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Google's parent company is spending $50 million to build a high-tech neighborhood in Toronto

Google Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs says that it will build a 12-acre Toronto waterfront neighborhood, its first large-scale experiment in urban design.

Called Quayside, the neighborhood's plan will prioritize "environmental sustainability, affordability, mobility, and economic opportunity," according to Sidewalk Labs. The city of Toronto and Sidewalk Labs call the project " target="_blank"Sidewalk Toronto."

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Sidewalk Labs has committed $50 million to the project's first phase, though

Though details of the plan are still unclear, Doctoroff, a former New York City deputy mayor, has hinted at what the company would like to see in a city. He has spokenabout how self-driving cars, embedded sensors that track energy usage, machine learning, and high-speed internet could improve urban environments.

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"I like to describe it that we’re in the very early stages of what I call the fourth revolution of urban technology," Doctoroff previously told Business Insider.

"The first three were the steam engine, which brought through trains and factories that industrialized cities. The second was the electric grid, which made cities 24 hours, made them more vertical, made them easier to get around in with subways and streetcars. The third was the automobile, which forced us to really re-think the use of public space in order to protect people from the danger of the automobile. We’re now in the fourth one. We’ve had an urban technology revolution … We’re seeing a real change in the physical nature of our cities."

Sidewalk, founded in 2015 by Doctoroff and has been lookingOne of its earliest andmost visible smart-city effortswas replacing phone booths withpublic WiFi kiosks in Manhattan.

Like Doctoroff, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at the conference that he expects Quayside to be a model for other cities around the world.

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Ariel Schwartz contributed to this story.

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