Alphabet's smart city project is winding down and Google will take over its products. Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff announced the news in a letter, in which he noted he is stepping down for health-related reasons. A spokesperson confirmed to Engadget that Sidewalk Labs will no longer continue as a standalone unit after the transition, though Alphabet plans to spin out Canopy Buildings as a separate company. "Starting next year, Sidewalk products Pebble, Mesa, Delve, and Affordable Electrification will join Google, becoming core to Google's urban sustainability product efforts," Doctoroff wrote. "These products will continue to be led by Sidewalk Labs President of Urban Products Prem Ramaswami and Chief Technology Officer Craig Nevill-Manning, both Google alumni, and the teams will continue to execute on their vision and serve customers."

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is promising to build a network of smart cities that won't have any cars or roads. It's called The Line, due to its arrangement of "hyper-connected future communities," and will form part of NEOM, a $500 billion project announced in October 2017. According to the prince, the development will offer "ultra-high-speed transit," autonomous vehicles and an urban layout that ensures basic facilities, such as schools and medical clinics, are never more than a five-minute walk away. "It is expected no journey will be longer than 20 minutes," the project's organizers claimed in a press release today. One million people are supposed to live inside The Line.

Hudson Yards, a $25 billion urban complex on Manhattan's west side, is the city's most ambitious development since the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. When fully complete, the 28-acre site will include 16 towers of homes and offices, a hotel, a school, the highest outdoor observation deck in the Western Hemisphere, a performing arts center, Vessel and a shopping mall. Hudson Yards in New York and Sidewalk Labs' project in Toronto are test cases that will radically change the way our cities work through the use of data and the Internet of Things. As I discussed in a previous post, the Internet of Things has evolved to encompass a range of devices, from the smallest household appliance to self-driving cars. On a larger scale, smart city developments compound the benefits of IoT by collecting and analyzing data on usage patterns to create a reciprocal relationship between residents and their communities.

Too many cities are built around cars rather than people. Sidewalk Labs, an offshoot of Google's parent company Alphabet, wants its smart neighborhood in Toronto to be different. It's considering a so-called superblock concept, modeled after Barcelona's, that bundles smaller streets together and limits vehicles to the perimeter. The smaller lanes inside each superblock would then become safer, quieter spaces for pedestrians and cyclists. Sidewalk Labs wants to go a step further, though, with real-time traffic monitoring and movable street furniture.

Newly leaked concept images have revealed the first real glimpse into Alphabet's plans for an Orwellian smart city on the Toronto waterfront. Sidewalk Labs, an offshoot of Google's parent company, reached an agreement with the city back in 2017 to develop a futuristic community known as Quayside, complete with robotic waste-sorting systems, sensor-lined pavement, digital infrastructure, and wireless 5G connectivity all throughout. The plans have sparked both concerns and curiosity from the public, fueled further by a lack of information on how it will ultimately come to fruition, aside from a series of simple sketches. The new images published by Sidewalk Labs this month and leaked by Toronto Star now reveal stunning plans for a dozen timber towers and modular pavement in the development, allowing it to evolve to the city's changing needs. Sidewalk Labs also detailed a system of underground tunnels where robots can transport waste and freight out of the public's sight.

A few are studded with bright, white lights, right in the center, which is fun. And the way the hexagons, each the size of a manhole cover, have been bunched into clusters feels natural and sensible. Surely a Fibonacci sequence is hiding somewhere in there. What's important about these shapes is what they represent to Sidewalk Labs, a sister company to Google, Waymo, and Loon. It's how the company envisions the street of the future: as a series of removable, modular, flexible pavers.

QUAYSIDE, an area of flood-prone land stretching for 12 acres (4.8 hectares) on Toronto's eastern waterfront, is home to a vast, pothole-filled parking lot, low-slung buildings and huge soyabean silos--a crumbling vestige of the area's bygone days as an industrial port. Many consider it an eyesore but for Sidewalk Labs, an "urban innovation" subsidiary of Google's parent company, Alphabet, it is an ideal location for the world's "first neighbourhood built from the internet up". Sidewalk Labs is working in partnership with Waterfront Toronto, an agency representing the federal, provincial and municipal governments that is responsible for developing the area, on a $50m project to overhaul Quayside. It aims to make it a "platform" for testing how emerging technologies might ameliorate urban problems such as pollution, traffic jams and a lack of affordable housing. Its innovations could be rolled out across an 800-acre expanse of the waterfront--an area as large as Venice.

On Toronto's waterfront, where the eastern part of the city meets Lake Ontario, is a patchwork of cement and dirt. It's home to plumbing and electrical supply shops, parking lots, winter boat storage, and a hulking silo built in 1943 to store soybeans--a relic of the area's history as a shipping port. Torontonians describe the site as blighted, underutilized, and contaminated. Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs wants to transform it into one of the world's most innovative city neighborhoods. It will, in the company's vision, be a place where driverless shuttle buses replace private cars; traffic lights track the flow of pedestrians, bicyclists, and vehicles; robots transport mail and garbage via underground tunnels; and modular buildings can be expanded to accommodate growing companies and families.

Bill Gates is set to build a new "smart city" with a population of almost 200,000 people. Belmont Partners, an investment firm run by the Microsoft co-founder has invested $80 million (£61 million) in the project, which will be "forward-thinking" and have "cutting-edge" technologies at its core. It has purchased 24,800 acres of land, which will be used for schools, housing, offices and commercial and retail space. Mr Gates' futuristic city will be built in southwestern Arizona, and will be called Belmont. It will have 80,000 residential units, says Belmont Partners, which will give it a population of around 182,000.

Google is set to build a "new kind" of high-tech neighbourhood that will be unlike anywhere else in the world. The company has revealed radical plans for the town, which will be called Quayside. It will feature flexible buildings that can be completely reconfigured at speed, and Google will even attempt to "mitigate" the weather, to encourage people to spend more time outside. It's an astonishing vision, which Google hopes to turn into "a blueprint for the 21st-century urban neighbourhood". Quayside will be built on Toronto's Eastern Waterfront, with the project being undertaken by Google subsidiary Sidewalk Labs and the Canadian government.