The Digital Life

The Digital Life


Smart Cities and Sidewalk Labs

April 28, 2016

Jon: Welcome to episode 153 of The Digital Life, a show about our adventures in the world of design and technology. I'm your host Jon Follett, and with me is founder and co-host, Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: Greetings, Jon.

Jon: For our podcast today, we're going to discuss a little bit Google's Sidewalk Labs, which is what I see as kind of one of the inventive spin-offs from Google's Alphabet now. They have radical plans to design smart cities. They've got a few active products already, but one of the things that makes this Sidewalk Labs such a compelling or interesting initiative from Google is that they're also looking into the possibility of building this smart city or smart neighborhood from the ground up.

They've got their pragmatic products right now, which include something called Flow, which helps to basically guide transportation in a city, namely, helping people find parking spots, helping them avoid traffic, et cetera, and making congestion less so that all of us commuters into the city can have life's that exist outside of just waiting in traffic. That's Flow. They're working with the US Department of Transportation and it's a smart city challenge finalist to develop.

Then in New York City they've got a product called LinkNYC which is a super fast internet access basically that is replacing what you'd have your old payphone booth. Now they've got these wonderful kiosks or what have you that you can sidle up to or sit next to or be in the vicinity of, within 150 feet or so, and basically get fiber optic access to the internet at blazing speeds. That's LinkNYC and that works really well if you're say sitting in a Starbucks somewhere in the vicinity of a link.

Those are two of their initial products but they do have large ambitions and those things are also going to stretch into housing, personalized services around health, basically anything that you can think of in the digital realm that relates to folks living in the city. I think Sidewalk Labs is probably interested in rolling that out.

I feel very excited about this and at the same time I know how government works. I know how cities work. I know that it's very hard to start from scratch. It's such a luxury when you're designing from the ground up. I'm a little skeptical that Google/Alphabet Sidewalk Labs is going to be able to get the leeway to do what it is they really want to do.

Dirk, what's your initial take on the Sidewalk Labs experiments?

Dirk: Well I certainly think they're interesting. I think they're necessary. We need to re envision what life, what humanity, could be like if started from the ground up in the reality of the new digital context that is really sort of a modern development and continues to develop with a lot of technologies even beyond just the digital. You're correct that the idea of taking New York City or Boston or Chicago or other major cities in the United States and fully integrating and benefiting from these visions is unlikely.

The infrastructure cost is too high. The existing infrastructure bill is too much and we're, meaning the United States, at a point of not just maturity but almost languid old age in a certain way. We're not looking to- New York City in the 19th century and into the mid-20th century was basically rolled down and built back up and numerous different times. The picture is taken from one point to two or three decades later it would look nothing like it. Whereas it's largely calcified over the last 50 or 60 years with obvious exceptions with some giant skyscrapers.

The city as a whole looks very much the same. I think where there's real opportunity, where these ideas could bare fruit, are in ways that the general public that must of us can't envision. Specifically that's with the new cities of the future that instead of trying to retrofit New York City to be the new gleaming paradise there will just be another city built that didn't exist before and we have the context for that.

On one hand you have,