George Brown College to help shape the future of city building on Toronto’s waterfront

By Alexis Wise, Director, Sidewalk Labs

Sidewalk Labs recently signed a letter of intent with George Brown College, our neighbour in Toronto’s eastern waterfront and a major centre for education in innovation. We look forward to working together on community programming around digital literacy and healthy living, collaborating on construction and engineering learning opportunities, as well as exploring opportunities to continue to strengthen the Toronto innovation ecosystem.

This is an exciting partnership — one that we hope will not only deliver huge benefits for Sidewalk Labs, George Brown College, and neighbouring communities, but help advance Toronto as a world leader in working collaboratively to plan, build, and live in the next generation of cities. To understand more about George Brown’s point of view on this exciting future, I spoke with Rick Huijbregts, George Brown’s Vice President of Strategy and Innovation to get his thoughts on working with Sidewalk Labs. Rick is in charge of developing the college’s vision for 2030 and has an extensive background in smart cities and digital transformation.

Rick, what drew George Brown to this partnership?

There were several things. One is that we are both community members in the waterfront innovation district. We also admire the vision of changing the way we work, live, learn, and play through the innovation partnership that you have with Waterfront Toronto, because we also know that means a redefinition of jobs, employment, and experiences.

As an education institution and a city builder, we feel we have something to offer, but also stand a lot to gain as we deliver cutting edge forward-thinking curriculum and experiences to our students. And who would be better to do that with than our neighbour at one of our three major campuses in the City of Toronto?

What excites you most personally about the potential benefits?

For one, you are going to construct a microcosm of the city of the future, and we have a large construction and engineering school. Our students will be a part of the future of construction, construction management, and architecture. So, the potential of collaborating with you on design, on construction, on engineering, on research around it, on sharing all our collective experiences with our students is very exciting and very timely for us.

The second stream of our relationship is around community involvement. We’re a college in the neighbouring community. We have numerous partnerships with members around our campuses from the Toronto Public Library to the Toronto District School Board to community organizations, literally in our neighbourhood. We think that working together on big priorities like digital literacy, digital fluency, business transformation, urban innovation and solving urban challenges together for the purpose of building community, are strongly aligned with your goals.

Building healthier cities and healthier communities is a major focus of my work. How do you see that fitting in with the college’s interests?

Your interest in developing a community kitchen and doing more in healthy living and wellness is a natural fit with us. We are one of the largest and one of the most well-known culinary schools. We have incredible programming, the best faculty out there, industry partnerships that reach far and wide and we’re literally a stone’s throw away from your development in Quayside. All the right ingredients to build a strong collaboration in pursuit of building healthier communities.

When you speak with students and faculty about this partnership, what resonates with them?

Part of it is thought leadership, what Sidewalk brings to the table from your global experiences. I think our faculty and our students will benefit from that. In reverse, we have incredible faculty and bright students from all over the world coming to the college. So hopefully this is a two-way street where we can collaboratively reimagine the future of city building and solving urban challenges.

We also think when you start to move into your next phases and actually start to develop your acreage, you’re going to need people to do a lot of the work. Thinking about our student population, from our social workers to our construction students, people in our design program and our culinary arts — this is a huge and immense opportunity for them to get experiential learning opportunities.

We can then also allow our students to be part of the research around all this. This is real-time, real-life problem solving about urban issues that need to be addressed. This is an opportunity to expose our students and our faculty to this kind of work. They can learn things in the classroom and effectively walk outside to our partner Sidewalk Labs in their neighbourhood and see how these things come to fruition.

Alexis Wise is a Director for Sidewalk Labs, based in Toronto.