Smart Ethics for Smart Cities: Learning from Quayside

In the bustling council chambers of Toronto’s City Hall, a senior policy advisor prepared to address an urgent committee meeting. The topic was the city’s potential adoption of data-driven technologies as part of the broader Quayside project on Toronto’s eastern waterfront. The initiative aimed to transform the area into a high-tech urban environment by integrating digital infrastructure and sensor-enabled systems into urban design and management, with the stated goal of improving mobility, environmental sustainability and the functioning of city services through data-informed decision making.

Toronto was now faced with a central governance dilemma: whether the city administration should proceed with an ambitious smart city project in the absence of a clear, publicly legitimate framework for governing the vast amounts of data that would be generated in public space, or whether the city should slow, restructure or even suspend the project until such a framework would be in place. While proponents emphasized the project’s potential to improve urban efficiency, sustainability and quality of life, critics increasingly questioned who would control the data produced by residents, visitors and urban infrastructure — and in whose interests that data would be governed.