Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has its fingers in many pies – but, in its mission to bring technological enhancements to urban areas, could it even build an entire city from scratch?
Dan Doctoroff, the CEO of Alphabet subsidiary Sidewalk Labs, has hinted that it indeed could, reports Business Insider. He was speaking earlier today at a New York summit where Jessica Lessin – the editor in chief of The Information, the summit’s host – publicly revealed that she had heard of consultants being hired by Sidewalk to look into building a city from the ground up.
Doctoroff responded that making a city in this way “would be a great idea”, though he cautioned that “I can’t tell you anything.” He was more forthcoming about the benefits, as he enthused that such a project could assist Sidewalk in rethinking social policy and data-driven management.
He said that a specially-built city could serve as “a laboratory to experiment”. However, he also tempered expectations, noting that “cities are hard”. He observed: “You have people with vested interest, politics, physical space… But the technology ultimately cannot be stopped.”
