Katana VentraIP

Sidewalk Labs

Sidewalk Labs LLC[1] is an urban planning and infrastructure subsidiary of Google. Its stated goal is to improve urban infrastructure through technological solutions, and tackle issues such as cost of living, efficient transportation and energy usage.[2][3] The company was headed by Daniel L. Doctoroff, former Deputy Mayor of New York City for economic development and former chief executive of Bloomberg L.P.[4] until 2021. Other notable employees include Craig Nevill-Manning, co-founder of Google's New York office and inventor of Froogle, and Rohit Aggarwala, who served as chief policy officer of the company and is now Commissioner of New York City Department of Environmental Protection.[5][6] It was originally part of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, before being absorbed into Google in 2022 following Doctoroff's departure from the company due to a suspected ALS diagnosis.[7]

Company type

Subsidiary

Urban planning, infrastructure

June 10, 2015 (2015-06-10)

New York, NY, U.S.

sidewalklabs.com

Mana Wynwood — a 23.5–acre project in that will serve as a trade center between Latin America and China and an arts and entertainment center

Miami

Downtown — a 300–acre mixed-use development with minimalized parking in Las Vegas

Summerlin

The Power Station — a 29–acre mixed-use residential community on the waterfront in at the site of a former electrical plant

San Francisco

Vancouver Innovation Center — conversion of a 180–acre industrial manufacturing site into a mixed-use residential and commercial community in the area

Portland/Vancouver

Mesa, launched in September 2020, is a tool to help commercial buildings use energy more efficiently.

[25]

The Yellow Book[edit]

Sidewalk Labs provides a coffee table book to employees known as The Yellow Book, which contains aspirational designs of a futurist city run on its technology.[43] In the book, the company proposes expanding its scope to include the power to levy taxes, control public services such as schools, roads, and public transportation, collect data on the current and past locations of all members of the community, and to help redesign the local criminal justice system. The book also describes a social credit system to reward "good behavior", a system which has been compared by some to the one used in China. Sidewalk's proposed system also included rewards for sharing personal data.[44]


The book also includes the potential real estate profitability of such investments, containing theoretical proposals for communities in Detroit, Denver, and Alameda, California. The company has described this book as a "wide-ranging brainstorming process", and stated that most of its ideas were never considered for the Toronto project.[44]

Official website