Sidewalk Labs

» see sidewalklabs.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Sidewalk Labs was announced on 10 June 2015. Daniel Doctoroff ran it, a former deputy mayor of New York for economic development who had also been chief executive of Bloomberg, and Larry Page described the money going in as a relatively modest investment, very different from Google's core business. The premise was that cities are badly instrumented. Housing cost too much and traffic moved too slowly, and the people responsible for both were making decisions without usable data.

For the first few years the company mostly bought and spun things out rather than built them. In June 2015 it led the purchase of Control Group and Titan and combined them into Intersection. In early 2016 it worked with the ten cities competing in the US Department of Transportation's Smart Cities Challenge, reading phone data to understand congestion. Cityblock Health was spun out in 2017 and Coord in 2018. Two more followed in 2019, Replica and Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners. The software it kept arrived late. Mesa, for building energy, shipped in September 2020. Delve, a neighborhood design tool, followed that October, and Pebble, for city parking, did not appear until May 2021.

My own work sits at the sensor end of this argument, computer vision on hardware small enough to fly, so the Quayside fight reads differently from here than it did in the coverage. The objection was never that the instruments would fail to work. It was that they would work, and that nobody had settled who owned what they saw.

~ the record ~

~ quayside ~

In October 2017 Sidewalk Labs announced plans for Quayside, twelve acres on the Toronto lakefront, answering a competition organized by Waterfront Toronto and branded as Sidewalk Toronto. The language was about a testbed for emerging technologies and materials. The real ambition was the 800 acres of Port Lands sitting behind it, one of the largest pieces of undeveloped urban land in North America, and the twelve acres were the proof of concept that would unlock it.

It opened a Toronto office in 2018 and ran weekend open houses where the public could bring ideas. By 2019 it was saying it had consulted thousands of Torontonians. Waterfront Toronto's own Digital Strategy Advisory Panel said the proposals contained too much technology for technology's sake. In May 2020 the project was abandoned. Sidewalk Labs pointed at pandemic economic uncertainty, which was true and also late: the data-governance problem had been eating the project for two years before anybody had heard of COVID.

~ the fall ~

Sidewalk Labs made a book for itself called the Yellow Book, a volume of aspirational designs for a city running on the company's own technology, put together to inspire its own employees. It is the clearest artifact the place left behind. Nothing in it was ever built on the site it was drawn for.

~ where the domain points now ~

When Alphabet closed the unit it kept four things and moved them under Google: Mesa, Delve, Pebble and a project on affordable electrification. Canopy Buildings, the mass-timber construction effort, was spun out on its own. Prem Ramaswami and Craig Nevill-Manning stayed on to run what was left. Nevill-Manning had co-founded Google's New York office and built Froogle, which gives you some idea of how far back into the company this went.

The design tool was switched off on 4 May 2026 and parts of it were absorbed into Google Earth. That is also where the old address goes now: sidewalklabs.com answers with a redirect to a Google Earth design page. A company set up to build cities ended up as a feature inside a map.

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