Urban neoliberalism, smart city, and Big Tech: The aborted Sidewalk Labs Toronto experiment

On May 7, 2020, Sidewalk Labs (part of Alphabet, which includes Google) abandoned its Toronto waterfront redevelopment project after two-and-a-half years of planning, public relations, and bargaining with the public agency responsible for this sector. The official and final reason Sidewalk gave for its withdrawal was the uncertainty of the Toronto real estate market due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Few observers of the Toronto scene subscribed to this explanation. Events did not unfold as Sidewalk would have hoped for. Its Toronto venture exposes implementation difficulties of a form of neoliberalism combining the smart city model with an active involvement of Big Tech. The Toronto narrative suggests that while the materialization of this version of neoliberalism is advantaged by plentiful resources, futurist visions of the city, and access to new technology, it is not immune to implementation hurdles associated with the context-specific nature of neoliberal projects. The paper identifies three categories of obstacles that have hampered the reaching of the Sidewalk objectives in Toronto: opposition movements objecting to electronic surveillance, corporate control, and restrictions to democratic processes; the fragmentation of the neoliberal political block; and ill-advised strategies on the part of Sidewalk.