Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs Partner to Launch Testbed for Solutions to Urban Challenges

Waterfront Toronto launches Quayside Testbed Site with Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet company that imagines, designs, tests, and builds urban innovations to help cities meet their biggest challenges.

Cities around the world are facing challenges to develop sustainable, accessible, inclusive and prosperous communities. To meet this challenge, Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs announced on October 17, 2017 that they launched a new precedent-setting waterfront community called Quayside as a testbed for emerging technologies, materials and processes that will advance solutions that can be replicated in cities worldwide. Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet company, responded to Waterfront Toronto’s RFP issued in March 2017 that sought an innovation and funding partner for the Eastern Waterfront site called Quayside. Opened by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynn and Toronto Mayor John Tory at Corus on the Toronto Waterfront, the October 17 event attracted Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet, Dan Doctoroff, CEO of Sidewalk Labs and former Deputy Mayor of New York City and Will Fleissig, President and CEO of Waterfront Toronto as keynote speakers. Called “Sidewalk Toronto”, the initiative aims to make Toronto’s Eastern Waterfront the Global Hub for Urban Innovation, starting with Google’s Canadian Headquarters to be located here.

Toronto, ICF’s Intelligent Community of the Year (2014), is the fastest growing large metropolitan area in North America. With this growth, Toronto is facing many challenges from climate change to critical infrastructure deficiencies; congestion; social disparities; disruptions with technological change and lack of affordable housing. With increasingly limited resources available to governments new approaches must be found. Accordingly, Sidewalk Toronto will help Waterfront Toronto in advancing the following ambitious, high-level objectives:

• Sustainability, Resiliency and Urban Innovation: Create a globally significant demonstration project that advances a new market model for climate-positive urban developments. Pilot, on a large scale, leading sustainability and resiliency practices that address local, national and global carbon emission reduction targets. Incorporate technology advancements that enhance efficiencies and improve the overall quality of life for citizens, employees, students and visitors to the area;
• Complete Communities: Establish a complete community that emphasizes quality of place, and provides a range of housing types for families of all sizes and income levels within a robust mix of uses, including public open space, culture, recreation, retail, education-related activities and offices;
• Economic Development and Prosperity: Provide a testbed for Canada’s cleantech, building materials and broader innovation-driven sectors to support their growth and competitiveness in global markets; and
• Partnership and Investment: Develop a new partnership model that ensures a solid financial foundation, manages financial risk and secures revenue.

With this announcement, Quayside will be where the emerging technology-based economic hubs will be developed on the waterfront, including attracting employers and job creators in the green technology, film and television production, digital media and information technology sectors. Quayside will also benefit from Canada’s first open-access, ultra-high-speed broadband community network, which is currently giving residential and business users access to advanced fiber-optic technology that delivers internet connection speeds that are exponentially faster than standard networks. The 12-acre Quayside site consists of three separate blocks of land located in downtown Toronto at the east end of Queens Quay and is just the first phase that could include development of the rest of the nearly 800 acres of Toronto’s Portlands.

According to Alphabet Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, “Toronto is the ideal place for Alphabet and Sidewalk Labs to do something impactful that we hope will foster new ideas that can be applied by cities around the world”. Similarly, Dan Doctoroff, CEO of Sidewalk Labs remarked that “Successful cities around the world are wrestling with the same challenges of growth, from rising costs of living that price out the middle class, to congestion and ever-longer commutes, to the challenges of climate change. Sidewalk Labs scoured the globe for the perfect place to create a district focused on solutions to these pressing challenges, and we found it on Toronto’s Eastern Waterfront. This is not a place where we deploy technology for its own sake, but rather one where we use emerging digital tools and the latest in urban design to solve big urban challenges in ways that we hope will inspire cities around the world.”

To view this timely announcement, press releases and video, see: https://sidewalktoronto.ca/#documents

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