This week Toronto won a major fight against Big Tech. But unlike the battles underway in Washington, it wasn’t over digital domains like online privacy or ad sales; rather, it was over something deep out of the city’s industrial past: its waterfront.

Sidewalk Labs, a sister company of Google, had proposed rebuilding a chunk of land east of downtown in exchange for using Toronto as a beta test. In pushing back against that plan, Toronto reached a compromise that lets Sidewalk go ahead, but firmly under public control — setting a precedent for how governments around the world can harness the potential for “smart cities” without letting Big Tech dictate the terms.

After winning a competition in 2017 to build a smart city development on a 12-acre plot of derelict publicly owned land called Quayside, Sidewalk offered a dazzling array of innovations intended not just to push Toronto into the future, but also to act as a test bed and a model for similar developments worldwide.

The proposals blended “The Jetsons” and “Portlandia”: heated sidewalks, robot trash collectors, mandated mass-timber construction, and a focus on bikes, transit and autonomous vehicles for getting around. But what really made the plan tick were ubiquitous sensors to collect huge amounts of human and environmental data to make everything run more efficiently.