In April 2016, The Information reported that Sidewalk intended to create a new city in the United States to test design ideas prior to real world implementation. Sidewalk did not confirm that report, but has said it had engaged in thought experiments about what it could be like to develop a community "from the internet up." In October 2017, Sidewalk Labs announced plans to develop Quayside, a 12-acre neighborhood in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in response to a competition organized by Waterfront Toronto. Branded as Sidewalk Toronto, the project aims to become "a testbed for emerging technologies, materials and processes" to address issues such as sustainability, accessibility, inclusiveness and prosperity in urban communities. The initiative is also envisioned to be scaled up across Toronto's Port Lands, an 800-acre area that is one of the largest areas of underdeveloped urban land in North America. In 2019, Sidewalk Labs said it had consulted thousands of Torontonians for its development plans. However, representatives of Waterfront Toronto’s Digital Strategy Advisory Panel said that Sidewalk Labs's projects contained too much "tech for tech's sake." In May 2020, the project was abandoned due to the economic uncertainty posed by the COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak.
At March 17, 2016,Sidewalk is also working with the U.S. Department of Transportation to assess road data gathered from smartphones to analyze congestion and other traffic conditions, and develop a transportation coordination platform to improve the efficiency of road, parking, and transit use.
Investments and portfolio companies
Sidewalk Labs invests in and incubates companies to develop tools that can support Sidewalk Toronto and scale to other cities around the world.
Intersection and Link
In June 2015, Sidewalk Labs led a group of investors in the acquisition of Control Group and Titan forming a new company called Intersection. Intersection works in cities and public spaces to offer internet connectivity, information, and content.
Coord
In 2018, Sidewalk Labs introduced spin-off Coord, a company focused on providing RESTful APIs for accessing information like routing, bike share details, toll information, and curbside details. In October 2018, Coord raised an additional $5 million to continue building products.
''The Yellow Book''
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. 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, continuously track the current and past locations of all members of the community, and to help redesign of the local criminal justice system. The book also describes a social credit system to manipulate human behavior similar to the one used in China, but unlike the Chinese system, Sidewalk's proposed system includes rewards for sharing personal data. The book also includes the potential real estate profitability of such investments, containing theoretical proposals for communities in Detroit, Denver, and Alameda, California.
