Sidewalk Labs

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Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

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“There is nothing innovative about city-building that disenfranchises its residents in insidious ways and robs valuable earnings out of public budgets,” she wrote in her resignation letter.2 Two weeks later, Ontario’s former privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian, who served as an advisor to Sidewalk Labs, resigned after expressing significant concerns with how the company planned to treat the data it collected. Even though the project was pitched as a big win for Toronto and its residents, it quickly became apparent that Sidewalk Labs planned to integrate a host of its own technologies into the infrastructure of Canada’s largest city by using the twelve acres of land it had been contracted to transform as a beachhead, making the government and its residents dependent on them in perpetuity. In its expansive vision document, Sidewalk Labs outlined the many ways it wished to control urban systems.

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It planned to build a “digital layer” that would be the interface for access to public services, community spaces, and “a neighborhood assistant tool to facilitate social cooperation and civic engagement.”3 All this would be controlled by the company, not the local government, and the access terminals would be the exclusive containers for wireless technologies. That meant that for telecommunications companies to offer network services in Sidewalk Labs’ smart neighborhood, they would need its permission. Quayside, as the site was called, would also exclude private car traffic. Instead, there would be transit service and bike lanes, along with an autonomous shuttle service through Waymo—one of Sidewalk Labs’ sister companies—and access to ride-hailing services from Uber and Lyft. Notably, Google was invested in both companies. In addition, Sidewalk Labs wanted to get into healthcare through its Care Lab, control traffic with its Flow technologies, and place sensors throughout the urban landscape to run experiments through its Model Lab.

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A better world is not only possible, it is essential. Conclusion October 17, 2017, was a big day in Toronto. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt appeared alongside the mayor of Toronto, the premier of Ontario, and the CEOs of Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto to announce a project they promised would forever change the city for the better. Sidewalk Labs, one of Google’s sister companies, had been chosen to build a city “from the internet up” on the water-front of downtown Toronto. Trudeau told attendees that he and Schmidt had been talking about it for a couple of years—calling into question the impartiality of the public tendering process—and asserted that the project would yield “smarter, greener, more inclusive cities”1 by using technology for public good.

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The real commercial value, according to Balsillie, is that “‘smart cities’ rely on IP and data to make the vast array of city sensors more functionally valuable, and when under the control of private interests, an enormous new profit pool.”33 In the year since the official announcement, it has become even clearer that Sidewalk Labs wants Toronto’s blessing, but it does not relish the city’s active involvement and oversight in the build-out and management of the smart neighborhood on the waterfront. Meanwhile, the ongoing negotiations between Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto, the development body for the site, have been steeped in secrecy. As Balsillie points out, Waterfront Toronto is an “unelected, publicly funded corporation with no expertise in IP, data or even basic digital rights … in charge of navigating forces of urban privatization, algorithmic control and rule by corporate contract.”34 By the closing days of 2018, the outlook for Sidewalk Labs’ smart city project seemed bleak, at least in its present articulation.

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The vision of a Google-inspired smart futuristic city had become lost amid the growing fear of “Big Brother”—Alphabet—taking over a small segment of Toronto’s waterfront and transforming it with smart technology into a 24/7 surveillance cloud for the purpose of collecting data on the daily activity of its citizens, which Sidewalk Labs could exploit by selling it to third parties for commercial use. In July 2018, Will Fleissig, the chief executive of Waterfront Toronto and an early supporter of Sidewalk Labs, resigned abruptly. Shortly thereafter, Julie Di Lorenzo, a prominent local real estate developer, departed the board of directors of Waterfront Toronto, saying she was uncomfortable with Alphabet as a partner.

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Wylie made clear that she was not opposed to a smart infrastructure incorporating “plausible surveillance” of use to residents, businesses, and the community, but, she added, “we need to state clearly and unambiguously that this infrastructure is public.”36 In October, Ann Cavoukian, the former information and privacy commissioner of Ontario, resigned from the venture. What made her resignation particularly meaningful is that she was commissioned by Sidewalk Labs to help establish a “privacy by design” protocol for the development, only to find out later that third parties might enjoy access to “identifiable data.” In her resignation letter, Cavoukian said, “I imagined us creating a smart city of privacy as opposed to a smart city of surveillance.”37 The problem does not lie with Sidewalk Labs’ expertise. The company boasts some of the best talent available for establishing digitally connected, efficient, and environmentally sustainable smart cities.

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

Never mind that NEOM was the brainchild of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, proposed right as he was ordering the dismemberment of his critics and reducing Yemen’s cities to rubble while starving its population, or that Saudi Arabia’s existing cities were known to be some of the least sustainable or livable in the world. But hey, the past was the past. NEOM was the future, and it had robots! Here in Toronto, we saw the arrival of the digital city’s future in 2017, when Sidewalk Labs won a proposal to develop a smart neighborhood along the eastern part of the undeveloped waterfront. Sidewalk Labs was a division of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, headed up by Bloomberg’s former deputy mayor, Dan Doctoroff, who hoped to transform cities using basically the same techniques Google used to transform the internet: connect everything and everyone with the latest technology, then fund it all with ads targeted to residents by leveraging the personal data provided by their daily activity.

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Roads would be optimized for self-driving vehicles, garbage would be collected automatically underground, digital layers of sensors would underpin everything, gathering the data that Sidewalk Labs would crunch to deliver even better solutions to residents. For a city that always saw itself as the eternal bridesmaid of North American urbanism, Sidewalk Toronto was a kiss from the digital fairy godmother. Shoshanna Saxe was skeptical of Sidewalk Labs from the start, but she understood its instant appeal to local politicians, business leaders, and other excited residents. She believes our attraction to the smart city comes from an honest desire to make positive changes to cities, but in a way that’s easy and quick.

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Would Google pay to fix it? Or Toronto’s taxpayers? Others raised concerns about privacy and who would own all that tasty data that Sidewalk Labs (aka Google, aka Alphabet) planned to harvest. Most importantly, Torontonians asked, why was one of the world’s richest corporations being given the most valuable parcel of undeveloped real estate in the city for far less than market rate? What kind of future was this? Two months into Toronto’s pandemic lockdown, Sidewalk Labs quietly announced it was leaving town. The building that housed all that future promise was recently converted into a Budget car rental.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

As we saw with Google Street View, the company can siphon a lot of valuable information about people from a Wi-Fi network, even if they don’t use the kiosks.74 Doctoroff has characterized the Sidewalk Labs’ kiosks as “fountains of data” that will be equipped with environmental sensors and also collect “other data, all of which can create very hyperlocal information about conditions in the city.” In 2016 the US Department of Transportation (DOT) announced a partnership with Sidewalk Labs “to funnel transit data to city officials.” The DOT worked to draw cities into Google’s orbit with a competition for $40 million in grants. Winners would work with Sidewalk Labs to integrate technology into municipal operations, but Sidewalk Labs was eager to work with finalists in order to develop its own traffic-management system, Flow.75 Flow relies on Google Maps, Street View vehicles, and machine intelligence to capture and analyze data from drivers and public spaces.76 These analyses produce prediction products described as “inferences about where people are coming from or going,” enabling administrators “to run virtual experiments” and improve traffic flow.77 Doctoroff postulates a city presided over by digital omniscience: “We’re taking everything from anonymized smartphone data from billions of miles, trips, sensor data, and bringing that into a platform.”78 Sidewalk refers to its high-tech services as “new superpowers to extend access and mobility.”

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Conor Dougherty, “Cities to Untangle Traffic Snarls, with Help from Alphabet Unit,” New York Times, March 17, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/technology/cities-to-untangle-traffic-snarls-with-help-from-alphabet-unit.html. 76. “Sidewalk Labs | Team—Alphabet,” Sidewalk Labs, October 2, 2017, https://www.sidewalklabs.com/team. 77. Dougherty, “Cities to Untangle.” 78. See Dougherty. 79. See Diana Budds, “How Google Is Turning Cities into R&D Labs,” Co.Design, February 22, 2016, https://www.fastcodesign.com/3056964/design-moves/how-google-is-turning-cities-into-rd-labs. 80. Mark Harris, “Secretive Alphabet Division Aims to Fix Public Transit in US by Shifting Control to Google,” Guardian, June 27, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/27/google-flow-sidewalk-labs-columbus-ohio-parking-transit. 81.

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In this vision, MacKay and Paradiso’s conceptions come to fruition under the auspices of surveillance capitalism in a grand scheme of vertically integrated supply, production, and sales. Sidewalk Labs’ first public undertaking was the installation of several hundred free internet-enabled kiosks in New York City, ostensibly to combat the problem of “digital inequality.” As we saw with Google Street View, the company can siphon a lot of valuable information about people from a Wi-Fi network, even if they don’t use the kiosks.74 Doctoroff has characterized the Sidewalk Labs’ kiosks as “fountains of data” that will be equipped with environmental sensors and also collect “other data, all of which can create very hyperlocal information about conditions in the city.”

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), 3–25. 206“bringing remote storage locations”: “Automated Trucking: A CBRE Research Perspective,” CBRE, November 17, 2017, http://www.cbre.us/real-estate-services/real-estate-industries/industrial-and-logistics/industrial-and-logistics-research/automated-trucking. 206“service firms should locate”: CBRE, “Automated Trucking.” 206“In order to feed, maintain, and entertain”: Rem Koolhaas, “The World in 2018,” The Economist, November 28, 2017, 153. 208“Rather than building AI”: Russell Brandom, “Self-Driving Cars Are Headed Toward an AI Roadblock,” The Verge, July 3, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/3/17530232/self-driving-ai-winter-full-autonomy-waymo-tesla-uber. 209The term jaywalking: “Why Jaywalking Is Called Jaywalking,” Merriam-Webster, accessed May 23, 2019, https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/why-is-it-called-jaywalking. 209weaponized by automobile interests: Peter Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 210. 209another separate guideway: Kiger, “Designing for the Driverless Age.” 209“argued for dense multilevel traffic”: “New York Modern,” The Skyscraper Museum, October 24, 2007, https://www.skyscraper.org/EXHIBITIONS/FUTURE_CITY/new_york_modern.htm. 210“the first place in the world”: Sidewalk Labs, RFP Submission for Waterfront Toronto (New York: Sidewalk Labs, 2017), 144. 210“Carriage squares”: Renate van der Zee, “Story of Cities #30: How This Amsterdam Inventor Gave Bike-Sharing to the World,” The Guardian, April 26, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/26/story-cities-amsterdam-bike-share-scheme. 210“a small zone that will serve”: Sidewalk Labs, RFP Submission for Waterfront Toronto, 144. 211the “beeping monster”: Shirley Zhao, “Tech Worries Throw Future of Hong Kong’s First Driverless Electric Bus Route into Doubt,” South China Morning Post, March 31, 2019, https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/transport/article/3003944/driverless-electric-bus-fails-create-buzz-hong-kong. 211“Purchases are deposited at freight delivery centres”: Sustainable Urban Mobility Research Laboratory, “Shared World,” Singapore University of Technology and Design, accessed January 6, 2019, https://mobility. sutd.edu.sg/shared_world/. 211the unbuilt Minnesota Experimental City: David Grossman, “The Time Minnesota Almost Built a Doomed, Future City,” Popular Mechanics, March 31, 2018, https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a19642881/spilhaus-experimental-city-documentary/. 9.

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Long blamed for increasing segregation and reducing mobility, megablocks feature prominently in AV-ready real estate developments like Singapore’s Jurong Lake District and the Milan Science & Innovation Park. Ostensibly, these designs are put forward under the guise of creating vast pedestrian-friendly zones free of cars. But developers like Google’s city-building sister company Sidewalk Labs also see them as a tool to keep human drivers away from computerized ones, further simplifying the challenge of rolling out safe AVs. The company aims to cordon off its proposed Toronto campus—making it “the first place in the world where conventional vehicles will be a thing of the past.” Figure 8-6.

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But talk of revenue targets is already drowning out mobility concerns. Here’s the tagline of a 2018 feature on Slate—“The American city is wasting valuable real estate on parked cars.” A week later, Governing jumped on the bandwagon with its own avaricious headline, “Cashing In on the Curb.” The author was Stephen Goldsmith, a Harvard University professor and Sidewalk Labs advisor. Even the sober-minded folks in the room seem to be losing their heads. “It’s the most valuable space that a city owns and one of the most underutilized,” says Matthew Roe of NACTO, the city transportation officials’ club. I’m all for cities taking their cut of continuous delivery. But it’s unsettling that the pitch for curb pricing has so rapidly moved past the mobility benefits and straight to the payout.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Governance Baltic state of Estonia: Nathan Heller, “Estonia, the Digital Republic,” New Yorker, December 11, 2017. See: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/estonia-the-digital-republic. OpenGov: See: https://opengov.com/. Social Glass: See: https://www.social.glass/. Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs: Alissa Walker, “Here Is Sidewalk Labs’s Big Plan for Toronto,” Curbed, June 24, 2019. See: https://www.curbed.com/2019/6/24/18715669/sidewalk-labs-toronto-alphabet-google-quayside. Chapter Fourteen: The Five Great Migrations In their book Exceptional People: Ian Goldin and Geoffrey Cameron, Exceptional People (Princeton University Press, 2012), p 12. Stanford economist named Petra Moser: Clifton Parker, “Jewish Émigrés Who Fled Nazi Germany Revolutionized U.S.

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OpenGov turns the morass of government finance into a series of easy-to-read pie charts; Transitmix allows for real-time, data-driven transportation system planning; Appallicious created a disaster-assistance dashboard to coordinate emergency responses; Social Glass makes government procurement fast, compliant, and paperless. The larger tech companies are also in on the action. Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, for instance, is collaborating with the Canadian government on Quayside. In this smart community slated for Toronto’s industrial waterfront, robots deliver the mail, AI uses sensor data to manage everything from air quality to traffic flow, and the entire cityscape is “climate positive,” that is, built to green standards and sustainably powered.

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Sears Watch Company, 96 Ryan ToysReview (YouTube program), 129 Sacks, David, 17 Sagan, Carl, 212 Samsung, 51 Samumed, 90, 176–77 Sanford, Glenn, 196–97 Sasson, Steven, 43 satellite communications, 152 network connections and, 40 saved time, 15, 70–72 Scharf, Caleb, 215 Scheherazade (gaming technology), 130, 131 Schumpeter, Joseph, 239 Science, 65 Scientific American, 215 screens, new technologies for, 139–40 sea level rise, 232, 241–42 search engines, 71 Sears, 21, 95–98 Sears, Richard Warren, 95–96 Seasteading Institute, 200 Second Life, 86, 248 Sedol, Lee, 36 Sehgal, Suren, 174–75 self-education, computer-aided, 144–47 senolytic therapies, 90, 175–76 senses, content and, 134–35 sensors, 41–44, 72, 136 insurance rates and, 188 smartphones and, 43 Sentry System, 233 Sequoia Capital, 128 serotonin, 247 service economy, AI and, 34–35 severe combined immunodeficiency (Bubble Boy disease), 65, 66 sex, VR and, 248–49 shipping industry, 182 shopping: AI and, 100–106 AI assistants and, 123–24 bricks-and-mortar stores in, 97–98 cashierless, 104–5 discount pricing and, 96, 98 e-commerce revolution in, 98–100 frictionless, 100, 101, 103, 105 “Internet of Things” and, 104–6 rise of mail order in, 95 robots and, 106–8 3–D body-scanning and, 114 3–D printing and, 108–11 VR and, 113–14 Sidewalk Labs, 235 Sikorsky, Igor, 9 Singularity, 76 Singularity University, xii, 8, 264, 266 Siri, 100, 132 Sirius XM, 152 “Six Ds of Exponentials,” 31 Skirball Cultural Center, 3 Skysource, 214 sleep: disease and, 41 sensors and, 41–42 Slingshot, 213–14 smart cities, 235, 245 smart dust, 44 Smart Finance Group, 194–95 smart grids, water scarcity and, 214–15 smartness economy, 85 smart objects, 59–60 smartphones, 100–101 demonetization and, 78 sensors and, 43 smart shelf technology, 105–6 Snapchat, 119 Snapshot (TripSense), 188 Social Glass, 235 Softbank, 14, 40, 46, 107 Solar Cities, 252 solar energy, 10, 63, 78, 214, 215–18 solid state batteries, 222 Son, Masayoshi, 76–77 Song, Dong, 82 Soul Machines, 103 sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), 76 Soviet Union, space race and, 73 space, colonization of, 249–53 space race, 73 Bezos vs.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

Noble, Algorithms. 199. On “savage sorting,” see Sassen, Expulsions, 4; and compare David Lyon’s prophetic book, Surveillance as Social Sorting. Douglas Merrill, quoted in Peppet, “Regulating the Internet of Things,” 87. 200. Greenfield, Radical Technologies. 201. Daniel Doctoroff, CEO of Sidewalk Labs, quoted in Bozikovic, “Google’s Sidewalk Labs.” 202. Agre, “Two Models.” 203. Leslie, “The Scientist.” 204. Walmart, Annual Report 2017, 9. 205. Fraser, “Global Justice.” 206. Leslie, “The Scientist,” 9. For the Truth about Tech campaign, see https://www.commonsensemedia.org/digital-well-being#. Chapter 5 1. Quoted in Levy, “Contexts of Control,” 166. 2.

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Popular narratives of “smartness” (for instance, the smart city) are an example: in the smart landscape, there are only connected individuals, natural and willing targets of commercial messaging and sources of commercially useful data, functioning within the larger cycle of capitalized life.200 Everyone else is by definition invisible. As smartness starts to drive urban regeneration, it will become harder to hold on to the forms of knowledge lost through the capitalization of life. New urban environments will emerge, such as the proposal by Google’s Sidewalk Labs for downtown Toronto’s waterfront district, built on personalization (“really smart, people-centered urban planning”) and iron corporate control of the “intelligent signals” generated by a datafied environment.201 To have a chance of resisting this, we must hold onto earlier forms of social knowledge: voice, public accountability and the public value of social understanding, visibility rather than opacity, contextual social explanation, and above all a concern with the role of these values in challenging injustice.

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Bowman, Courtney. “Data Localization Laws.” Jurist, January 6, 2017. http://www.jurist.org/hotline/2017/01/Courtney-Bowman-data-localization.php. boyd, danah, and Kate Crawford. “Critical Questions for Big Data.” Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 5 (2012): 662–79. Bozikovic, Alex. “Google’s Sidewalk Labs Signs Deal for ‘Smart City’ Makeover of Toronto’s Waterfront.” The Globe and Mail, October 17, 2017. Bradley, Joseph, Joel Barbier and Doug Handler. “Embracing the Internet of Everything to Capture Your Share of $14.4 trillion.” Cisco, 2013. https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/ac79/docs/innov/IoE_Economy.pdf.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Ross, “In Silicon Valley, Age Can Be a Curse,” SFGate, August 20, 2013, https://www.sfgate.com/business/bottomline/article/In-Silicon-Valley-age-can-be-a-curse-4742365.php. 17 Susan Crawford, “Beware of Google’s Intentions,” Wired, February 1, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/sidewalk-labs-toronto-google-risks/; Sidewalk Toronto, “Toronto Tomorrow,” https://sidewalktoronto.ca/#documents; Vipal Monga, “Toronto Oicials Question Alphabet Unit’s Ambitions for ‘Smart City,’” Wall Street Journal, June 24, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/toronto-officials-question-alphabet-units-ambitions-for-smart-city-11561412851. 18 “Sidewalk Labs’s vision and your data privacy: A guide to the saga on Toronto’s waterfront,” Globe and Mail, June 24, 2019, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/toronto/article-sidewalk-labs-quayside-toronto-waterfront-explainer/. 19 Crawford, “Beware of Google’s Intentions.” 20 “Albert Gidari,” Center for Internet and Society, Stanford Law School, http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/about/people/albert-gidari. 21 Yulia Gorbunova, “Online and On All Fronts,” Human Rights Watch, July 18, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/07/18/online-and-all-fronts/russias-assault-freedom-expression; Leopord Hakizimana and Dr.

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CHAPTER 18–THE TOTALITARIAN URBAN FUTURE 1 Kevin Carty, “Tech Giants Are the Robber Barons of Our Time,” New York Post, February 3, 2018, https://nypost.com/2018/02/03/big-techs-monopolistic-rule-is-hiding-in-plain-sight/. 2 Henry Grabar, “Building Googletown,” Slate, October 25, 2017, https://slate.com/technology/2017/10/sidewalk-labs-quayside-development-in-toronto-is-googles-first-shot-at-building-a-city.html; Sophie Davies, “WiFi but No Water: Can Smart Tech Help a City’s Poor?” Reuters, January 4, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-cities-tech-inequality/wi-fi-but-no-water-can-smart-tech-help-a-citys-poor-idUSKBN1EU0JF. 3 William Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 50. 4 Luke Stangel, “Sam Altman wants Silicon Valley to sign on to a core set of common values,” Silicon Valley Business Journal, April 19, 2017, https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/04/19/sam-altman-donald-trump-silicon-valley.html. 5 Jane Wakefield, “Tomorrow’s Cities—nightmare vision of the future?”

How Cycling Can Save the World by Peter Walker

active transport: walking or cycling, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, car-free, correlation does not imply causation, Crossrail, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, fixed-gear, gentrification, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, meta-analysis, New Journalism, New Urbanism, post-work, publication bias, safety bicycle, Sidewalk Labs, Stop de Kindermoord, TED Talk, the built environment, traffic fines, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, transit-oriented development, urban planning

A bicycle-sharing system extends that by about three times.”11 Anand Babu, meanwhile, is imagining bikes having a key role to connect with a more high-tech transport system—high-speed driverless cars. Babu, formerly head of special projects for Google, is now chief operating officer of Sidewalk Labs, a new and vastly ambitious Google spin-off that has as its modest intention to reshape cities through the conjunction of clever planning and high-tech solutions. Sidewalk Labs has so far devised LinkNYC, a project to turn New York City’s defunct pay-phone booths into digital hubs, where people can either access Wi-Fi or, if they don’t have a smartphone or similar device, find information directly.

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As I mentioned in chapter 5, I’m not especially a fan of such plans to remove cyclists from the streets, however well intentioned. Cycling is not just about people getting around. It’s about them stopping, interacting, shopping, mixing. Being human, in other words. — I can, however, forgive this of Sidewalk Labs. In a strange sort of way, these grandiose dreams of carbon fiber bike flyovers are oddly reassuring. Why? Because it shows the people who are likely to reshape our cities are thinking about cycling. And this wasn’t always the case. Think back fifty or more years to when the predecessors of Babu and his colleagues, in this case municipal planners, were cutting miles of urban freeways through city centers.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The topic of “algoracism” is now a hot one, as activists and civil rights attorneys struggle to stay ahead of the way in which Big Tech has turned policing upside down, with potentially grave civil liberty implications for entire communities. As alarming as such shifts are, we are only at the beginning of the creation of a world in which everything we do and say, online and offline, can be watched, and used, both by Big Tech and the public sector itself. Consider the Alphabet Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto. The Google parent’s “urban innovation” arm, known as Sidewalk Labs, which works with local governments to place sensors and other technologies around cities (ostensibly to improve city services, but also, of course, to garner data for Google), is working on creating a “smart city” in the Canadian city. The high-tech neighborhood, which is being created from scratch along twelve acres of the city’s waterfront, will have sensors to detect noise and pollution, as well as heated driveways for smart cars.

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A sprawling “feedback wall” at the site offers visitors a chance to give answers to pre-written questions, such as “I’m not excited about…” One visitor had written “Surveillance state.” Another scrawled “Making Toronto Great Again.”29 Given the growing outrage, it will be interesting to see if Sidewalk Labs meets the same fate as Amazon HQ2. But if you think that’s creepy, consider Google’s Dragonfly search engine project. In August 2018, the Intercept, an investigative journalism website, reported that Google was considering working on a censored version of its search engine for China called Dragonfly.30 This came as an enormous shock not only to the general public, but to the vast majority of Google’s own workforce.

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Sarah Brayne, “Big Data Surveillance: The Case of Policing,” American Sociological Review 82, no. 5 (2017). 27. Aria Bendix, “Activists Say Alphabet’s Planned Neighborhood in Toronto Shows All the Warning Signs of Amazon HQ2-Style Breakup,” Business Insider, April 14, 2019. 28. Marco Chown Oved, “Google’s Sidewalk Labs Plans Massive Expansion to Waterfront Vision,” Toronto Star, February 14, 2019. 29. Anna Nicolaou, “Future Shock: Inside Google’s Smart City,” Financial Times, March 22, 2019. 30. Ryan Gallagher, “Google Dragonfly,” Intercept, March 27, 2019. 31. Shannon Vavra, “Declassified Cable Estimates 10,000 Killed at Tiananmen Square,” Axios, December 24, 2017. 32.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

As a result, the company can in principle fuse together a suite of virtually hegemonic web products like GMail and the Chrome browser, the hundreds of millions of devices running the Android operating system, a high-resolution global mapping capability, the networked Nest thermostats and other home-automation systems, the Glass augmented reality visor, the Daydream VR headset, an autonomous-car initiative, the DeepMind artificial intelligence unit, the Sidewalk Labs smart-city effort, even the military robots produced by their Boston Dynamics division. There is surely something troubling, if not outright dystopian, about this particular assembly of forces and capabilities. The thought that a single entity controls all of these products and services—and is able to tap and exploit the flow of information as it courses through and between them—is more than a little unsettling.

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Boston Dynamics was put up for sale in March 2016, in what has been characterized as a corporate retreat from the entire field of robotics (and what was notably, again, a failure to integrate organizational cultures following an acquisition).3 The company’s autonomous car initiative has suffered a long wave of defections among senior personnel, and keeps rolling back the date at which it plans to introduce its driverless technology;4 it now estimates its vehicles will be fielded commercially no sooner than 2020. The Sidewalk Labs unit stumbled early on, when reportage by the Guardian brought to light troubling aspects of its proposals to American municipalities (including a plan to spend Federal mobility subsidies for low-income citizens on Uber rides).5 And of course, as we’ve seen, the Glass product was outright rejected by a market of consumers manifestly unwilling to make Glassholes of themselves.6 So it’s clearly foolhardy to underestimate the internal complexity of large, heterogeneous organizations, or the degree to which that complexity can confound even well-articulated intentions.

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., 219 GitHub code repository, 242, 274, 281 “glassholes,” 84, 276 Global Village Construction Set, 103 go (game), 263–6 Goodhart’s Law, 247 Goodman, Bryce, 250–1 Google, 18, 24, 37–40, 46, 66, 69, 73–4, 76–8, 80, 84, 193, 212, 218–20, 247, 254, 264, 275, 276, 278, 281, 284 Boston Dynamics robotics division, 276 Chrome browser, 275 Daydream virtual reality headset, 275 Deep Dream, 80, 219 DeepMind, 264–5, 270, 276, 281 driverless cars, 193, 220 Glass augmented reality headset, 66, 73–4, 76–8, 80, 275 Home interface device, 38–40 Image Search, 218 Mail, 275 Maps, 24 Nest home automation division, 275–6 Nest thermostat, 275–6 Play, 18 Plus social network, 276 search results, 212 Sidewalk Labs, 276 Gladwell, Malcolm, 237 Glaser, Will, 220 Global Positioning System, 4, 16, 21, 26, 51, 67 Graeber, David, 205 Guangdong, 179 Guardian (newspaper), 276 Guattari, Félix, 148 Gu Li, 265 Hagakure, 267 Haldane, Andy, 194 Halo (game), 39 Hannah-Arendt-Strasse, 70 haptics, 16 Harman, Graham, 48 hash value, 123–4, 128–30 Hashcash, 121 hashing algorithm, 123 head-up displays, 66–7 Hearn, Mike, 179 Heat List, Chicago Police Department program, 230–1, 233, 235–6, 244 heroin, 228 heterotopias, 70 high-density polyethylene plastic filament, HDPE, 99 Hitachi Corporation, 197 Hollerith machines, 61 hooks, bell, 311 HR analytics, 199 Hungarian pengo, 120, 122 iaido, 266 iaijutsu, 266 IBM, 263 ideology of ease, 42 infrapolitics, 311 ING, bank, 262 input neurons, 215 Instagram.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Add to that Waymo and Wing, which develop self-driving car and drone delivery technology, and DeepMind, Alphabet’s artificial intelligence subsidiary. Throw in venture capital and private equity firms (GV, Capital G), a tech incubator (Jigsaw), broadband and balloon internet providers (Google Fiber and Loon), an urban innovation organization (Sidewalk Labs), and a “semisecret” research and development facility called X Development, and one gets a sense of the growing reach of the behemoth that started with a search engine. Facebook, too, has made big-ticket purchases such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus, and when it can’t buy what it wants, as in the case of Snapchat, it has implemented similar features on its own platform.

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., 37, 54, 57 Rongwen, Zhuang, 94 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 88 Rousseff, Dilma, 97 Rudder, Christian, 23 rural areas: internet access for, 29, 149–50 Salesforce: employees organizing at, 148; immoral projects at, 154 Sandberg, Sheryl, 107 Sanders, Bernie, 103–5, 110 Santana, Feidin, 19, 20 Santelli, Rick, 105 Saudi Arabia, censorship in, 95 Scavino, Dan, 88 Schifter, Doug, 127 Schillinger, Klemens, 8 Schneier, Bruce, 135 Schrems, Max, 151 science fiction, 126 Scott, Walter, 19, 20 scraping, 71 Seamless, 30 search algorithms, 51–52, 53 Seasteading Institute, 124 Seinfeld, Jerry, 110 self-esteem, 65 selfies, 59–60 selfish behavior, 138–39, 154–56 self-monitoring tools, 69 service jobs, 33–34 Seth, Jodi, 56 sexism, 23–27, 35 sexting, 25–27, 35 sexual division of labor, 74–75 sexual harassment, 25, 27, 126–27 sexuality, 23–27, 35 sexual violence, 25 shareholder value society, 98 sharing on social media, 60–61, 84 Sharpton, Al, 102 shopping, mobile, 31–32 short message service (SMS), 6 Sidewalk Labs, 41 Sierra Club, 157 signals intelligence, 95–96 “silent spring,” 7 Silicon Valley, 115–41; distrust of, 125–31; and government control, 124; and spirit of capitalism, 115–25; taking back control from, 131–41 Silicon Valley Rising (SVR), 147 Sina Weibo (China), 94 Singh, Jagmeet, 93–94 the Singularity, 123 skeptics, 7–8 Skype, 81 slacktivism, 111 Slager, Michael, 19 Slutwalks, 108 smartness, 9 smartphone(s): demographics of, 3, 4; vs.

Data Action: Using Data for Public Good by Sarah Williams

affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, City Beautiful movement, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data philanthropy, data science, digital divide, digital twin, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, fake news, four colour theorem, global village, Google Earth, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, selection bias, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sidewalk Labs, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Steven Levy, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transatlantic slave trade, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration

The hype around these projects generated fascination in the popular press and media for what the analysis of big data can offer cities.101 Microsoft launched its CityNext program, intending to draw from its worldwide network of technology experts to make cities better places.102 In 2015, Google launched Sidewalk Labs, a grouping of “urban innovation organizations” working on various projects including data analytics with the US Department of Transportation and developing a “smart city” solution in Toronto. Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford document this interest in using data to drive government policies in their book The Responsive City: Engaging Communities through Data-Smart Governance, which illustrates how governments are harnessing the power of big data to increase efficiency in the delivery of city services.

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See also specific applications Geography of Buzz project 115, 119, 120 Geotagged messages 121–122 Gerrymandering 5–8 Getty Images 120 bias in data and 114–120 database of 114, 117, 134 for Geography of Buzz project 116 Ghana 200, 203 Ghost Cities project 96–101, 103, 104, 108, 112–114, 217–219 in Chengdu, China 105 drones and 104, 106 photos of underused developments found 107 screenshot of data 110 user interacting with website 111 GIScorps 83 Gitelman, Lisa xii Glaeser, Edward L. 98 Glass, James 42 Global Design Exposition, New York University 67 Global Resource Center for the Development of Informal Transit Data 155 Global Science Research (GSR) 91 Global System for Mobile Communications (GSMA) 207 Goad Fire Insurance Plans (London, England) 14 Goldsmith, Stephen 47 Goldsmiths, University of London 68 Goodchild, Michael 54 Google 94, 130–131, 188, 193 augmented reality navigation tool 190, 190 data collection and 189 Google Assistant 94 Google Earth 71 Google Flu Trends (GFT) 130–131, 134, 215 Google Maps 54–55, 69, 95, 146 Google Maps transit directions 77, 149 Google Purchases 94 Sidewalk Labs 47 Waymo (autonomous vehicle program) 189 Govern, Maureen 197 Government(s). See also specific countries collection of data from citizens 78–79 protection from surveillance by xix release of data and 69 GPS data for location 52, 80, 204 Grab Taxi 204, 205, 206 Gray Area 85 Great Britain 14, 91.

The Miracle Pill by Peter Walker

active transport: walking or cycling, agricultural Revolution, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, car-free, Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work, coronavirus, COVID-19, driverless car, experimental subject, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, Sidewalk Labs, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, the built environment, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, twin studies, Wall-E, washing machines reduced drudgery

I am impressed, if not completely convinced. History might prove me wrong, but if towns and cities have a future in which physical activity becomes the norm, I’m not sure that technology, robotics and automation will be the primary reasons why. A few years ago I had a long chat with a senior executive from Sidewalk Labs, a Google spinoff company which seeks to use tech to reimagine how cities could work in the future. We discussed how driverless cars – which at the time, as now, were confidently billed as being just around the corner from ubiquity – could affect active travel. While stressing that predictions were essentially guesswork, he conjured up one scenario in which autonomous cars sped people from distant suburbs to city centres, but with the last half mile or so, where people lived and worked, reserved for modes like cycling and walking.

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actin (protein) 40 active applause 176–7, 180, 271 Active Ten app (Public Health England) 57, 269 adenosine triphosphate (ATP) 40, 41, 276 Aldred, Rachel 119–20, 139 Alzheimer’s disease 5, 49, 186, 226, 232, 233, 234 Agricultural Revolution/Agrarian Revolution 15–16 Amager Bakke/Copenhill waste-burning energy plant, Denmark 134–5 Amish people 17–18, 208 anaerobic respiration 40 Annual Travel Survey 3 anxiety 5, 50, 57, 112 Araujo, Claudio Gil 229–32 Aspern, Vienna 140 asthma 10–11, 160, 172, 209 Atlas, Charles (Angelo Siciliano) 31 Barnet Graph of Doom 100–1 basal metabolic rate (BMR) 51, 158, 191 Better (non-profit social enterprise) 224 BeUpstanding 195–6 bike couriers 11–13 Biobank public health project 114 biophilia 133 Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) 132–5, 138–9 Blackburn, Elizabeth 41–2 Blair, Steven 19–20, 21, 46, 169–72, 275–6 blood pressure 5, 41, 46, 48, 57, 75, 90, 160, 225, 227, 265 Boardman, Chris 124–5, 127, 137, 264 BodPod 172–3, 174 body mass index (BMI) 146–7, 150–2, 161–4, 167, 170, 171, 172, 173, 193, 243 bone density/health 16–17, 22, 23, 44, 46, 49, 67, 101, 209, 223, 227–8 Boyd, Andrew 105–6 breast cancer 48, 160 British Medical Journal (BMJ) 64, 65, 80 Buchan, William: Domestic Medicine 63 Buchanan, Colin: Traffic in Towns 120–1 Buchanan, Nigel 203–4, 206, 207–8 Buchner, David 228 Bull, Fiona 98–9 Burden of Disease, WHO 47, 90 Burfoot, Amby 78, 79 Burnham, Andy 124, 264, 266 bus drivers, heart attack rates in London 61–2, 71–3 Bushy Park Time Trial 250 calories 13, 19–20, 19n, 27, 51, 54, 75, 113, 114, 146, 148, 153, 155, 156–7, 158, 165–6, 169, 190 Cambridge University 64, 65–6, 187 cancer 5, 41, 48–9, 62, 79, 90, 114, 160, 186, 187, 227, 231–2 car children and 216, 219, 258, 263–4, 265, 272 electric 137, 268 lobby 263 social engineering and 254, 258 town/city planning and 110, 111, 113, 121, 120–2, 124, 125, 126, 127–8, 129, 130, 131, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 191–2, 263, 265, 268 walking supplanted by 2, 3, 5, 53 cardiovascular activity 168–9, 209, 271–2 cardiovascular health bus drivers, heart attack rates in London 61–2, 71–3 children and 2, 213 coronavirus and 265 diabetes and 95 Harvard Alumni Health Study 75–7, 134 heart attacks 41, 48, 50, 62, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 91, 92, 93, 106 heart disease 5, 43, 46, 48, 59, 68, 69, 70–4, 81, 82, 88, 89, 114, 152, 154, 243, 244 inactivity first linked to 47–8 life expectancy and 93 longshoremen health study, San Francisco 75 low-density lipoprotein (LDL)/triglycerides and 41, 43, 46, 185 mitochondria and 40, 41 rheumatic heart disease 68, 69–70, 82, 152 sitting and 5, 185, 186, 187, 199 Centers for Disease Control (US government) 95, 228 chair 178–9 Chan, Margaret 152–3 children 22–3, 203–20, 235 adult health, movement in childhood and 11, 209–10 BMI and 51 bone density and 16, 23, 49, 67, 209–10 childhood movement diminishing into adolescence and onwards 11, 210–11 cycling and 121, 130, 214, 237–8, 246, 247 Daily Mile and 203–7, 212–13 decline in activity/inactivity statistics 1–2, 10–11, 22–3, 24, 203–11, 252–3, 254, 256 girls, low activity levels in 141–3, 204, 209, 210–11, 256 independent childhood mobility, perceived cosseting of children and 216–20 life expectancy and 97 obesity and 84, 152, 153, 252–3, 256–7 schools and see schools social care and 100 social engineering and 244, 245, 246, 247–9, 252–3 town/city planning and 121, 122–3, 130, 138, 139–40, 142, 216–20 cholesterol 43, 185, 242–3 cigarettes 10, 29, 47, 62, 75, 76, 79, 92, 98, 105, 176, 177, 242–4 cognitive function 5, 46, 49, 57, 87, 186, 226, 232, 233, 234 Coldbath Fields Prison, London 63–4 colon cancer 48 co-morbidity 89, 91 commuting 58, 111, 114–18, 125, 127–9, 148, 183, 184, 199–200, 221, 270, 273, 274 Cooper, Ashley 129 Cooper, Ken: Aerobics 78, 79 Copenhagen, Denmark 109–12, 122–3, 125, 134, 135, 184, 240 Coronary Heart Disease and Physical Activity of Work 61–2, 71–3 coronavirus pandemic 8–10, 13, 33, 88, 90, 100, 115, 116, 130, 138, 154, 172, 173, 182, 183, 192, 198, 201–2, 214, 240, 247, 248, 257, 259–61, 263, 264–9 Cregan-Reid, Vybarr: Primate Change 178–9, 189 Criado-Perez, Caroline: Invisible Women 141 cycling body fat and 173 calories and 113 car travel supplants 2, 3, 127, 217–18 children/schools and 121, 130, 214, 217, 237–8, 246, 247 commuting/everyday cycling for transport 7, 9, 13, 27–8, 34, 58, 104–5, 113, 114, 115–20, 129, 137, 177, 182, 183, 184, 199, 213, 254, 261, 265, 270, 272–3 couriers 11–13 Denmark and 7, 111, 121, 128, 130, 135, 239, 240, 249, 268 electric-assist bicycle/e-bike 128–30, 135 Finland and 236–8, 246, 247 heart attacks and 74 lanes/routes 9, 28, 82, 111, 119, 120–1, 122, 124, 130, 133, 192, 237, 246, 253–4, 265, 267–8 leg strength and 224, 231, 276 METs and 51, 52, 58, 115, 129 mortality and 114–20, 121 Netherlands and 119, 121, 125, 127, 128, 239, 240, 249, 268 Olympics and 34 overweight people and 166 Peloton 31 postmen and 73 safety/road danger 28, 118–19, 121, 125–6, 128, 137, 216–18, 240, 260 Slovenia and 253–4 social engineering and 236–8, 239–40, 246, 247, 249, 253–4, 256 share schemes 106 short car trips and 136, 137, 143 town/city planning and 33, 111, 112, 113, 114–20, 121, 122, 124–6, 127–31, 136, 137, 141, 143, 191, 192, 236–9, 246–7, 249, 253–4, 256, 263–4, 267–8 cytokines 42, 161, 162 Dahl, Roald 217–18 Daily Mile 203–7, 212–13, 214, 249, 251, 261, 262 Davies, Adrian 5, 35 dementia 5, 49, 87, 88, 226, 227, 229, 232–4 Denmark cycling in 7, 111, 121, 128, 130, 135, 137–8, 184, 239, 240, 249, 268 town/city planning in 109–12, 114–15, 121, 122–3, 125, 128, 130, 131, 132–5, 268 Department for Transport, UK 3 depression 5, 50, 106, 250 diabetes 88, 90, 95, 102, 186, 187, 192–3, 227 pre-diabetes 37, 59, 188 type 1 37, 94 type 2 4, 5, 36, 37, 41, 42, 43, 46, 48–9, 57, 89, 93–4, 99, 106–8, 129, 145, 146, 151, 160, 162–3, 167, 185, 193, 215, 222, 265 Diabetes UK 108 Disneyland 135–6 Dober Tek campaign 254–5 Doll, Richard 79 Donaldson, Liam 79 driverless cars 136, 137 Dunstan, David 192–3, 200 duurzaam veilig (sustainable safety) 126 electric-assist bicycle/e-bike 128–30, 135 electric vehicles 128–30, 135, 136–7, 268 endocrine system 42 Equinox (US gym chain) 32 Erickson, Kirk 226, 233–4, 275 exercise see individual exercise and area of exercise ‘fat and fit’ 147, 169–75 fat, body 42–4, 145, 146–7, 151, 161, 162, 165–6, 167, 169–75, 185, 188, 193, 242, 255 financial costs of inactivity 87–143 mortality and morbidity and 90–3 NHS/universal medical systems and 87–108 non-medical long-term action against preventable conditions and 102–8 social care and 100–2 total additional costs imposed on health services due to inactivity 94–5 Finland 236–47, 258 cycling in 236–8, 246, 247 Finnish Schools on the Move 211–12, 246, 252 Global Report Card study on childhood activity levels and 252–3, 255 Helsinki central library 252 Network of Finnish Cycling Municipalities 247 social engineering in 236–47, 249, 252, 262, 264 Sports Act (1980) 245–6 Sports Act (1999) 246 Winter Cycling Congress 238, 246 see also individual place name Fitbit 54, 181 fitness industry 3, 31, 33, 34 fitness watches 116, 181, 270–1 food corporation lobby 148 ‘four by four’ threat (four most damaging NCDs) 90 Frauen-Werk-Stadt (Women’s Work City), Vienna 140–1 Freiburg, Germany 137–8 Frome, Somerset 141–3 Garmin 116, 181, 270–1 Gehl, Jan 109–12, 120, 122–4, 125, 126, 131, 135, 184, 268, 275 Life Between Buildings 110, 122–3, 131 Gill, Tim 138, 218–20 No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk-Averse Society 219–20 Glasgow University 66, 68, 134, 163 Global Report Card study on childhood activity levels 24, 252–3 glucose intolerance 37, 38, 167, 185, 192–3, 194 Gobec, Mojca 254–5 Googleplex, Mountain View 133, 196 Greater Manchester 124–5, 127, 264–6 gyms 1, 4, 26, 30–5, 51, 106, 149, 166, 167, 220–1, 223–4, 256, 276 Hartley, Sir Percival Horton-Smith 64–5 Harvard Alumni Health Study 75–7, 134 Harvard University 46, 52, 74, 76, 77, 134, 171 Haskell, William 26, 274 Hatano, Yoshiro 54 Health Education Authority 210 health gap (gap between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy) 92–4, 95, 99–100, 222 Healy, Genevieve 194–6, 274 heart attacks 41, 48, 50, 62, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 91, 92, 93, 106 see also cardiovascular health heart disease 5, 43, 46, 48, 59, 68, 69, 70–4, 81, 82, 88, 89, 114, 152, 154, 243, 244 see also cardiovascular health heart rate 13, 27, 53, 116, 117, 129, 181, 197, 270 Hidalgo, Anne 192 high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL) 43, 185 Hillman, Mayer: One False Move 217–18 Hillsdon, Mervyn 79–80, 83, 84, 85 Hippocrates 63 Hobro, Denmark 131 hunter-gatherers 5, 15, 16, 17 Hunt, Jeremy 261–4 Imbeah, Alistair 224 inactivity financial costs of 87–143 see also financial costs of inactivity obesity and see obesity sitting and see sitting see also individual area and consequence of inactivity incidental activity (activity which takes place as part of your regular day) 27, 114, 220 individual responsibility 2, 30, 58, 148, 263 industrialisation 2, 30 inequality (of income and opportunity) 103 Ineos 205 inflammation 42, 48, 68, 161, 162, 223 Institute of Hygiene and Occupational Health, Sofia 165 insulin 36, 37, 38, 42, 43, 57, 146, 161, 162 International Olympic Committee 81 International Space Station 44 Johnson, Boris 259, 260, 261, 264, 266, 267 Kail, Eva 139–43 Kelly, Mark 44 Kelly, Phil 88–9, 96–7, 103–5, 107 Kelly, Scott 44 Keston, John 225 keto diet 146 King’s College Hospital, London 87–9, 91 Kiuru, Krista 238–9, 245 Korhonen, Nina 246, 248–9, 252 Kraus, Hans: Hypokinetic Disease: Diseases Produced by Lack of Exercise 74 lactic acid 40–1 Lancet, The 23, 46, 47, 73, 95, 98, 128, 153, 199, 210 Lean, Mike 163–4 Lee, I-Min 46, 47, 52, 55, 56, 59, 60, 74, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 274 Levine, James 189–92, 193, 194, 196–7, 199, 201 Lewis, Thomas 68, 71–2 life expectancy 91–2, 99, 221–2 health gap (gap between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy) 92–4, 95, 99–100, 222 lipaemia 43 liver 161, 186, 187 Longevity of Oarsmen study, The 64–5 longshoremen health study, San Francisco 75 low-density lipoprotein (LDL) 43, 185 Lucas, Tamara 73–4, 83, 85 lung cancer 48, 79 lung function 5, 95–6 Lykkegaard, Kasper 181–2 Mackenzie, Richard 36–8, 43, 59, 117, 274–5 Maguire, Jennifer Smith 31, 32, 33 Mancunian Way, Manchester 124–5 Marin, Sanna 238 Marmot, Michael 82–3 ‘Matthew effect’ 206 Mayer, Jean 154–6, 157, 175 Physiological Basis of Obesity and Leanness 155–6 McGovern, Artie 31 meals, movement and processing of fats and sugars after 43–4, 167, 183, 188, 194, 272 mental health 49–50, 74, 204, 211 MET (metabolic equivalent) 51–2, 58, 115, 129, 178 metabolic disorders 5, 43, 49, 74, 95 see also individual disorder name metabolic rate 39, 51, 158, 191 micro mobility 135 Miliband, Ed 266–7 minimum amount of moderate activity needed to maintain health, recommended 116–17 mitochondria 41, 48, 167 Mitrovic, Polona Demšar 254 modal filtering 126 morbidity 89, 91–3, 160, 168–9, 227, 256–7 Morris, Annie 66–7 Morris, Jerry 61–3, 64, 65, 66–74, 75, 77, 79, 80–6, 152, 154, 241 Morris, Nathan 66–7, 83 Moscow 111, 112, 123 Mosley, Michael 229 movement decline of everyday 15–35 rediscovery of benefits of 61–86 see also individual type of movement muscle leg 224, 231, 276 skeletal 40, 42, 43, 167, 276 smooth 40 strength/muscle training 22, 223, 228, 271–2 wastage 22, 42, 223–4 Muscular Christianity 30 myosin (protein) 40 ‘nanny state’ 9, 243–4, 262–3, 264, 265 NASA 44 National Fitness Survey (1990) 84 National Health Service (NHS) 9, 70, 101, 164, 179, 223, 266 cost of inactivity to 9, 89–90, 93–7, 101, 104, 106–7, 153–4 social prescribing 105–6 National Lottery 33 Nebelong, Helle 219–20 Netherlands 119, 121, 125, 127, 128, 166, 239–40, 249, 268 Nieman, David 265 Niemi, Joonas 246, 248–9, 252 non-communicable diseases (NCDs) 90, 98 non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) 190–1, 194–5 North Karelia, Finland 241–3, 244, 245, 257 obesity 5, 19, 89, 98, 144–75, 215, 241 activity required to lose significant amounts of weight 144–7, 164–9 age and 152 basal metabolic rate and 158, 191 BMI and 146, 150–1, 160, 161–4, 167, 170, 171, 172, 173 body fat percentage and 146–7, 151, 165, 167, 170, 172–4, 193 childhood and 84, 152, 153, 212 costs of 95, 153–4 crisis 152–3, 154, 157 deaths and 47, 90, 160, 163, 170, 171 energy balance and 154–9 exercise benefits for 59, 144–7, 156, 158, 159, 165–6, 167–8 ‘fat and fit’ 169–75 health conditions associated with 160–1 obesogenic foodscape and 148–9 sex and 152 Slovenia and 256–7 stigma 147, 149–50 sugar and 146, 148, 156, 166 waist circumference and 161–4, 169, 172 weight loss/Watson and 144–6, 147–8, 149, 162, 166–7, 171, 173, 175, 270 worldwide spread of 152–3 Odense, Denmark 130 Ojajärvi, Sanna 247 older people/ageing staying active and 220–35 town/city planning and 138–9 Old Order Mennonites community 208 Olympics 33–4, 124, 224, 228, 255 (1964) 54 (1996) 33, 81 (2000) 33 (2012) 23 150-minutes of moderate exercise per-week recommendation 21–2, 26, 38, 54, 201, 270 active travel and 112 children and 207 commuting and 127–8 definitions of moderate and intense exercise 22 MET and 58 moderate activities, WHO list of possible 52 mortality and 45 older people and 222 strength training and 271–2 weight loss and 164 osteoporosis 16–17, 209, 227 Paffenbarger, Ralph 62, 64, 74, 75–82, 84–5, 101, 134, 225, 274 Paris 191–2, 197, 268 Parkrun 106, 249–51 pavement 120, 122, 124, 130, 140, 141, 237, 265, 268 pedometers 53–4 Peloton 31 personal choice, myth of 25–30 personal trainers 31 Peska, Pukka 46, 240–5, 257, 262–3 Physical Activity and Health (eds Bouchard, Blair, Haskell) 39 Physical Activity Guidelines Advisory Committee (PACAG) 45, 48, 57 physical activity level (PAL) 51 Pichai, Sundar 133 Policy Studies Institute 217 polypharmacy 89 portal theory 161 poverty 67, 68, 69, 82, 152, 180 Poynton, Frederic 68 protein 37, 40 Public Health England (PHE) 3, 22, 33, 57, 94–5, 97, 169, 269 Raab, Wilhelm: Hypokinetic Disease: Diseases Produced by Lack of Exercise 74 Radcliffe, Paula 36 ramp test 117–18 rheumatic heart disease 68, 69–70, 82, 152 risk-averse culture 207, 219 road danger 28, 119, 121, 125–6, 128, 137, 216–18, 240, 260 Roehampton University 36, 117, 172 Rook, Sir Alan 65 Ross, Robert 149–50, 157, 160, 161–2, 163, 164, 168–9, 171, 173, 174, 175 Rost, Leon 132–4, 135, 136, 139 Royal College of General Practitioners 105 running 1, 3, 9 ageing and 225, 227, 275 ATP and 40 bone density and 16 childhood and 203–7, 209, 210, 212–13, 214, 215, 246, 255 exercise industry and 31 home running treadmills 147 METs and 51, 58 150-minutes of moderate exercise per-week recommendation and 22, 52, 201 overweight people and 167 Paffenbarger and 76, 77, 78–9, 80, 225 Parkrun 106, 249–51 ultrarunning 32 schools 20, 27, 30, 121, 210–20, 236, 237–8, 239, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 252–7, 261–2 cycling to 121, 130, 214, 237–8, 246, 247 Daily Mile and 203–7, 212–13 English curriculum, physical education and 212, 248, 261–2 Finland and 211–12, 246, 252–3, 257 free school meals at 245 girls low activity levels in 204, 209, 210–11 Global Matrix 3.0 Physical Activity Report Card and 24, 252–3 independent childhood mobility, perceived cosseting of children and 216–20 playing fields 103, 107 Scottish schools curriculum, physical education and 212 sitting in 211–16 Slovenian 212, 255–7 social engineering and 237–8, 239, 244, 245, 246 sedentary behaviour 177–202 see also sitting Sens 181–4, 271 short-termism 107 Sidewalk Labs 136 Sim, David: Soft City 123–4, 126–7 Sinton-Hewitt, Paul 250 sit-stand test 228–31 sit-stand workstations 195, 196, 198–9, 200, 202 sitting 5, 13, 24, 26, 39, 49, 54, 62, 72, 176–202, 211–16 active applause and 176–7, 180, 271 average amounts of 179 breaking up prolonged 176–7, 180, 181, 182, 190–1, 193, 194–5, 197, 200, 271, 275 chair and 178–9 diabetes and 185, 186, 187, 188, 192–4 exercise and effects of 184, 199–201 fidgeting and 190–1, 194–5 health effects of 176–7, 185–8 low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL)/triglycerides and 185 ‘new smoking’ headlines 177 schools and 211–16 sedentary behaviour defined 177–8 sit-stand test 228–31 sit-stand workstations 195, 196, 198–9, 200, 202 tracking/measuring 179–84 TV viewing and 178, 186, 187–8, 189, 192 workplace and 189–92, 195–9, 201–2 skeletal muscles 40, 42, 43, 167, 276 skinfold body fat test 173–4, 255 Skinner, James 21 sleep 5, 42, 50, 57, 184 Sleep, Leisure, Occupation, Transportation, and Home-based Activities (SLOTH) 25 Slofit programme 255–6 Slovenia 24, 212, 253–8, 261 Smith, Edward 63–4 smooth muscle 40 social care 97, 99–101, 108 social engineering 236–58 cycling and 236–8, 239–40, 246, 247, 249, 253–4, 256 Finland and 236–47, 249, 252–3, 255, 257, 258 see also individual area of Finland kindergartens and 252 mortality rates and 240–5 ‘nanny state’ objections to 243–4 obesity and 241, 252–7 Parkrun 249–51 political support, need for complete 244–5 schools and 236, 237–8, 239, 244, 245, 246–7, 248, 252–3, 255, 256, 257 Slovenia and 253–7, 258 sports facilities funding 245–6 tax and 245–6, 252 Youth Sports Trust, UK 247–9, 251 social medicine 61, 68–71, 83 Social Medicine Unit 61, 69–70 socialism 66, 67–8 social prescribers 105–6 Spevak, Harvey 32, 35 Sport England 34 stairs 28–9, 131–4 Starc, Gregor 255–7 St Mary’s Hospital, London 93 St Ninian’s primary school, Stirling, Scotland 203–7, 213 Stockholm, Sweden 141 Stop de Kindermoord (Stop the Child Murders) road safety mass protests, Netherlands (1970s) 121, 240 strength/muscle training 22, 223, 228, 271–2 stroke 5, 46, 61, 81, 89, 160, 180, 186, 267 technology, monitoring of activity levels and Active Ten app (Public Health England) 57, 269 activity trackers 38, 57, 116, 180–4, 200–1, 214–15, 269, 270–1 Sens activity tracker 181–4, 200–1, 214–15, 271 television viewing 26, 82–3, 121, 186–9, 192 telomeres 41–2, 226 10,000 steps a day target 26, 38, 52, 53–5, 56, 184, 200, 270, 275 Titmuss, Richard 68–9 town/city planning (built environment) 5, 28–9, 108, 109–43, 210 active travel and 109–43 Amager Bakke and 134–5 Buchanan and 120–1 cars, hegemony of 110, 111, 113, 120–2, 124, 125, 126, 127–31, 135–8, 140, 141, 142, 143, 191–2, 263, 265, 268 Copenhagen 111–12, 122, 123 coronavirus lockdown and 130–1 cycling and 111, 112, 113, 114–20, 121, 122, 124–6, 127–31, 136, 137, 141, 143 driverless cars and 136–7 duurzaam veilig (sustainable safety) concept 126 e-bikes and 127–30 Gehl’s philosophy 109–12, 120, 122–4, 125, 126, 131, 135 Googleplex, Mountain View and 132–4 health dividends of active travel and 114–20 Manchester and 124–5, 127 Odense and 130 older people/those with disabilities and 138–9 stairs and 131–2 Toyota Woven City 135–6, 137, 138–9 Vauban, Freiburg 137–8 walking and 109, 112, 113, 114, 115, 120, 121–7, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140, 141, 143 women and girls, discrimination against 139–43 Toyota Woven City, Japan 135–6, 137, 138–9 tracking, electronic activity 13, 17, 21, 26, 38, 52, 53–5, 56, 57, 113, 116, 180–4, 190, 200–1, 214–15, 269–71, 272 transport use see individual mode of transport travel, active 9, 24, 112–14, 118, 121, 126, 127, 131, 136, 143, 191, 216 see also individual mode of travel Travers, Andrew 100–1 treadmill desk 199 triglycerides 43, 185 True Finns 245 Tudor-Locke, Catrine 53–4, 56 Tulleken, Xand van 29–30, 44–5 Uber 137 ultrarunning 32 University of Massachusetts 53 Utrecht, Netherlands 125 Utzon, Jørn 111 Valabhji, Jonathan 93, 99, 104 Varney, Justin 97–8, 169, 198 Vartiainen, Juha-Pekka 237 Vauban, Freiburg, Germany 137–8 Vienna, Austria 140–3 VO2 max test 117–18, 173 walking Active Ten app and 57, 269–70 ageing and 102 assessing/tracking 26, 38, 52, 53–5, 56, 181, 182, 183, 184, 200, 269–70, 272 bone density and 16 brisk/speed of 3, 9, 22, 48, 52, 53, 55, 57, 60, 74, 79, 84, 86, 114, 167, 269 children and 11, 209, 214, 215, 216, 218, 246, 247 commuting and 114, 130 cycling and 114, 115 danger and 120 decline in 2, 3, 9, 16, 18, 19, 27–9, 33, 208, 216 fat processing/reduction and 43, 48, 185 150 minutes of moderate activity a week recommendation and 52–4 social prescribing and 106 stairs and 28–9, 131–4 10,000 steps a day target 26, 38, 52, 53–5, 56, 184, 200, 270, 275 town/city planning and 109, 112, 113, 114, 115, 120, 121–7, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140, 141, 143 weight loss and 144–5, 157, 165, 166, 167 workplace and 196, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 274, 275 WALL·E (film) 25–6 Watson, Tom 144–6, 147–8, 149, 162, 166–7, 171, 173, 175, 270 Downsizing 145 weekend warriors 58–9 Wellington, Chrissie 250, 251, 252, 257 Whyte, Martin 87–9, 91, 94, 95–6, 102–5, 106–8 Wicks, Joe 10 Wiggle 270 Wijndaele, Katrien 187–8 Winter Cycling Congress 238, 246 Wollaston, Sarah 263 Wolff’s Law (bones adapt to the repeated loads put on them) 209 women 6 BMI and 51 bone density 16, 18, 227 cancer and 48 diabetes 151 girls, low activity levels in 141–3, 204, 209, 210–11, 256 life expectancy 92, 222 modern decline in activity among 19, 22, 24 obesity and 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162–3, 164, 165, 171 150-minutes of moderate exercise per-week recommendation and 22, 207 public space and 139–43 sitting and 186 walking and 53–4, 55, 84, 121 World Health Organization (WHO) 22, 47, 52, 98, 151, 152–3, 210 World Obesity Forum 154 Wright, Chris 247–9, 252, 257 Wyllie, Elaine 203–4, 205, 206, 209, 212, 213, 262 Youth Sports Trust 247–9, 251 First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2021 Copyright © Peter Walker, 2021 The right of Peter Walker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists by Linda McQuaig

anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, diversification, Donald Trump, energy transition, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, green new deal, Kickstarter, low interest rates, megaproject, Menlo Park, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, payday loans, precautionary principle, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sidewalk Labs, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing

But their innovation is aimed at contriving new ways to secure extremely large profits for themselves, with little regard for the consequences. It is not at all clear that their complex methods of extracting profits from our infrastructure are going to be in the interests of Canadians. Certainly, there are plenty of clever minds working on innovative schemes to exploit profit opportunities in infrastructure. Recently, Sidewalk Labs, a U.S. firm involved in building infrastructure for an experimental new neighbourhood on Toronto’s waterfront, devised a financing scheme that would allow it to get a share of property taxes and future increases in land values, diverting to itself revenues that would normally end up in city coffers.

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives by Stefan Al

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, digital twin, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elisha Otis, energy transition, food miles, Ford Model T, gentrification, high net worth, Hyperloop, invention of air conditioning, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Marchetti’s constant, megaproject, megastructure, Mercator projection, New Urbanism, plutocrats, plyscraper, pneumatic tube, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, SimCity, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, synthetic biology, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering, Victor Gruen, VTOL, white flight, zoonotic diseases

“A Tale of Two Towers,” Economist, November 18, 2013. 13.Karissa Rosenfield, “In Progress: Shanghai Tower/Gensler,” Huffington Post, May 4, 2012. 14.Kyoung Sun Moon, “Structural Design and Construction of Complex-Shaped Tall Buildings,” IACSIT International Journal of Engineering and Technology 7, no. 1 (2015): 30–35. 15.Jon Galsworthy, “Rising to the Clouds with Confidence,” Structure Magazine, June 2016. 16.Malcolm Millais, Building Structures: Understanding the Basics (New York: Routledge, 2017), 422. 17.Khan, Engineering Architecture, 361. 18.Sidewalk Labs, Exploration 1: How to Design a Timber Building That Can Reach 35 Stories or More, January 24, 2020, accessed April 17, 2020, https://sidewalklabs.com. 19.Nicholas A. Yaraghi et al., “A Sinusoidally Architected Helicoidal Biocomposite.” Advanced Materials 28, no. 32 (2016): 6835–44. THREE: The Race to the Top: Elevators 1.Kheir Al-Kodmany, “Tall Buildings and Elevators: A Review of Recent Technological Advances,” Buildings 5, no. 3 (2015): 1070–104. 2.Statista, 2021, “Number of New Elevator and Escalator Installations in China from 2001 to 2019,” March 17.

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

A Pattern Language, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, big-box store, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, car-free, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, mandatory minimum, market clearing, megastructure, New Urbanism, parking minimums, power law, remote working, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Seaside, Florida, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, SimCity, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, traffic fines, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, WeWork, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

How much revenue, and public welfare, could be unearthed at the curb? Stephen Smyth, the founder of Coord, had much the same pitch as Donald Shoup: the land was valuable, and it was being sold for far below market price (or worse, given away). Coord, which was backed by Google’s city-focused Sidewalk Labs venture, went way beyond parking meters. Doing business from a grubby coworking space in Midtown, Smyth’s company had digitized the curb rules of dozens of cities, often by sending employees out to pound the pavement and chart, block by block, the Borgesian map of parking rules—a hydrant here, a driveway there, two-hour parking here, residential parking permits there, yellow paint, red paint, lawn chairs—that made up the bulk of public signage in the American city.