Now Google is getting into the ultimate manifestation of the messy real world: cities.

The Silicon Valley giant is starting and funding an independent company dedicated to coming up with new technologies to improve urban life. ... The founders describe Sidewalk Labs as an “urban innovation company” that will pursue technologies to cut pollution, curb energy use, streamline transportation and reduce the cost of city living. To achieve that goal, Mr. Doctoroff said Sidewalk Labs planned to build technology itself, buy it and invest in partnerships.

“It’s going to evolve and we’re just starting up,” he said in an interview.

Neither Mr. Doctoroff nor Google would say how much Google intended to invest in Sidewalk Labs, but it could be sizable eventually. A model for Sidewalk Labs, they said, is Calico, a company backed by Google, established in 2013 ... While big technology companies take a “top-down approach and seek to embed themselves in a city’s infrastructure,” he said Sidewalk Labs would instead seek to develop “technology platforms that people can plug into” for things like managing energy use or altering commuting habits. He pointed to New York’s bike-sharing program as an early example of a technology-assisted innovation in transportation.

“Sidewalk will focus on improving city life for everyone by developing and incubating urban technologies to address issues like cost of living, efficient transportation and energy usage,” Page wrote.

Google is providing an undisclosed amount of funding for the startup, which falls outside Google’s main scope. In that sense, it’s like unusual Google projects that have come out of the tech giant’s Google X lab, which has previously worked on a driverless car, Google Glass, and sensor-laden contact lenses.

Page certainly sounds optimistic about this investment:

Making long-term, 10X bets like this is hard for most companies to do, but Sergey [Brin] and I have always believed that it’s important. And as more and more people around the world live, work and settle in cities, the opportunities for improving our urban environments are endless.