Toronto wants to kill the smart city forever - The city wants to get right what Sidewalk Labs got so wrong

Basically the Sidewalks Lab plan was like the Matrix or Wall-E, complete with machine overlords, but the new plan is more aligned with Singapore's green buildings with a human-centric design with a focus on nature and current issues the city actively needs to address.

I'm not sure how to explain it better than what's already in this article:

Sidewalk’s big idea was flashy new tech. This unassuming section of Toronto was going to become a hub for an optimized urban experience featuring robo-taxis, heated sidewalks, autonomous garbage collection, and an extensive digital layer to monitor everything from street crossings to park bench usage.

Had it succeeded, Quayside could have been a proof of concept, establishing a new development model for cities everywhere. It could have demonstrated that the sensor-­laden smart city model embraced in China and the Persian Gulf has a place in more democratic societies. Instead, Sidewalk Labs’ two-and-a-half-year struggle to build a neighborhood “from the internet up” failed to make the case for why anyone might want to live in it.

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In every way, Quayside 2.0 promotes the notion that an urban neighborhood can be a hybrid of the natural and the manmade. The project boldly suggests that we now want our cities to be green, both metaphorically and literally—the renderings are so loaded with trees that they suggest foliage is a new form of architectural ornament.

“To me it’s a wonderful ending because we didn’t end up with a big mistake,” says Jennifer Keesmaat, former chief planner for Toronto, who advised the Ministry of Infrastructure on how to set this next iteration up for success. She’s enthusiastic about the rethought plan for the area: “If you look at what we’re doing now on that site, it’s classic city building with a 21st-century twist, which means it’s a carbon-neutral community. It’s a totally electrified community. It’s a community that prioritizes affordable housing, because we have an affordable-housing crisis in our city. It’s a community that has a strong emphasis on green space and urban agriculture and urban farming. Are those things that are derived from Sidewalk’s proposal? Not really.”

I don't think one needs to have lived in Toronto for the past few years to understand the full difference between these two but it really does boil down to what both these developments sought to create and prioritize for the city, and what Sidewalks Labs was offering is more for a city that doesn't have more urgent problems to address. Toronto was in the middle of a burgeoning affordability crisis back when this was first announced and it's orders of magnitude worse now. The city's a mess of different districts built in different times for different purposes, and then hammered here and there on top of it into new forms and shapes. There's a distinct lack of mid-term and long-term city planning except from our one excellent city planner (fun fact: she came second in the last mayoral race), who is the one leading this Quayside 2.0 project. Basically this Sidewalks Labs idea wasn't a solution to anything Toronto was ailing from, it would have more than likely introduced a whole new range of problems to a city that already struggles addressing any problems at all. This Quayside 2.0 effort at least is hoping to address some of those things.

The bit about "people are attracted to the messiness" might be true but it's unclear what if anything is messy about the new plan.

I think the idea they were getting at is that Sidewalk's plan was sterile and uniform (necessary for large-scale automation), but this one has been designed with variation built in. That the "top down" was a company-oriented goal (to sell their smart products), opposed to "ground up" which seems to be catering more to what the inhabitants would want.

Old cities are messy because they have 100's of years of history (and dangerous legacy systems). Abandoning the legacy (and 70's architecture) of old cities, while capturing the unevenness that made them great, will help keep things from looking like a prison cell when moving to a more efficient future.

Having robots collect your trash probably takes a lot more energy, with a lot more potential problems, than a well-designed garbage truck and some people.