Sidewalk Labs?s proposal for Quayside, a ground-up ?smart? neighborhood in Toronto, is a prime example of techno-utopian thinking that?s influencing urban planning. | Sidewalk Labs

2019 saw a flood of interest in idealized ways to live. But to what end" I spent the last year consumed by utopias. Or at least the idea of utopia, of people imagining an idealized place and trying to make it a reality. If you listened to Nice Try!, Curbed?s podcast on failed utopias, you might be familiar with the stories of some notable attempts to build a version of a perfect world?for better or worse.
It seemed like everywhere I looked in 2019, there was a story about a utopia staring back at me. Plans for a techno-utopian neighborhood in Toronto; a floating utopian park in San Francisco; David Byrne?s American Utopia production; a New York Times deep dive into Italian industrialist Adriano Olivetti?s worker-focused utopia; and the Ford Foundation?s Utopian Imagination exhibition. When North Korea completed its new planned town of Samjiyon, state media billed it as a socialist utopia. There?s even a Utopias beer, which might come in handy to wash down any utopia fatigue. In a dark year, we looked for something brighter. A utopia, by definition, doesn?t exist. (The word, coined by writer Thomas Moore in 1516, is derived from Greek words meaning ?no place.?) However, the utopian impulse?the desire to work toward an idealized place?can be productive. In this incrementality, there?s s...