La Fabrique de la Cité would like to invite you to its New Year’s reception for a debate on “Will the city of tomorrow be shaped by Google?”.
What would you do if you could build a city from scratch? Dan Doctoroff, CEO of Sidewalk Labs, is preparing, on the shores of Lake Ontario, the answer to this question he asked NYU students in 2016. It is indeed in Toronto that the American company, a subsidiary of tech giant Alphabet, was selected in 2017 to build and develop a smart neighborhood on a deindustrialized waterfront site. But Sidewalk Labs has met with strong opposition since the genesis of the project. The “Google City” displeases Torontonians, worried about the fate of their personal data in this futuristic district full of sensors, outraged by the audacity of Sidewalk Labs when it requested, in June 2019, the creation of dedicated public agencies and the adoption of new regulations, or even when it created an entirely new legal concept, that of “urban data”, in defiance of Canadian laws. The case of Sidewalk Labs against Toronto is emblematic of the tensions aroused by the arrival of the actors of platform economy in the arena of city-making. Between developers and algorithms, is antagonism inevitable? Between negotiation, supervision, regulation and rejection, what strategies can cities adopt in response to the hyperpower of GAFAMs and the ever-increasing urban ambitions of platforms?
On the occasion of La Fabrique de la Cité‘s New Year’s reception, Chantal Bernier, National Practice Leader, Privacy and Cybersecurity, Dentons Canada LLP, Sébastien Soriano, chairman of ARCEP, and Cécile Maisonneuve, President of La Fabrique de la Cité, will discuss the arrival of tech companies and platforms in the traditionally public arena of city-making in a debate moderated by Jean-Marc Vittori, columnist at Les Échos. This debate will be preceded by a presentation of La Fabrique de la Cité‘s newly-published Toronto City Portrait by Marie Baléo, Head of studies and publications at La Fabrique de la Cité.
