Public-Private Value Conflict in Platform Cities: A Case Study of the Sidewalk Labs Service Ecosystem in Toronto’s Quayside Project

R Blair Frost Faculty of Information University of Toronto [email protected] rbfrost.com

Pre-print, October 2020

Abstract

In May 2020, Sidewalk Labs—a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. and sibling company of Google—announced their withdrawal from Quayside, a ‘smart city’ development project planned along Toronto’s waterfront. Since the selection of Sidewalk Labs as a partner on the project in 2017, the Quayside project drew extensive criticism on several grounds, including issues of data governance and privacy, legality, public accountability, and social responsibility. Using public value theory, service systems analysis, and value network analysis, the political economy of the Quayside project is analyzed with a focus on value conflicts and capability gaps between Sidewalk and the public. Sidewalk aimed to commodify Quayside as a local civic structure within a global service platform, enabling a global network of private platform owners to extract value from as much civic activity as politically possible for their own private benefit. This method of combining public-private partnerships, globalized value networks, and civic platformization in smart city development poses threats to local democracies and economies. Smart governance innovations and future research directions for mitigating public-private value conflict in smart city development projects are proposed.

Keywords: Smart City, Public Governance, Public Value, Value Conflict, Political Economy, Platform Capitalism, Service System

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1. Sidewalk Closed Due to Costly Construction

In March 2017, Waterfront Toronto, the organization responsible for coordinating the redevelopment and revitalization of Toronto’s waterfront communities, issued a request for proposals for an innovation and funding partner to work with Waterfront Toronto in transforming Toronto’s largely undeveloped Quayside neighborhood into “an exemplary waterfront community that achieves precedent-setting standards of sustainability, resiliency, innovation, inclusivity, and design excellence” (p. 14). In October 2017, Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. and sibling company of Google, was selected as the official partner of Waterfront Toronto on the Quayside project to develop Canada’s first internet-of- things-integrated ‘smart city.’ Upon hearing that Sidewalk had been selected, Eric Schmidt, then Executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc., remarked: “Oh my God! We’ve been selected. Now, it’s our turn” (as cited in Blinch, 2017). What exactly was it now Alphabet’s turn for? Portending the public outcry soon to come, Schmidt’s desire to have a “turn” referred to a long-standing political fantasy shared by Google’s co-founders of “all the things you could do if someone would just give us a city and put us in charge” (as cited in Blinch, 2017). With Quayside in Sidewalk’s hands, Schmidt’s fantasy of having a turn at performing the role of government became closer to reality than ever before.

Unfortunately for Schmidt, Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff announced in May 2020 that Sidewalk intended to abandon the Quayside project amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, explaining that “as unprecedented economic uncertainty has set in around the world and in the Toronto real estate market, it has become too difficult to make the 12-acre project financially viable without sacrificing core parts of the plan” (Doctoroff, 2020). With that, an urban development project offering 2,500 new purpose-built rental units and condominiums was deemed unviable in Toronto, a city with “a significant shortage of new purpose-built rental housing” (Smetanin et al., 2019, p. 2). Doctoroff’s statement is telling: it signals that even in the absence of a pandemic, development and governance of the processes through which Quayside would create value for the public was and always would have been beholden to the opaque capabilities and motives of Sidewalk, rather than to a genuine desire to serve the public interest with accountability, transparency, and responsibility. Well before Doctoroff’s announcement, the Quayside project was plagued by accusations that Sidewalk Labs was not acting in the public interest. Since the selection of Sidewalk Labs as Waterfront Toronto’s partner, the Quayside project drew sustained criticism on several fronts, including its vague guarantees of responsible digital governance and data protection (Clement, 2020), its questionable compliance with several legal and regulatory frameworks (Office of the Auditor General of Ontario, 2018), as well as Sidewalk’s potentially predatory, surveillance-based business model (Barth, 2019).

Even if such threats to the public interest rested on valid critical grounds, when analyzed in aggregate, the threats may be merely symptomatic of an even more pernicious threat that globalized public-private smart city partnerships like Quayside pose to the future of local democracies and 3

economies. Graham, Kitchin, Mattern, and Shaw (2019) identify a series of threats to the public interest posed by mismanaged public-private smart city partnerships, such as “profit being placed before people and the environment, widening inequalities between citizens, a loss of rights, and the erosion of democracy . . . and a transfer of risk and liability from the private to the public sector” (pp. 5-6). Others have studied this conflict between private and public interests in the political economies of smart cities, some with conditionally favorable outlooks on public-private partnership in smart city development (Neumann et al., 2019; Neuroni et al., 2019; Rossi, 2016) and some with largely unfavorable outlooks (Gandy & Nemorin, 2019; Cardullo & Kitchin, 2019; Kitchin, 2014), but these studies do not adequately scope and analyze the systemic value conflicts between public and private interests as well as local and global scales that are intrinsic to all public-private partnership (de Graaf, Huberts, & Smulders, 2014). More broadly, much of the analysis of public value creation in smart cities has not focused on the ontologies, systems, and mechanisms of service through which public value is co-created with private interests (Anttiroiko & Komninos, 2019). This paper contends that critical analysis of smart city political economies can benefit from an approach that is more sensitive to ontologies of public value and service. The goal of such an approach should be to identify instances of public-private value conflict in which the creation of public value through localized public services can be subverted and appropriated for the benefit of a global network of private interests. Following Barth’s (2020) suggestion that activists, academics, and businesses should study the case of Quayside as a “playbook for future battles” in smart city development, this paper adopts a service- and systems-oriented approach to explore key instances of public-private value conflict in the Quayside project in which public value creation could have been subverted and appropriated for the benefit of private interests. Following the analysis, opportunities for future research into governance approaches for mitigating these value conflicts will be proposed.

2. Public Value for Whom? Theory and Methods for Analyzing Public-Private Value Conflict

The rhetoric of public value creation was instrumental to Sidewalk Labs’ and the public sector’s promotion of the Quayside project. Quayside was touted as a virtually Edenic source of value for the public that promised to “restore paradise by pulling up a parking lot” (in the words of then-premier of Ontario, Kathleen Wynne, as cited by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, 2017, 1:23-1:26), deliver an unprecedented “economic windfall for Toronto, Ontario, and Canada” (Sidewalk Labs, 2019a, p. 37), and finally re-home a forlorn, precarious public to a prelapsarian state, a “city that wants me to stay forever” (p. xviii). Public value theory (PVT) as described by Moore (1995; 2013) therefore provides useful theoretical framing for analyzing the networks of private and public value in the Quayside project. Reflecting the broader ethos of the New Public Management paradigm, PVT calls for public managers to behave similarly to their private sector counterparts by optimizing the value that government produces and delivers to its “customers” (individuals and businesses, in the case of governments) through a variety 4

of political, economic, and managerial practices. Dahl and Soss (2014) critically suggest that PVT recasts public managers as “enlightened entrepreneurs” (p. 502) who tacitly participate in the same pursuits of service privatization and market domination as private sector entrepreneurs. PVT, then, has inherent challenges in clearly delineating public value from private value, and this ambiguity inverts the public manager’s role from being a “countervailing power” to the market (Galbraith, 1952) to being a facilitator of market logics and private value chains.

This troubling blur of public and private interests in Quayside was at the heart of the main political- economic critique of the project: that, through Sidewalk’s opaque business rationale, the project could have enormously enriched and empowered Sidewalk and their parent company Alphabet, providing ambiguous public value at incalculable public expense. Or, in Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s simpler terms, the project would net “a terrible deal for the taxpayers . . . it’s a big company trying to do the right thing for their company, but it’s not good for the taxpayers” (2019, 21:10-21:28). Other prominent critics of the Quayside project such as Jim Balsillie—co-founder of Research in Motion (now BlackBerry)—observed even more profound inequalities between Alphabet and the public. Balsillie (2018) described the inequalities to The Globe and Mail as such:

‘Smart cities’ are the new battlefront for big tech because they serve as the most promising hotbed for additional intangible assets that hold the next trillion dollars to add to their market capitalization . . . Securing new monopoly IP rights [as Sidewalk intended to do] coupled with the best new data sets creates a systemic market advantage from which companies can inexorably expand . . . Foreign corporate interests [such as Sidewalk and Alphabet] tout new technocratic efficiencies while shrewdly occluding their unprecedented power grab.

To overcome Balsillie’s critique would require a Herculean feat of public governance: capturing a net public value for Toronto, Ontario, and Canada from Quayside’s complex global ecosystem of assets and risks, services and disservices, and private and public interests. To systemically analyze public-private value conflict and value co-creation within such an ecosystem requires a framework with three analytical capabilities: 1) the ability to represent each of the above ecosystem components and relate their functions to one another within a unified, systemic view, 2) the ability to represent the ecosystem across multiple layers of scope and scale (e.g., global, national, and local), and 3) the ability to represent components in such a way that their interactions can be comparatively analyzed by using a value-centric analytical method. The literature on service science offers many such approaches for analyzing networked flows of value within “service systems,” a type of system conceived by Maglio et al. (2009) as “an open system (1) capable of improving the state of another system through sharing or applying its resources . . . and (2) capable of improving its own state by acquiring external resources” (p. 403). A service ecosystem, meanwhile, is conceived as a larger macrological structure characterized by “interaction within and among service systems” (Akaka & Vargo, 2014, p. 371). By building upon and 5

integrating these and other service system ontologies and methodologies through a systematic review and synthesis of the service science literature, the framework for multilayer service system analysis developed by Frost, Cheng, and Lyons (2019) is able to offer all three of the above analytical capabilities, representing the Quayside project as a service ecosystem that generates value through local and global networks of value co-creation.

The framework recognizes service systems as being composed of three architectural structures: the system’s environment, activities, and institutional arrangements. Of those three architectures, the system environment is the one most directly applicable to analyzing the overarching political economy of a service ecosystem such as Quayside’s. The system environment is a structure which enables ecological interaction between three components: actors, resources (subdivided here into assets and risks to distinguish each resource’s potential use-value from its potential misuse-value), and networks. Of primary importance to this analysis are the networks through which value is co-created and governance outcomes are produced between actors. Figure 1 (below) depicts an adapted version of the framework, illustrating the which components were used to focus a critical analysis of the Quayside service ecosystem on key instances of public-private value conflict.

Figure 1: Adapted version of Frost, Cheng, and Lyons’ (2019) multilayer service system analysis framework that was used to analyze the Quayside service ecosystem.

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By applying this framework to the Quayside service ecosystem, a set of key actors can be identified, and for each actor, their networked exchanges of assets and risks with the other actors as part of value co-creation and governance activities can be explored with particular attention being afforded to conflicts of interest between public and private actors. Based on a review of project documentation, official statements, news media, and other pertinent records, a value network model of the key high-level actors and value co-creation relations within the Quayside service ecosystem was created (see Figure 2, below). Modeling and analysis of the value network was based on the value network analysis approach of Allee (2008), in which the actors and relations depicted in the model collectively constitute a value network through which assets and risks may flow between actors. The following section will characterize and describe the strategic intentions of each actor in the value network through a series of actor profiles. Specific flows of assets and risks from which value conflicts emerge will then be critically analyzed in Section 4.

Figure 2: Value network of key actors and value co-creation relations in the Quayside service ecosystem.

3. The Quayside Value Network: Actor Profiles

The public: In a PVT framework, individual members of a public are regarded as customers of public services who are the ultimate benefactors of public value. Collectively, a public is seen as a political actor with the sole authority to “legitimize a particular concept of public value” and create performance measures for a particular government’s acts of public value creation (Moore, 2013, p. 9). Moore calls attention to the collective character of public actors in claiming that “people, acting through the imperfect processes of representative government, are the final arbiters of public value” (p. 41). In the case of the Quayside project, the most directly relevant publics included the people of Toronto, the 7

people of Ontario, and the people of Canada. Together, these three publics constitute “the public” within the context of this analysis.

Government: Moore (2013) characterizes government as the actor that “creates [public] value by satisfying ‘customers’ . . . in the public sector, the relevant ‘customer’ is a collective public” (p. 3). In this framing of government as business services provider, a government is an organization with the political authority to deliver public services as well as to represent public interests within “more collaborative, multisector modes of governance” (Dahl & Soss, 2014, p. 496). In the Quayside project, Waterfront Toronto was an intergovernmental organization mandated by the federal government of Canada, the provincial government of Ontario, and the municipal government of Toronto to revitalize Toronto’s waterfront communities. In that capacity, Waterfront Toronto served as the master developer of Quayside and was Sidewalk Labs’ main point of contact in the public sector; however, Waterfront Toronto and the three levels of government they receive their mandate from can collectively be seen as performing the role of “government” in the Quayside project. As government, these organizations had the political authority to represent public interests in the project and a responsibility to work with other actors to co-create a net public value that satisfied the “customers” of government’s public services.

Sidewalk Labs: Sidewalk occupied the central role in the Quayside project’s value network, functioning as what Allee and Schwabe (2011) call the “heartbeat” of a value network. As the Quayside value network’s heartbeat, Sidewalk acted as the economic intermediary through which nearly all value in the network—public or private—could be evaluated, captured, and/or and redistributed out into the rest of the network as assets or risks. In that capacity, Sidewalk could intermediate several value co-creation interactions in order to generate revenue for itself, all of which are detailed in the third volume of their Master Innovation and Development Plan (MIDP) for Quayside, entitled The Partnership (2019c, p. 179). The MIDP outlines the value co-creation interactions that Sidewalk hoped to capture private value from, including real estate rentals and sales, development and redeployment of technology and intellectual property, venture seed funding, timber manufacturing, municipal infrastructure financing and implementation, as well as ongoing “performance payments” as bonuses for providing high-quality services to Waterfront Toronto. While the success of government in generating public value is often difficult to empirically measure, the success of private sector firms such as Sidewalk Labs in generating private value for themselves “can be measured relatively simply and objectively” by analyzing how the firm taps into its value network to create profitable revenue streams (Moore, 2013, p. 41). Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff describes the central motive of private sector value creation quite simply: “We’re in this business to make money” (2016).

Alphabet: As the parent company of Sidewalk Labs, Google, as well as many other multinational tech companies, Alphabet operates a vast global service ecosystem that includes and extends beyond the localized service ecosystem of the Quayside project. Much as Sidewalk Labs intermediated the Quayside 8

value network, Alphabet intermediates a larger value super-network that interconnects and optimizes the many subordinate value networks associated with its corporate holdings and intellectual properties. Reeves (2015) observes three key benefits to Alphabet’s corporate structure: it “allows each unit to deploy the right approach to strategy and execution . . . makes it easier to build the required capabilities in each business . . . [and] lowers the hurdles to acquiring and growing companies.” Any value an actor co-creates with Sidewalk Labs could therefore have the potential to enhance or be enhanced by the capabilities of other actors and/or assets elsewhere in Alphabet’s larger value network. In this sense, Alphabet functions as a highly capable and reliable business partner to Sidewalk, but Alphabet is unique from other business partners in that it is the ultimate owner of all private value captured by Sidewalk within the Quayside value network. As a matter of business strategy, Sidewalk can be expected to avoid taking ownership of any assets or risks if those assets and risks will not eventually yield a net value for Alphabet and Alphabet’s shareholders.

Shareholders: Alphabet has a fiduciary responsibility to satisfy their shareholders by capturing enough private value through projects such as Quayside to increase Alphabet’s valuation, which in turn, will provide Alphabet’s shareholders with a return on their investment. By legal necessity, the responsibility of Alphabet—and Sidewalk Labs, by extension—to co-create value with their shareholders has primacy over Sidewalk’s co-creation of public value. The services of Alphabet and Sidewalk may very well deliver socially responsible outcomes that benefit the public, but their pursuit of public value must always be subordinate to Alphabet’s overriding fiduciary responsibility to capture private value for their shareholders. From the perspective of the shareholders actor, public value and public service are regarded as valuable only if servicing the public yields a net private value for shareholders. This value conflict positions the value system of shareholders in direct opposition to the value system of the public and their government, which pursues the co-creation of a net public value.

Business partners: Sidewalk Labs partnered or planned to partner with several other organizations in order to fulfill the development needs of the Quayside project. These included private sector partners that would co-create value with Sidewalk by, for example, developing the land in Quayside, constructing and managing new real estate, constructing and operating a timber factory, raising seed funding for new ventures that could supply the Quayside project with specific innovations, or lending money to Sidewalk and government as necessary (Sidewalk Labs, 2019c). Other partnerships with groups such as Park People and the Thorncliffe Park Women’s Committee were intended to gather data on social behavior in public spaces around Toronto, such as parks and residential areas (Merali, 2018). Partnerships with startups that were incubated or financed by Sidewalk Labs such as Cityblock, Coord, Intersection, Umbrella, and SPIDR Tech were intended to expand Sidewalk’s access to technological assets and capabilities, while the spin- off company Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners was backed by Alphabet and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP) in order to “leverage the combination of Alphabet’s leading technological capabilities with OTPP’s deep infrastructure investing experience” (Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, 2019). From a PVT 9

standpoint, Sidewalk’s wide range of business partnerships were intended to provide Sidewalk with access to the assets needed to deliver the key public value outcomes that Waterfront Toronto expected of them: to “create jobs, develop a climate-positive community, attain new levels of housing affordability, increase mobility options and reduce traffic, expand open space access, and, where appropriate, use digital innovations to improve outcomes while meaningfully protecting privacy and public interest" (Sidewalk Labs, 2019c, p. 22).

Advocates: Public advocates and advocacy groups, the most notable among them being #BlockSidewalk, advocated on behalf of the public interest in the Quayside project. Public advocates co- created value with the public by engaging with communities in order to identify and work towards closing any of government’s gaps in public responsibility and accountability. Conversely, private sector advocates from Sidewalk Labs and its partners intensively lobbied all three levels of government to advance their private interests and the co-creation of private value within the Quayside value network (Roth, 2018; Deschamps, 2019).

4. Privatized Services, Globalized Networks, and Platformized Cities

With the actors and their key relations profiled, returning to Waterfront Toronto’s original 2017 RFP is an instructive point from which to retrace how particular service expectations and value conflicts became embedded into Quayside’s service ecosystem. The 2017 RFP outlines the intended public service outcomes that the project was premised on, and in doing so, foreshadows the need for Sidewalk to strategically integrate a variety of actors into the Quayside value network and supply the project with the assets needed to accomplish the expected service outcomes. The expected activities specified in the RFP include extensive business development work with several strategic partners, including partners for investment, infrastructure development, research and innovation, manufacturing and engineering, IT services, and legal services. The RFP touts four key benefits of being selected as Waterfront Toronto’s main innovation and funding partner (p. 18): 1) “an unparalleled testbed environment in a North American context”; 2) boosts to global marketing and brand recognition; 3) access to a network of community and organizational stakeholders through Waterfront Toronto’s reputation as a reliable “execution and co-creation partner”; 4) revenue opportunities from real estate transactions and intellectual property sharing that Sidewalk would eventually seek to capitalize on in their own Master Innovation and Development Proposal (2019c). The RFP is also replete with consulting activities, such as co-creating a sustainable and re-deployable model for urban development and innovation with the appropriate stakeholders, leading economic and technical analyses of various solutions and technological innovations, and defining “measurable outcomes for the Project, including the necessary Key Performance Indicators” (p. 14). In this capacity as the project’s primary business developer and consultant, Sidewalk was functionally positioned as the intermediary of nearly all value co-creation and performance evaluation within Quayside’s value network from the project’s inception. 10

The necessity for an intermediary such as Sidewalk in co-creating virtually all aspects of Quayside’s governance reveals a dire gap in government’s capability to deliver public service. In Quayside, government’s ability to create public value is deeply dependent upon the private sector’s greater competency in managing value networks, delivering public services such as public transportation and affordable housing, and even in developing a framework for evaluating the extent to which the project’s intended outcomes have been satisfied. In that respect, the Quayside project is illustrative of a larger trend in which the organizational model of government—as well as the very concept of public services supplied by a public sector—has been superseded by multisectoral models of governance (Ansell, Trondal, & Ogard, 2017). This point is especially salient in view of Sidewalk’s “Yellow Book”, an internal document provided to Sidewalk employees that lays out Sidewalk’s vision of “having the power to levy its own property taxes, track and predict people’s movements and control some public services . . . including charter schools, special transit systems and a private road infrastructure” (Cardoso & O’Kane, 2019). There is, of course, an inherent conflict of interest in Sidewalk administering public governance and co- ordinating the delivery of public value through public service systems, as Sidewalk’s ultimate intent is to generate private value for shareholders in Alphabet’s larger service ecosystem. Although Sidewalk’s Master Innovation and Development Plan envisioned “harmonizing the objectives of Waterfront Toronto, the public, and Sidewalk Labs” (p. 22), the gap between government and Sidewalk in their respective abilities to develop value networks and integrate public service systems into a singular service ecosystem afforded Sidewalk much greater agency than government in determining how value co-created through the project would flow to public or private interests. More accurately, then, Sidewalk aimed to use its superior power to manage value networks in order to lead Quayside using a selectively collaborative mode of governance that Borrás and Edler (2014) refer to as “primus inter pares” (first among equals), rather than through a more sincerely harmonious mode of governance that would represent public interests on an even footing with private interests.

This power imbalance between public and private interests in the Quayside project expresses itself in the multitude of concerns expressed by government and public advocates about data governance and privacy. An audit of the project by Ontario’s Auditor General (2018) highlighted that there had been two resignations from Waterfront Toronto’s Digital Strategy Advisory Panel due to “concerns of lack of transparency and apathy by Waterfront Toronto in relation to residents’ concerns over data privacy” (p. 692). In a letter to the Chairman of Waterfront Toronto, Brian Beamish—the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario—commented that Sidewalk’s proposed mechanism of governing Quayside’s data through a civic data trust controlled by a third-party is “problematic for a number of reasons, including: a concerning overlap with the mandate of the Trust and that of existing privacy regulators; a lack of independent oversight of the Trust’s decisions; and an expectation the public sector organizations seek approval from the Trust” (2019, p. 1). But Sidewalk’s failures to deliver better public value in the form of socially responsible data governance and strong privacy safeguards could have been very reasonably expected: the company’s internal Yellow Book envisions real-time tracking of all devices and 11

behaviors within Sidewalk’s smart cities, data collection opportunities for Sidewalk’s own private police force, and superior tiers of civic services being made available to those who exhibit “good behavior” and choose to share more data with Sidewalk (Cardoso & O’Kane, 2019). Kitchin (2017) describes practices of smart city governance that are algorithmically structured and synchronized like these as “technocratic forms of governance [that] run counter to democratic politics, with real-time computationally-mediated management excluding meaningful public participation in governance, bypassing the creative, political and messy role of people in shaping their own environments” (p. 32). Although Sidewalk’s technocratic form of data governance produces significant risks to the public actors, its practices of “continuous geosurveillance, in which spaces and individual mobility are monitored at fine-grained temporal and spatial scales” (p. 32) can yield a motherlode of data assets for private actors that possess the technologies, capabilities, and scale needed to extract value from that data.

Ownership of the intellectual property (IP) that was developed through the Quayside project was another notably polarizing issue in the project’s development. Like issues of data governance and privacy, IP issues revealed a stark value conflict and power imbalance between the public and Sidewalk. Some public value would certainly have been captured from new IP developed as part of the project: alongside any quality of life benefits that may result from implementations of the IP, Sidewalk proposed that for all testbed-enabled technologies developed and deployed in Quayside, “the public sector would share 10 percent of the profits for ten years when that product is sold in other cities” (2019c, p. 179). At face, this seems like it could possibly be a fair exchange. However, recalling that Sidewalk intermediates value co- creation between the public and Alphabet’s expansionary global value network, it is likely that Alphabet would emerge from this exchange with far greater value than the public, though it is impossible to empirically determine the exact extent of the value imbalance—despite their fantasies of performing the role of government, Alphabet and Sidewalk do not show the same regard for public transparency in their financial motivations and projections. It is possible, though, to qualitatively analyze some key political- economic features of the Quayside service ecosystem which could generate and intensify such an imbalance. For example, while government could potentially produce public value by using the financial assets received from the profit-sharing arrangement to deliver improved public services, the IP assets and technological capabilities gained by Sidewalk and Alphabet from the exchange could yield even greater private value through their global redeployment and scaling within other local service ecosystems. If redeployed and scaled in other cities in the coming decades, IP assets that were among the proposed innovations for Quayside such as autonomous building management and mobility management systems would also become central to the governance and profitability of Sidewalk’s other smart city projects, offering relatively little long-term benefit to the local economies and innovation ecosystems of Quayside, Toronto, Ontario, and Canada (Waterfront Toronto, 2019, p. 36). Combined with other assets and capabilities found within Alphabet’s vast IP portfolio, the IP developed through the Quayside project could provide Sidewalk with the “cornerstone of wealth creation” (O’Kane, 2019) needed to expand into other locales, leveraging their powerful intermediary position in the Quayside value network to rapidly 12

and cost-effectively redeploy proprietary products and service offerings from one local service ecosystem to another. As an expansionary tactic, this IP profit-sharing arrangement realizes the decades-old fantasy of the Google co-founders of being in charge of a city—and perhaps many cities—through the logics of globalization and platformization. By integrating private value through the corporate intermediary of Sidewalk, Alphabet’s global influence over public governance expands. Alphabet becomes capable of systematically reconfiguring the socio-technical structures of cities into a profitable service platform, defined by Lusch and Nambisan as “a modular structure that comprises tangible and intangible components (resources) and facilitates the interaction of actors and resources” (2015, p. 166). From a service science perspective, a smart city functions as a large-scale service platform. Many observers and researchers of smart city design and development have identified a similar civic structure that they refer to as “city as a platform” or “platform city” (e.g., Bates, 2019; Green, 2019; Miller, 2018; Bollier, 2016; Anttiroiko, 2016). As a large-scale service platform, the platform city affords an extensible and modular civic structure that can, in theory, facilitate the value optimization of civic activity at multiple scales.

In functioning as a platform city, modules of the Quayside project such as IP, technological capabilities, governance mechanisms, and value networks would have been prefigured for agile redeployment and scaling in other smart city service ecosystems around the world. This platformization of civic structure, activity, and governance for the purpose of generating private value reflects the centralizing tendencies of service platforms as described by Srnicek (2016):

With network effects, a tendency toward monopolisation is built into the DNA of platforms: the more numerous the users who interact on a platform, the more valuable the entire platform becomes . . . the more activities a firm has access to, the more data it can extract and the more value it can generate from those data . . . Platforms also seek to build up ecosystems of goods and services that close off competitors . . . All these dynamics turn platforms into monopolies with centralised control over increasingly vast numbers of users and the data they generate. (pp. 95-96)

Quayside’s platform city model was designed to be conducive to Alphabet’s capitalization and expansion into the business of public service delivery for the exact reasons described by Srnicek. Through the Quayside platform city, Sidewalk would have access to data from an entire geography of users and their social interactions. The Quayside platform city would cultivate a local service ecosystem through innovation and development deals with local governments, enabling Sidewalk and Alphabet to gain competitive advantage by expanding their value network and their pool of IP and data assets. Sidewalk could then adapt and redeploy that service ecosystem model into other jurisdictions, gradually making it riskier to compete with Sidewalk’s global network of platform cities, and gradually increasing the economic scale of Sidewalk and Alphabet’s global service platforms. Rather than being driven by price- based competition and mergers, platform owners like Sidewalk are driven by “the need to occupy key positions within the ecosystem” (p. 103) in order to grow their value network and valuation more quickly 13

than competitors, create a riskier environment for competitors, acquire inferior competitors, and ultimately, consolidate a powerful enough value network to assume the role of first-among-equals in the multisectoral governance of their chosen market niches and locales.

In this struggle for privatization and dominance through network effects, the political economies of platform cities such as Quayside signal “a shift away from competition over prices” (Srnicek, p. 97) and toward competition over value networks. An actor with greater access to a more comprehensive network of actors and assets will, by virtue of that access, have greater power to integrate and scale those assets through a platform model in order to capture value and drive economic growth. Sidewalk’s proposal for the Quayside project, for example, was “by far the most comprehensive” (Auditor General of Ontario, 2018, p. 652) in the opportunities for public value and economic growth it seemed to propose. Waterfront Toronto’s deference to Sidewalk’s capability to drive growth, deliver public services, and responsibly mediate the governing of the Quayside value network led Ontario’s Auditor General to note that government interests “may not be fully represented during negotiations with Sidewalk” (p. 694). Echoing the Auditor General’s concerns, the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner commented that “the City [of Toronto] must have a clearer role in the project and a voice in identifying what is in the public interests” (Beamish, 2019, p. 1). Moreover, Beamish stated that “the provincial government must modernize our laws to ensure that privacy protective, transparent, accountable and ethical data practices are at the forefront of all smart city projects” (p. 1), indicating that government lacked the legal power needed to mitigate the public risk and optimize the public value of data assets in the Quayside project.

Quayside’s privacy challenges reveal a fundamental value conflict between public and private interests in digital service platforms: “Calls for privacy miss how the suppression of privacy is at the heart of this business model” (Srnicek, 2016, p. 101). Because businesses like Sidewalk primarily aim to optimize private value for shareholders, their platform and business models must start from a position of capturing as much value from as much data as possible through internet-of-things architectures, sensors and cameras, artificial intelligence, and other digital technologies. Appropriate concessions to legal and regulatory frameworks, prominent public demands, and other stakeholders in the governance network must then be made in order to achieve a balance of assets and risks in the platform that satisfies the public to the greatest extent possible, while also maximizing private value for the platform owner(s) to the greatest extent possible. “Bottlenecks in the flow of data from sensors to commodity are an impediment to producing more value” (p. 103), and Sidewalk and Alphabet have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to avoid or minimize such bottlenecks wherever possible. By pursuing this responsibility through a multisectoral mode of governance in which Sidewalk and Alphabet hold disproportionate power over the public sector to develop the networks needed to deliver public value, the ethical premise of public service implied by Moore (2013)—to deliver cost-efficient and high-quality public value—is effectively subverted. Serving the public becomes epiphenomenal to serving private interests; public responsibility is subordinated to shareholder responsibility. The risks to public privacy 14

posed by the Quayside project then seem to be symptomatic of larger political-economic risks to public governance that are posed by globalizing, privatizing, and platformizing the networks involved in creating localized public value and delivering localized public services. Such risks extend beyond the institutional arrangements of Quayside, Sidewalk, or Alphabet alone, pointing towards the more general macro- institutional conditions in which the platform city model of urban development is perceived by government actors as an effective approach to creating public value.

5. Smart Cities Without Smart Governance: A Superwicked Problem

Ansell, Trondall, and Ogard (2017) contend that globally, “governance has become more pluricentric, fiscally volatile, and institutionally diffuse,” presenting a “superwicked” problem of governing increasingly turbulent political economies that are “complex, multidimensional, and rife with value conflict” (p. 4, emphasis added). Heightened political-economic turbulence threatens to undermine the foundations of creating public value in what Osborne (2006) calls New Public Governance, a post-New Public Management paradigm of governance “where multiple inter-dependent actors contribute to the delivery of public services and a pluralist state” (p. 384). Smart city developments that adhere to Quayside’s approach of building a service ecosystem around a diffuse set of privatized, globalized, and platformized institutions do not offer “effective and efficient solutions to wicked problems, such as globalisation, financial crises, climate change and environmental pollution” (Nesti, 2016, p. 21). Rife with public-private value conflict, such cities will only intensify the superwicked problem of governing turbulent political economies that are rife with value conflict. The case of Quayside reveals how mismanaged smart city development can create paradoxical conditions for public governance: platformized cities that are bountiful in the technological innovations needed to help the public navigate the superwicked problem of governing in political-economic turbulence, yet sorely unable to be governed without creating increasingly more value for private interests. The causes of this paradox transcend the development and governance of smart cities. The self-defeating model of public governance adopted in the Quayside project was buoyed by global macro-economic demands for more value conflict in order to promote competitive markets and fuel economic growth. The value conflicts between public and private interests in the Quayside project demonstrate how deeply embedded into global macro-structures—how superwicked—the problem of governing turbulence has become.

For instance, consider Sidewalk’s plan to offer 40 percent of the housing in Quayside for rent below market rate, with another 45 percent allotted to condominiums and 15 percent to rentals at market rate. Jennifer Keesmaat, the former chief planner for the City of Toronto, observed that the market rate for housing in Toronto is so high that “even if Sidewalk’s second tier of affordability [for rental housing] is on par with the market, these homes are wildly overpriced compared to Canadian wages” (2019). Of course, Sidewalk’s precise ratio of housing types was almost certainly costed, priced, and optimized to deliver a satisfactory degree of public value while still capturing what Sidewalk determined to be the greatest 15

possible level of private value from housing rentals and sales—and that is precisely the problem. In the value conflict between Quayside’s public and Alphabet’s shareholders—predominantly private, multinational institutional investors that extract wealth from local economies and globally re-distribute it through their opaque value networks—private value creation was prioritized over public value creation. Quayside’s service ecosystem was primarily optimized by Sidewalk to derive private value from services such as affordable housing that would traditionally—in less politically and economically turbulent times— be delivered by the public sector as public services. However, with the City of Toronto struggling to provide affordable housing amidst a decade-long cycle of austerity budgets (Wilson, 2020), the political economy of Quayside was primed for intense public-private value conflict and private sector exploitation of a public housing crisis. With private interests afforded excessive representation in the public governance of Quayside, and with public interests unfaithfully represented in public governance, the very premise of public governance and public service—to serve the public interest—was reduced to a romantic ideal, superseded by a pernicious new public governance model that was asymmetrically pluricentric, resistant to representing public interests, and exploitative of the public’s economic hardships.

Quayside’s failure was a multifaceted failure of governance, stemming from not only from pandemic- related uncertainties, but also from Sidewalk’s unfamiliarity with Canadian political culture, ongoing unaccountability and opacity in Sidewalk’s business operations, and sustained resistance from the local community (Barth, 2020). Future smart city projects around the world should learn from the failure of the Quayside project: in times of turbulence, smart city development projects will be better positioned for success if they attend more closely to not only building smart cities, but to building new models of smart governance. Meijer and Bolívar (2016) note that in most literature on smart city governance, “smart governance” is viewed not only as a challenge of technical innovation, but also of managerial innovation. The causes of Quayside’s failure point towards a lack of smart governance: Sidewalk’s zeal for radical technical innovation and near-term profit maximization at the expense of adopting innovative new practices of management and governance. Extensive public advocacy work was required before Sidewalk acquiesced to public demands on issues such as the adoption of a third-party data trust or guarantees of affordable rental housing, and Sidewalk’s concessions on these issues still received intense public scrutiny. For private interests to win the public’s trust and deliver genuine, long-term public value in smart city projects will require a far greater desire to work with the public sector in co-creating bold new innovations in smart governance. Beyond civic data trusts and affordability guarantees, several other managerial and governance innovations are possible, including: stewardship approaches to collaborative innovation that aim to establish a shared responsibilities for public value creation between public and private actors (Neumann et al., 2019); shared public-private ownership of intellectual property developed over the course of the project (Hinton & Raffoul, 2019); increased transparency, accountability, and public oversight in the design of public service platforms and smart city business models (Timeus, 2020; Díaz-Díaz, Muñoz, & Pérez-González, 2017); interjurisdictional resource-sharing and co-governance 16

partnerships with other smart city locales (Kitchin & Moore-Cherry, 2020); and reinvestment agreements to guarantee that a portion of profits will be reinvested into the local economy.

Further research is needed to determine how these and other smart governance innovations could be combined and implemented within a diverse set of smart city political and economic contexts. Such innovations will be necessary in mitigating the future threats to local public interests posed by private interests that seek to subvert public services for their own benefit and to appropriate public value through the globalized value networks and platformized civic structures of the smart city’s service ecosystem. Future case studies of the failure of the Quayside project—as well as public-private value conflicts in other smart city projects—should closely examine how the presence or absence of these innovations shifted the balance of power and responsibility in the project’s governance, altered the delivery of public services and the creation of public value, and resulted in greater or lesser mutual benefit for public and private interests.

17

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