ThinkFresh Group is a Toronto-based creative urban planning consultancy promoting vibrant city building. We interviewed Howard Tam, principal, to get his take on what to do with Quayside, now that Sidewalk Labs has thrown in the towel on Toronto. Here are his answers:
Revelateur Studio: What was your take on Sidewalk Labs Proposal?
Howard Tam: I thought it was a highly ambitious project – and the kind of ambitious, big vision kind of project that Toronto needs to have instead of the often more piecemeal approach to development we have.
That being said, the process being pursued, the proposed outcomes and the players definitely raised a lot of questions. I felt that the process was too singularly focused on building out this tech-enabled city, that, while there was an acknowledgment of larger social and equity concerns, it was too focused on building for the tech and minimizing the social implications and the complexity-comprehension required to truly solve urban problems. In many respects, it felt like a classic economic development play where a developer comes in to say that one singular project will solve all your problems, so “let’s all get behind this” when the track record of such projects is clearly mixed, and the solution itself may end up causing more problems.
RS: What opportunities do you see for the site now that it can be rethought from scratch?
HT: I don’t think we need to rethink it from scratch – this is an opportunity to “steal this idea” – i.e. the things that we do like about the original proposal, understand the problem that it actually solves, and then do the hard work to unpack what it all means, mapping out the complexities and implications.
In many respects, the greatest opportunity would be to leverage technology and automation to have deeper conversations around the city about how we do business, what’s wrong with it, why it’s complex to solve and then discuss how technology can support us to build better, more equitable processes. Like the COVID-19 crisis, the digitization of human processes can shine a light on our failings and gaps – let’s use this as that chance to address those gaps and custom-build technology that can support us in improving them. For context, I’d highly recommend checking out Ben Green’s book: The Smart Enough City. [RS note: this is a great book.]
RS: How do we make this opportunity the best it can be for Toronto's current and future residents?
HT: We should take this opportunity to problem-solve for cities in more systemic and strategic ways. The debate around Quayside showed us that we have many systemic desires in Toronto – better transit, more housing, vibrant urban spaces, facilitating economic development, sustainable buildings etc.. Because there was so much attention brought to this project, it had to be shown that it was trying to accommodate all of these needs in order to generate the political currency to be accepted by Torontonians.
Yet, it shouldn’t take a marquee project like this to happen in order for us to finally have a place to park these desires. These needs are not just specific to the waterfront – they’re needed all over the city and now. These are system-wide problems – and we need to have conversations about the strategies to get this rolled out everywhere. It’s not just good enough to say “we’ll try this here and hopefully roll this out across the city later” but “how do we resolve these needs across the city now and Quayside, with its wonderful technology, is one part of that strategy?”
RS: Why is it important to get it right?
HT: The future of Toronto. And the future of urban solutions. We built our modern cities around cars without much regard for bikes and pedestrians – and we’re paying the price for it now. Once we get locked into specific tech solutions, problematic or not, it will be hard to back out of it as we’re now stuck with the infrastructure. I prefer to think of this from an agile perspective – let’s get it right enough so that it doesn’t hurt anybody, design-in flexibility and then keep iterating and improving it so it’s truly solving the problems it has set out to resolve.
RS: Are there similar examples elsewhere that we could learn from?
HT: Not at a district or city level that I know of and is implemented. But there are good individual examples like the global Civic Tech movement and I’m excited when cities actually have strong leadership and strategy to say we want to get this right, we don’t know all the answers, but we want to work with our residents and figure this out step by step. I see some of this happening in Barcelona, Boston and right here in Mississauga.
For a good reference on how to develop smart cities ethically, see the Ethical Smart Cities Framework recently released by George Brown College’s Institute without Boundaries: https://ethicalsmartcity.com/
