to such entities.

Developers entered into secretive deals with these obscure special-purpose authorities, sidelining local accountability processes to create exclusive commercial and residential districts, including Canary Wharf.

Local democracy has certainly had its ups and downs in Canada.

But unlike the situation in the U.K., the federal government has no jurisdiction over city matters and so corporate involvement in urban planning has been more limited.

For example, next door to the proposed Google mini-city in Toronto, developer First Gulf is proposing to create a large office development in an area of the city that’s been dubbed East Harbour. The city of Toronto is allowing the developer to draw up a master plan covering not only the land it already owns, but also some adjacent areas.

 

This is somewhat worrisome because urban planning is first and foremost a key public function.

Working with the city

But as I saw at a recent community consultation meeting, First Gulf is working closely with Toronto urban planners and officials from the city’s parks department and public transit agencies.

In some cases they are even proposing details that exceed legal standards, and so the public interest seems to be front and center. Of course, the profit motive has not disappeared. Local residents will need to stay vigilant.

Nonetheless, First Gulf is demonstrating that collaboration between private corporations and public bodies can serve the public interest.

A major difference between the East Harbour plan and the proposed Google project is that the Google folks have not approached the city in the usual, highly regulated manner, but have been negotiating, in secret, with the arms-length Waterfront Toronto.

A sketch of Sidewalk Labs’ plan for housing in its proposed Quayside development in east-end Toronto. (Sidewalk Labs)

Waterfront Toronto, a tri-government agency set up in 2000 to develop Toronto’s post-industrial waterfront, has facilitated many good projects. But like other agencies and commissions that have been spun off by governments, it lacks transparency.

Such agencies may very well do good work, but they operate much like private corporations. Their political masters sometimes hold them to account, but citizens have no idea who’s in charge or why they make the decisions they make.

Closed meetings

In contrast, city staff operate under the glaring light of compulsory transparency. The Waterfront Toronto board of directors—political appointees, overwhelmingly from corporate backgrounds—held a closed meeting in October after giving its own real estate committee less than four days to look at the Google plan.

 

It quickly proceeded to a big photo-op featuring Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, without the release of either the agreement itself or any prior studies that would justify its development.

Recommended

• When a Tech Giant Plays Waterfront Developer

  1. LAURA BLISS

  JAN 9, 2018

• What Facebook Can Learn From Company Towns

  1. ZACH MORTICE

  JUL 19, 2017

• The Case for Putting Amazon's HQ2 in the Suburbs

  1. AMANDA KOLSON HURLEY

  JAN 26, 2018

City staff, who have noted that even their waterfront planning experts were not consulted, have recently raised important issues regarding potential conflicts between Google’s ambitions and public laws and policies. For example, the city has a fair procurement policy that would not allow it to let a big U.S. company have any kind of monopoly.

Even more worrying, Waterfront Toronto has declared that so-called Sidewalk TO will begin with the 12-acre Quayside, but “will then expand to 325 hectares (800 acres).”

“Will” is a peculiar word here.

 

Google does not own any of the land, so it’s not even in a position to seek development permission, much less approve its own plans.

The city has other ideas

For the larger 800-acre area, known as the Portlands, Toronto’s city council recently approved its own, much-discussed plan, one that focuses on preserving film studio space and makes no mention of Google.

At a recent University of Toronto panel on the proposal, the vice-president of Waterfront Toronto, Kristina Verner, was confronted with the discrepancy about what land is actually in play.

She explained that the plan would only come to fruition if Google’s Sidewalk Labs was given control over the larger area. Because the city appears reluctant, for good reason, to give important city planning powers about an 800-acre expanse to an American corporation, the agreement could fall apart.

Nonetheless, other corporations could easily be inspired by the much-touted Google plan to propose smart-city, tech-oriented neighborhood plans to other municipalities.

It’s clear that tech companies expanding into city planning puts at risk the core democratic principles of Canadian urban planning and city-building.

Corporations are not responsible to the people. And politicians can easily be seduced by visions of high-tech jobs. Only citizens can remind politicians that city building does involve deals — but only deals that have the public interest at heart, deals that respect public laws and policies.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

About the Author

Mariana Valverde

• FEED

Mariana Valverde is a professor of socio-legal studies at the University of Toronto and a researcher interested in urban law and governance and infrastructure.

[enrigue9]

Une nouvelle publicité pour le projet One Yonge à Toronto !

 

 

[IluvMTL]

Another Toronto should be leery about partnering with corps like Google. This time in Wired.

https://www.wired.com/story/sidewalk-labs-toronto-google-risks/

• IDEAS
• 02.01.18
• 09:22 AM

BEWARE OF GOOGLE'S INTENTIONS

In partnering with local governments to create infrastructure, Alphabet says it is only trying to help. Local governments shouldn’t believe it.

• IDEAS
• 02.01.18
• 09:22 AM

BEWARE OF GOOGLE'S INTENTIONS

In partnering with local governments to create infrastructure, Alphabet says it is only trying to help. Local governments shouldn’t believe it.

 

BY SUSAN CRAWFORD

A DECADE AGO, Chicago handed over control of its parking meters to a cadre of private investors. Officials pitched the deal as an innovative win-win. In exchange for a 75-year lease, the cash-strapped city got a lump sum. In fact, that large upfront payment was far less than the meters’ potential revenue—it was more than $1 billion too low.

In an upcoming article, professors Max Schanzenbach and Nadav Shoked of Northwestern Law School point out that the city got away with that bad deal, in part, because it was a city. Schanzenbach and Shoked argue that if a private corporation had done what Chicago did—entering into an arrangement aimed at solving "short-term financial problems, without properly considering the long-term implications of the deal," as Chicago’s Office of the Inspector General put it at the time—it would have been sued for violating its duty of care. The distinction may seem small, but as cities become embroiled with private companies, promising to fund and build city infrastructure, it’s worth ironing out what obligations a city owes its residents.

Susan Crawford (@scrawford) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED, a professor at Harvard Law School, author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, coauthor of The Responsive City, and a longtime columnist and blogger about tech policy.

Beginning last fall, Toronto has been getting a flood of publicity about a deal with Sidewalk Labs, part of Google spinoff Alphabet. Reports describe the deal as giving Sidewalk the authority to build in an undeveloped 12-acre portion of the city called Quayside. The idea is that Sidewalk will collect data about everything from water use to air quality to the perambulations of Quayside's future populace and use that data to run energy, transport, and all other systems. Swarms of sensors inside and outside buildings and on streets will be constantly on duty, monitoring and modulating.

But Toronto recently revealed that deal has put it in a tough place. A nonprofit development corporation, not the city, made the arrangement with Google that sparked all the publicity—the city itself doesn't appear to have known a deal with Google was in the works. Now the situation appears messy: The details of the arrangement are not public, the planning process is being paid for by Google, and Google won’t continue funding that process unless government authorities promise they’ll reach a final agreement that aligns with Google’s interests. Those interests include Google's desire to expand its Toronto experiments beyond that 12-acre Quayside plot.

Toronto, like Chicago, seems to be holding too few of the cards. Yet the city still has a chance to act as a good steward by avoiding the long-term risks that come with involving Google in urban planning.

When Toronto decided to redevelop its eastern waterfront almost 20 years ago, much of the land in the area was owned by the city, the province of Ontario, and the national government. To smooth the process of development, these entities gave Waterfront Toronto, a nonprofit corporation with a private board, authority to strategize about revitalization plans, while retaining the authority to approve any agreements having to do with government-owned land. It was Waterfront Toronto, acting without input from city staff, that made the "framework" deal with Google last fall that kicked off all the publicity.

 

And what great publicity it was. Mayors and other local elected officials love to look forward-thinking, and in a world of constrained resources, they'll happily be associated with something that looks both shiny and free. The designs and sketches published so far by Sidewalk are visually arresting, featuring modular, fully green buildings, a bustling coexistence between small businesses and residents, and lively, well-planted pocket parks. The leader of Sidewalk Labs, former NYC deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff, told the press that Google's plan was to improve the quality of life in cities generally, starting with the Quayside project as a pilot. Google's systems, bristling with cameras and antennae, could, according to Doctoroff, improve on democracy.

The reality is that Google has agreed—in a secret framework document—to spend $10 million on a planning process aimed at producing agreements that can be implemented only if the city and other government authorities go along with a plan that benefits Google. (And Google clearly needs its experiments in Quayside to operate at a larger scale in order for them to be cost-effective for the company.) All the media coverage has given Google tremendous leverage as the city scrambles to figure out what to do. Last week, Toronto's city council got a report making clear the city hadn't known what Waterfront Toronto was doing. In response, the council has asked Waterfront Toronto to include Toronto's chief information officer and chief transformation officer in the planning process.

They'll have a lot to talk about. The key problem is that city officials may not understand that they will get access to very little of what Google learns from their citizens. After all, Google already knows an enormous amount about what people are doing when they're using Google products, and it won't be sharing what it already knows about Toronto's citizens. (Indeed, the city may not want that information because of the risk the data might be made public in response to a public records request.) But it is not clear whether Toronto will gain any useful insights from its partnership with Google. Meanwhile, Google will be gaining insights about urban life—including energy use, transit effectiveness, climate mitigation strategies, and social service delivery patterns—that it will then be able to resell to cities around the world. Including, perhaps, Toronto itself.

A central question for any city in the US contemplating IoT installations by giant tech companies for "free" is whether it is being a good steward of the city's reputation and long-term trustworthiness. When corporations do business deals, their directors are subject to a bundle of fiduciary obligations: a duty of care, a duty of loyalty, and a duty of transparency. "Be a fiduciary" is another way of saying "be a good steward." Fiduciaries need to keep the long-term interests of their organizations in mind. From a historical perspective, cities are corporations too. Today, cities in the US often have corporate-like charters setting out their scope and duties. When a city acts in the private market by selling, even indirectly, data drawn from its citizens, it is unlikely to be immune from lawsuits. Cities are more likely to be protected from litigation when they're clearly "governing.” And so the duties of care, loyalty, and transparency should apply to it as well.

There are civil servants in every city, I'm willing to bet, who are deeply worried about massive IoT deals by their cities with companies like Google. It is likely that the burdens of these arrangements, over the decades to come, may outweigh whatever short-term benefits the city obtains. There will be, someday, an enormous blowback from citizens, about these giant tech company deals, akin to the fury over the Chicago parking meter debacle. By then, the current electeds will have moved on and the city will be left looking thoroughly untrustworthy. Which will make it even more difficult for cities—now trusted more than any other element of government in the US—to address the crushing problems of affordable housing, homelessness, climate change, and other urban issues they now confront every day.

To avoid these legal liabilities, cities need to show their work before entering into these kinds of contractual arrangements: Be clear and consistent as to city priorities and city values, rather than being driven by the priorities of companies like Google; debate the long-term benefits of proceeding, in public; and, at the very least, constrain what Google-like companies can do in the future with what they learn from their citizens. Toronto has the chance to do that, starting now.

[Jasonzed]

1 Yorkville,  183M, 58s condo

by somemidtowner

[Jasonzed]

 

Mississauga projects:

M-City towers 1 & 2 are starting up

Parkside Village Block 9  (two buildings in the centre) and Daniels' Wesley tower 1 and 2 are under construction

 

Modifié 8 février 2018 par Jasonzed

[Jasonzed]