The boss of Sidewalk Labs, the firm's New York City firm described as an 'urban innovation' company mentioned the idea at a summit hosted by The Information.

'Thinking about a city from the Internet up is really compelling,' Sidewalk CEO Dan Doctoroff said at the event.

Later he added that building a new city could help test solutions to cybersecurity and privacy issues: 'If you could create a place, it'd be a laboratory to experiment with these problems.'

Developing a city 'would be a great idea,' he said, before quickly adding 'I can't tell you anything' in a conversation with the site's Jessica Lessin.

'Cities are hard,' he said.

'You have people with vested interest, politics, physical space...But the technology ultimately cannot be stopped.'

'A lot of people have tried it and haven't succeeded.

'Right now we're just building products and services but there are lots of lessons that can be learned from the past and we'll see what happens over time,'

The subsidiary was launched last year with a mission to develop technology that makes living and running big cities better.