KIT-Fakultät für Architektur – Master-Arbeiten Winter 2019/20 – Teil 1/2

Out of the Flatland, Toronto
Lu Chen
7
6
5
4
3
1
2
This master thesis proposed a data center for
Sidewalk Toronto, an unrealized smart city
project that envisioned a utopian urban community
driven by data and technologies. Sidewalk
Labs, a sister company of Google, worked
with the Canadian government from 2017
till 2020 on developing an empty 4.9 hectares
site in Toronto’s East Bayfront. The company
strived to achieve transformations of urban
life not only through planning approaches but
most importantly digital innovations. A digital
layer with multiple intelligent systems would
be built into the city infrastructure, which
collects data from the residents in public space
and in private sectors, while the cutting-edge
data technologies enable various services
including automated building operations,
smart traffic systems and urban facilities.
Within this framework, the thesis analyzed
the potential changes and threats such
technological solutions would pose to us: the
city would become a platform run by the techgiants,
and the citizens would be its users;
the human body were turned into subject for
data input, and the city life could be seen as
a massive crowdsourcing activity. Data, as we
know, is the new oil in digital age. It is used
currently by various agencies to serve their
commercial, financial or political interests. So,
who would benefit from those transformations,
the company owners, the shareholders, the
third parties with specific interests, or the
general public? The lack of rules and regulations
on using data would put the democracy
in the new smart neighborhood in peril, while
the traditional concepts of citizen duties and
rights shall be challenged.
Thus, the thesis offered a sociopolitical solution
for the neighborhood, which aims to democratize
the data and acts as a mediator between
tech-companies, policy makers and the
citizens. It firstly proposed a renovation of an
existing structure on the site, the Victory Soya
Mills Silo, into a data center: the silo, built
60 years before iPhone was invented, used to
store grain, now could be used to store data
and to make data available for everyone. Secondly
a series of civic and political programs
would be housed in the building, including
exhibition spaces, educational center, governmental
department, cooperative sections and