Our Right to Quayside

Toronto, Canada

By Gillian Chisholm
campaign, affordability, urban planning, development

The Our Right to Quayside site is a webpage built for the ORTQ campaign to address the incompetencies of the Quayside development in Toronto.

The neighborhood under investigation is named Quayside, and has become the most high-profile and contested development project in Toronto’s near future. The Quayside land is located in one of the most sought after areas in the city, situated along Lake Ontario and directly adjacent to the city’s downtown core. The development for Quayside is being spearheaded by a quasi-governmental agency named Waterfront Toronto, who has agreed to partner with Sidewalk Labs - a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc and a sister company to Google - as their innovation and planning partner. This project has faced a number of controversies since it was announced in October 2017, including 4 resignations due to discontent toward the dynamic of the partnership between the two companies and disagreements toward how the data collected through Sidewalks tech implementations will be dealt with as well. The CEO of Waterfront Toronto was also asked to step down, and there were three firings of Waterfront Toronto board members in December as well. There was also one leaked document about  sidewalk Labs plan to further expand into a new area of the city to scale up their work which was not something that was public knowledge, or desired by residents as well. These are just a few of the red flags that highlight the issues with this project as it has progressed.

So, after a long investigation into the extensive and ongoing timeline of this partnership, one that has continuously been marketed as a plan to extend Waterfront Toronto’s ongoing vision of inclusion and access to Toronto’s waterfront, I have come to understand that this project is not that at all. Quayside is the first project by Waterfront Toronto that fully diverges itself from the values and goals established by and for the company. This is not an “access to the waterfront” project. This is a project with underlying and hidden objectives, which can be seen by Sidewalk’s inability to budge on data measures, their desire to expand into the Portlands and control the areas fate, and the lack of a plan to link the Quayside land with the rest of the existing city.

So as a way to be actionable with my research and fight back against the powers that be, I developed a campaign called Our Right to Quayside with the mission of halting the progression of the quayside project so that :

  1. Reconsiderations in the housing plan can be made, including providing a significant increase in amount of affordable housing in the neighborhood and getting Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs to provide information on how these units will be subsidized and remain permanently affordable 

  2. Waterfront Toronto can establish assurances to ensure that Sidewalk Labs does not gain control of the waterfront’s fate by eliminating the opportunity for the company to govern the neighborhood, and ensure the Portlands fate is in the hands of waterfront Toronto and the government 
 The information for this campaign will be housed on a web platform, as seen here:

The map on the homepage allows visitors to the website to orient themselves in the city in relation to this project, and shows neighbourhood boundaries and areas with most rapidly changing rents in the city as well, which have risen along the waterfront substantially as a result of revitalization projects like this in the past.

There will be ongoing blog posts uploaded to inform residents about the ongoing revelations made about the project, which can be found on the Our Right to Quayside blog tab as seen here:

The currently posted blogs are about governance and power on the waterfront, extraction and housing in Toronto. The blogs look like so:

In addition, there is a call to action page on the website, which invites visitors to the site to sign a petition to halt the project, and is a place where people can download and disseminate posters and information as well.

I think a campaign is a very timely mode for action in this case because the Quayside project is at a point where the campaign can still create change. A campaign is useful because it is dynamic, allowing the opportunity for adaptations to the mission of Our Right to Quayside as new information comes to light. It also allows me to take immediate action against the project and invites others to participate in that action as well, and it’s an open form of action and collaboration, so anyone can join and participate in the work.

Feel free to sign the petition, leave a comment about the site and work being done, and read the blog posts to learn about the situation Toronto is in currently!