Where is Sidewalk Labs or Google? It seems full speed ahead at Quayside, but so far Google is no where to be found. Are they gone? I wonder. Or are they in the background, somewhere buried in the contracts with the Ontario Pension Plan as it was said years ago? Or, will I find a small innocuous tiny little Google sign hanging somewhere, like they do at the HQ in Zurich? Is this a game of Hide & Seek? A look around the properties of the former Sidewalk Labs, it would seem that the big tech firm totally gone and is far from anyone’s mind.
In March 2021—almost a year after Sidewalk Labs abandoned its project—Waterfront Toronto launched another competition to search for new parters to develop the 4.9 hectare, L-shaped, strip of land. The winner this time—or more precisely, the chosen “preferred proponent” (Waterfront Toronto 2024)—was a consortium known as Quayside Impact Limited Partnership. Quayside Impact, for short, was a collaboration between real estate developers Dream Unlimited Corp and Great Gulf Group Ltd. Both have strong footholds in Toronto’s downtown development. Dream records over 70 projects and/or “assets”, 20 of which are located in the Distillery District (Dream 2024); Great Gulf has several towers in downtown Toronto, including Monde, a condo building that borders Quayside to the west (Great Gulf 2024).
In February 2022, negotiations commenced over the Project Agreement between Waterfront Toronto and Quayside Impact. These would lead a design team composed of Adjaye Associates from London/New York/Accra, Alison Brooks Architects from London, Henning Larsen who has offices in North America, Europe and Asia, SLA housed in Copenhagen/Aarhus/Oslo, and Two Row Architect from Ohsweken/Six Nations (Waterfront Toronto 2024). Quayside is also supported by a number of “community partners” including The Bentway, Centre for Social Innovation, Crow/s, George Brown College, The Rekai Centres, and Woodgreen. And, there are “Project Consultants” including a-A AEA Consulting, ARUP, Aspect Structural Engineers, Benoy, Entuitive, G architects, CH+A design studio, Golder, Innovation Seven, cahdco, KPMB, Transolar KlimaEngineering, Tucker Hirise, Urban Strategies Inc. Ledcor Group, Norm Li, Murray Twohig, PMA Landscape Architects, Purpose, reteam, Smith + Andersen, Frontier Design.
The former Sidewalk Labs 307 is now a truck rental company. Waterfront Toronto has a new home across the street and the properties along the lakeside where Sidewalk Lab’s mass timber buildings were to be built are near completion. Aquabella and Aqualuna, built by Tridel, are offering ‘luxury by the lake’ for between 2.3 and 8.9 million a piece plus taxes and maintenance (Tridel 2024). Four more condo towers and a ‘community forest’ are planned for the remaining 4.9 hectare plot.
At a public session of Waterfront Toronto’s Design Review Panel in March 2024, presenters discussed the planning objectives focussing on retail integration/retail frontage, timber construction, building height adjustments, zoning requirements, design flexibility, “porosity” (which I think is about human-building interaction), rooftop urban agriculture, signature skylines, community green and public spaces.
Questions from the audience focussed on street-level design and diverse retail environments. Some zeroed into questions about the meaning of 'public': which spaces were in fact open to the wider public, as opposed to residents of the new towers? How, for example, would the rooftop urban agriculture be a public space as advertised? Framing constraints to questions of zoning, seemed to preclude discussions of housing.
Further properties that were set aside for Sidewalk Labs’ IDEA District on Villier’s Island are now being re-landscaped to allow for a new mouth to the Don River. Massive amounts of land have been pushed around, ecological studies of wildlife have been completed, and bridges and bike lanes installed. According to Waterfront Toronto at a public information session on March 26, circa 80% of the land is publicly owned, and once the landscaping is complete a new residential district will be built featuring several more towers, a school, a “site for ceremony”, and plenty of green space.
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| Re-landscaping the Don River (Carr 2024) | |
Did the Toronto smart city die?
So far, it seems like it's back to business-as-usual condo development in Toronto with all the usual suspects -- landowners, real estate developers, (st)architects, city officials, interested buyers, existing residents -- this time with emphasis on re-naturalization and reconciliation. These modes of urban development invoke old debates about market-led housing, respective exclusionary pricing with all sorts of knock-on effects, vertical cities (condo living), and the gaps between design process and actual needs, profits and distribution of wealth, variations on public-private relationships in urban planning. But how curious: No conversations about automatic lighting, climate sensors, underground robotic waste disposal, data collection/privacy, hackathons, or administration dashboards. Where is Google? Olly olly oxem free!
