Why Google's 'Sidewalk Labs' Is Such a Big Deal

Susie Cagle follows news about the launch of the Sidewalks Labs urban innovation company with context on Google's surprisingly complex history of dabbling in urban planning.

In essence, Cagle identifies Google's efforts to build a city within a city at the location of its headquarters in the Silicon Valley as a test run of the goals for Sidewalk Labs.

Google’s interest in the physical design and function of a city seems born of pragmatism (the necessary logistics of building and running its giant campus), with a vague tinge of eco-friendly progressive ethos. Those traffic jams bring the region to a halt every rush hour—how could a self-driving car make travel more efficient? Those parking lots for thousands of workers are really expensive—how do you get more of them to bike to work instead?

Cagle goes on to describe a dialectic behind the data-driven innovations of the privately owned tech industries with the political realities of the public sphere, in the process targeting Sidewalk Labs as the potential site for a future negotiation of how cities change.