It looks, printed and bound and in a box set, like one of those shelf-decorator Time-Life Books series’ your great-grandmother might have ordered off the television: “Alphabet Presents the Complete and Unabridged Illustrated History of Toronto’s Future 2020-2040ish.” Or, maybe, it will instead turn out to be a substantial new addition to the Unbuilt Toronto book series.

Either way, Sidewalk Labs, the Google sister company angling to remake the Port Lands on Toronto’s waterfront, certainly seems to have taken to heart Daniel Burnham’s city-building maxim “Make no little plans.” The plan they released Monday is B-I-G, both in the weight of its pages and in the scale of its ambition. That bold scope cuts both ways: it’s the reason it generates excitement, while also being the thing that might scare the city and Waterfront Toronto away.

Much of it is exciting: a massive upfront commitment to affordable housing and rental properties and mixed-use communities, and to sustainable development and accessibility; a chance to partner with a globe-straddling tech colossus to teach the world how to integrate innovation into city-building; a kick-start to one of the biggest downtown redevelopment districts in any big city in the world (one, incidentally, we’ve been talking about getting going on for decades — since those Time-Life books I mentioned were still a thing). The renderings of wood and sky and water are pretty, too.

That excitement might be drowned out a bit by political factions and critics lining up to try to strangle this idea in the cradle. There’s a substantial portion of the city’s left (including many otherwise-urbanist types) who are opposed in principle to doing anything in partnership with a big corporation — or with a data-mining tech-bro giant in particular, or with Google specifically. Many of them worry the tail is wagging the dog on a project where the winning bidder on a 12-acre test project came back with plans to develop more than twice that much land, and to have a hand in planning more than 10 times more. Others in the same general political vicinity are opposed to changing anything in the city’s bureaucratic planning and approvals process, particularly for a large project. Or are skeptical of any big master-planned community.

On the other side of the partisan aisle, particularly up at Queen’s Park where many of the key decisions can ultimately be essentially vetoed, there are different concerns. The interests of existing local private developers are not necessarily served by this kind of disruption by an outsider, and if we’ve learned anything in the past year it is that the interests of local private developers will trump almost any other concern in the eyes of the provincial government. Premier Doug Ford and crew get sour at the mere mention of sustainability and walkability and (especially) the cost of anything worth building. The provincially appointed chair of Waterfront Toronto was immediately reacting negatively to “unreasonable” presumptuousness on the part of Sidewalk in saying serving the new community with mass transit was a precondition for the concept, as if that weren’t among the most obvious and welcome parts of it.

It isn’t that many of the concerns being raised about the plan are invalid — about public control and governance, about the importance of locking in the privacy of the data being collected and used, about how much we’re going to allow Google to bite off before they even start chewing anything. All of them are real issues to address, and that’s what the upcoming six months of consultation are for, and the further negotiations before making any kind of final deal, and the oversight mechanisms we put in place to function over the potential decades any partnership might last.

Read more:

5 key take-aways from Sidewalk Labs’ master plan for Quayside and Toronto’s waterfront

Should we go all-in on Sidewalk Labs, or click no to ‘Googleville’?

Sidewalk Labs is pledging to protect ‘urban data.’ Critics question if their ‘untested’ plan is worth the risk

It’s obvious from how Sidewalk has mapped out plans that far exceed what Waterfront Toronto asked them for that they are looking for a partnership, not a contract to do work-to-order. This ambition and vision is the source of much of what’s exciting about their proposal, but it also means the government partners will need to set and police parameters if indeed anything comes of this.

And it seems like it would be a shame if nothing comes of it. None of those concerns that have been articulated strikes me as a poison pill making this proposal unworthy of consideration, which is close to how the critics have been talking (both before and after the plan’s release). This chance to think big — and partner big — to build something breathtaking on what has essentially been a toxic industrial partial ghost town for as long as anyone can remember is worth some hard conversations and debate and negotiation. It’s probably worth some trade-offs in day-to-day control and variations from usual procedures to see what may come of it. And it’s certainly worth some transit spending that will be necessary and is overdue anyway.

By all means, let’s not allow ourselves to be sucked in by the pretty pictures and write anyone a blank cheque. But let’s also not prematurely shut down the possibility of trying something new, and of building something new and interesting and innovative. Of seeing what this kind of partnership could bring that is different from the way we’ve been doing things (and often, not doing things) for decades. Let’s peek into that history of our possible future and see what it actually might look like before we decide whether we want to close the book on it.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Have your say

Read more about: