“This is a story of how power is wielded in the 21st century. And we are going to see more sagas like this.”
In 2017, Sideways Labs, an affiliate of the multinational giant Google, won a contract to design and build a neighbourhood on a prime 12-acre waterfront site in Toronto. It was to be a city based around tech: from autonomous garbage collection to a "digital layer" to monitor everything from street crossings to park bench usage. By May 2020, the project had collapsed. In Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, award winning reporter Josh O’Kane investigates how Google moved into the physical world, and how the project came unstuck. In this episode of The Context, O’Kane also explains to Sinead what it means for tech, city planning, and democracy.
