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“We looked all over the world for the perfect place to bring this vision to life, and we found it here,” said Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff. “We found a city with unequalled diversity and a remarkable spirit of openness. We found a city with a long, rich urbanist legacy matched by a recent technology boom.”

Waterfront Toronto’s plan is to use the principles demonstrated in Quayside to develop the rest of the Portlands. This long-neglected prime real estate could become “the new hub of global industry at the intersection of cities and technology,” said Doctoroff. It could be nothing less than “a new model for urban life in the 21st century.”

Well, golly. It’s certainly worth a try. Toronto is every bit the success story that Doctoroff and Eric Schmidt, Google’s head honcho, made it out to be on Tuesday. Indeed, it’s helpful to have that outside perspective: foreigners often seem to understand Toronto’s importance more intrinsically than a lot of the people who live here, including certain city councillors. Beyond Torontonians’ diversity and openness and industriousness, the thing that makes their city an ideal testing ground for new models of city planning is the mess their politicians often make with the current ones.

When neighbourhood residents want a stop sign, city staff go and measure pedestrian and vehicular traffic against established benchmarks and make recommendations. Most councillors then ignore the recommendations and vote according to how they feel about stop signs. Same goes with bike lanes: the Bloor Street pilot project was admirably rich in data. It suggested commercial activity had actually increased in the area, and not collapsed as some merchants had suggested. But it’s unlikely to change a lot of people’s minds: most will vote according to how they feel about bike lanes. This is a city that tore out bike lanes on Jarvis Street in deference to motorists’ commuting times, then immediately installed on-street parking where the bike lanes were and gave it away for a pittance — as we do all over the city, on major streets, even as motorists and transit riders boil alive in their own rage.