By Eliot Brown
Google parent Alphabet Inc. has legions of web developers. Soon
it might be in need of real-estate developers.
In coming weeks, top executives at the Mountain View, Calif.,
technology giant are set to weigh a pitch from Alphabet's urban
technology-focused subsidiary, Sidewalk Labs, on a plan to delve
into an ambitious new arena: city building.
According to people familiar with Sidewalk's plans, the division
of Alphabet is putting the final touches on a proposal to get into
the business of developing giant new districts of housing, offices
and retail within existing cities.
The company would seek cities with large swaths of land they
want redeveloped -- likely economically struggling municipalities
grappling with decay -- perhaps through a bidding process, the
people said. Sidewalk would partner with one or more of those
cities to build up the districts, which are envisioned to hold tens
of thousands of residents and employees, and to be heavily
integrated with technology.
The aim is to create proving grounds for cities of the future,
providing a demonstration area for ideas ranging from self-driving
cars to more efficient infrastructure for electricity and water
delivery, these people said.
Details on the effort, which was reported earlier this month by
the technology news website the Information, are scant. Most
important, it is unclear who would cover the cost of such an
endeavor -- tens of billions of dollars -- since large-scale
development typically requires buy-in by third-party investors over
a period of years or decades.
But one key element is that Sidewalk would be seeking autonomy
from many city regulations, so it could build without constraints
that come with things like parking or street design or utilities,
the people said.
If Alphabet greenlights the project, it would be in the same
category of unlikely-but-promising moon-shot investments as its
self-driving car division.
Sidewalk was formed last year, the brainchild of Alphabet Chief
Executive Larry Page and Sidewalk CEO Daniel Doctoroff, New York
City's economic development czar during the first six years of the
administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. There Mr. Doctoroff was
known for a technocratic approach to government and large ambitions
for development, many of which involved converting formerly
industrial parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn into neighborhoods where
office and apartment towers have sprouted like mushrooms in the
past decade.
Mr. Doctoroff went on to run Mr. Bloomberg's media company,
Bloomberg LP, and last year started Sidewalk, describing it as a
company that would use technology to help transform cities.
In recent months, Mr. Doctoroff and a flock of consultants and
staff, including several of his former deputies at City Hall, have
been racing to put together their game plan for the city-building
initiative, people who have spoken to Mr. Doctoroff said.
He hinted at his ambitions in a February speech at New York
University.
"What would you do if you could actually create a city from
scratch," he said. "How would you think about the technological
foundations?"
Past efforts to build "smart" cities or districts integrated
with technology have failed, he said, because typically urban
planners and tech executives don't understand each other.
"That is why the combination of Google, which focuses on the
technology, and, me, who focuses on quality of life, urbanity,
etc., we think is a relatively unique combination," he said.
One challenge the company would face would be that the history
of city-building and large-scale urban development projects is full
of failures and disappointments. Cities built from scratch, like
Brasília or Canberra, Australia, are viewed as antiseptic and
without the vibrancy of more organic cities.
"You can build a city from scratch and you can copy and emulate
the great qualities of cities," said Glen Kuecker, a history
professor at DePauw University who has studied the Songdo City
district near Seoul and other smart cities. "It's still a very
artificial and sterile place."
Large-scale development projects within cities, too, are often
marked by frequent delay and failure. Battery Park City, a
development in lower Manhattan, took four decades and a
near-bankruptcy to be completed, as did the Playa Vista district of
Los Angeles, north of the airport.
This is because developers aren't only facing swings of the
market, but also of political dynamics that change frequently.
"You've got political barriers, you've got economic barriers,
sometimes you've got environmental barriers," said Eugenie Birch, a
city planning professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Mr. Doctoroff ran into many of these headwinds in his tenure in
New York, where he gathered together countless ideas that had been
collecting dust on planners' shelves and tried to put them into
action.
"He dares to dream big -- he's always pushing to do the next big
thing," said Robert Lieber, who worked under Mr. Doctoroff in New
York City government before succeeding him as deputy mayor.
Many of these ideas were successful, including his rezoning of
Manhattan's far West Side, which today is becoming an office
district serviced by a brand new subway extension, as well as
multiple rezonings in Brooklyn that have spurred thousands of units
of new housing.
One of his weaknesses, people who know him say, was legislative
politics, at least in New York State government. His two
highest-profile plans -- a stadium for the city's 2012 bid for the
Olympic Games and a congestion-pricing charge on drivers in
Manhattan -- were both defeated by the state legislature.
Write to Eliot Brown at eliot.brown@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 26, 2016 12:44 ET (16:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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