Beth

This was a massive plan affiliated with Google to build a sensor-laden, heavily optimized neighborhood right on the Toronto waterfront.

In 2020, the project completely folded after the Canadian Civil Liberties Association sued three different levels of government.

Citizens realized they were essentially becoming beta testers in a corporate experiment.

It sounds like the citizens realized they were being treated as data points rather than constituents.

That highlights the final, perhaps most urgent risk discussed in our sources, the digital divide.

The risk is creating an urban environment that actively shuts out lower income residents or the elderly.

That is why organizations like the Cities Coalition for Digital Rights, launched in 2018 by Barcelona, Amsterdam, and New York City, are emphasizing that keeping non-digital options alive is an absolute equity requirement.

Exactly.

We want the transit systems to run on time and we want to stop burning municipal energy for no reason.

We want the tangible benefits of AI optimization.

We want to preserve our civic agency, our mental maps and our democratic control over our own streets.

The profound challenge for the future of our cities is finding a way to optimize for coordination without destroying the visible rules, the predictable redundancies, and the room for human improvisation that make a city actually belong to its people.

It's the ultimate balancing act between efficiency and agency.

Right.

The system wants to eliminate it entirely.

Do we lose those accidental encounters?

Something to think about.

Right.

With some hindsight.

Yeah.