A Big Master Plan for Google's Growing Smart City

What happens when a group of high-profile urban thinkers, capitalized by the vast wealth of a tech goliath, snags a parcel of public waterfront in a major North American city as a sandbox for their ideas? One outcome just became clearer.

Sidewalk Labs, the smart-city startup from Google parent company Alphabet, has released its master innovation and development plan to turn a sizable swath of Toronto’s Lake Ontario shoreline into “the most innovative district in the entire world,” its chief executive, Dan Doctoroff, said in a press call on Monday. After more than a year and a half of controversial public engagement in Toronto, the 1,524-page proposal details numerous facets of a high-tech urban utopia that Sidewalk Labs would oversee as a developer.