<story><title>Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52572362</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>drusepth</author><text>I know there&amp;#x27;s gonna be a lot of people here that are happy about this for various reasons (anti-Google, anti-&amp;quot;smart cities&amp;quot;, etc), but this is really disappointing for me.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s true that the concept of &amp;quot;cities&amp;quot; (or even just &amp;quot;gatherings of people&amp;quot;) predates the Internet by thousands of years, and that cities themselves haven&amp;#x27;t adapted much to the Internet and what it enables in the 40ish years it&amp;#x27;s been around. This project was inspiring because it embraced what&amp;#x27;s possible in a new way and enabled many new possibilities that wouldn&amp;#x27;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).&lt;p&gt;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 &amp;quot;experiments&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;FWIW I previously worked at a &amp;quot;smart cities&amp;quot; company that I won&amp;#x27;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 &amp;quot;city&amp;#x27;s data leaks&amp;quot; headline and the whole market chills.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Barrin92</author><text>The entire idea of a &amp;quot;smart city&amp;quot; is pure anathema to how vibrant cities function. It&amp;#x27;s a technocratic wet dream, the digital version of Robert Moses and Corbusier making a comeback. The people preoccupied with this should read some Alain Bertaud and learn how markets work and then go do more productive things with their time than trying to micromanage cities.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52572362</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>drusepth</author><text>I know there&amp;#x27;s gonna be a lot of people here that are happy about this for various reasons (anti-Google, anti-&amp;quot;smart cities&amp;quot;, etc), but this is really disappointing for me.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s true that the concept of &amp;quot;cities&amp;quot; (or even just &amp;quot;gatherings of people&amp;quot;) predates the Internet by thousands of years, and that cities themselves haven&amp;#x27;t adapted much to the Internet and what it enables in the 40ish years it&amp;#x27;s been around. This project was inspiring because it embraced what&amp;#x27;s possible in a new way and enabled many new possibilities that wouldn&amp;#x27;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).&lt;p&gt;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 &amp;quot;experiments&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;FWIW I previously worked at a &amp;quot;smart cities&amp;quot; company that I won&amp;#x27;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 &amp;quot;city&amp;#x27;s data leaks&amp;quot; headline and the whole market chills.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>netcan</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d like us to be more forward looking, ambitious and experimental with our cities as well, especially in the west.&lt;p&gt;But... I think there&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;I think the reticence was justified: &amp;quot;&lt;i&gt;Who owns the data? What kind of monopoly are google eventually going to have?&lt;/i&gt;&amp;quot; These are fair. A financial success case for google is some sort of data-centric monopoly. They don&amp;#x27;t really do business another way. It&amp;#x27;s fair to be dubious of their endgame.</text></comment>