creating a new spatial grammar for the networked age

In the interest of furthering the discussion of what the networked city actually is, I am posting a short text I wrote recently. It is a little heavy on the academic/geographic jargon which I apologize for, but that was the audience I wrote the piece for. The sources for the in-text citations can be found at the bottom of the essay. Additionally, I would consider the essays and books cited at the bottom an excellent entry point for anyone interested in studying the geographies of the networked city. You will notice pretty quickly that there is not much traditional geography in the list; I pull from many directions and I think that doing so is a necessity for anyone studying the complexities of our contemporary moment.

A New Spatial Grammar

The world’s population is predominantly urban (UNPF 2007). The cities holding these billions of people fit no common mold. Part of recognizing and studying these new landscapes is the need for what Colin McFarlane (2011a) calls a “new spatial grammar”. As digital, pervasive computing technologies become commonplace and spread into the everyday landscape, a new spatial grammar is emerging obliquely out of computer science terms such as ‘open source’, ‘hacking’ and ‘ubiquitous computing’. Architectural historian Kazys Varnelis calls for urbanists to hack the city (Varnelis 2008, 16), to create interventions in the landscape rather than plans, and to revision the city through the many complex assemblages of culture, nature, and technologies that make up cities today. Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell (2011) bring the everyday, mobile and wireless personal and urban, ubiquitous computing technologies into the urban landscape. Saskia Sassen, acting as a public intellectual more than a political economist, calls for an ‘open source urbanism’ (2011a) and for ‘talking back to our intelligent city’ (2011b) as ways to counter the discourse coming from private information technology providers such as IBM and Cisco on the responsive ubiquitous networks embedded in the landscape.
Conceptualizing the geography of contemporary cities to include the overlay of pervasive computing connectivity necessitates bringing new terms into geography. Here are three key terms to my research:

Ubiquitous computing:
Emerging out of information science, ubiquitous computing describes the the technological overlay of everyday life. As digital technologies become so small they are essentially invisible, and as these computing technologies can communicate with each other and between individuals wirelessly, the systems become invisible (Bell and Dourish 2011; Greenfield 2006). A common example today is the mobile phone (Greenfield and Shepard 2007). The invisibility and the near-universal adoption of devices such as mobile phones is the becoming everydayness of digital technologies. The systems disappear into the landscape, in a similar way to other networked systems such as water or transportation, becoming taken-for-granted. While ubiquitous computing has typically focused on the user experience and its impact in urban spaces, there is also a significant infrastructural component to providing and maintaining these systems. Ubiquitous computing systems do not spontaneously generate, just as water does not inherently flow out of the tap. There is a spatialization to how ubiquitous technologies are used in the urban landscape, and there are spatial ramifications to how these systems are embedded in the landscape (Shepard 2001).

The geographic utility of ubiquitous computing is that this everyday overlay of digital responsiveness impacts urban spaces both through the opening up or the foreclosing of action in public space—and private or semi-private space—through the locational information received on a smartphone, or the blanketing presence of security cameras limiting the ability of a group to comfortably gather in a public park (Crang and Graham 2007). This is the ‘above ground’, individualized utility, either beneficial or repressive, of ubiquitous computing technologies, but for this always-present responsiveness to exist requires a significant amount of networked information and communication technology infrastructure, communicating across systems and across platforms. Similarly to water or electrical infrastructure systems, these digital infrastructure (Zimmerman and Horan 2004) systems have a small but noticeable impact on the urban landscape as well today, but as Saskia Sassen points out, opening up these systems visually could be a means to bring the relationships between city and citizen to the surface, to highlight how these relatively invisible technologies impact our individual and collective experiences (Sassen 2011a; 2011b). Additionally, the responsiveness—the instantaneous communicative potential—of ubiquitous computing could enable this visualizing of the flows of the modern city that Sassen speaks of. Politicizing these infrastructures locates these ubiquitous systems in the public sphere and not behind the closed doors of city hall and in the programming of private, corporate technology providers such as Cisco or IBM. These ubiquitous things, to paraphrase Bruno Latour, are a networked actor in performing public life, and their role in mediating social and spatial exchanges should be noted (Latour 2005a; 2005b).

Networked city:
The networked city is embedded with responsive, communicative ubiquitous computing capacity. The networked city is an urban form based primarily around the service industry/information economy, but also encompassing other, more traditional urban economic activities (Castells 2000; Graham and Marvin 2001). This city may still have industrial outputs, but the core economic activity is based around creative (in the largest sense), digital production. Consequently, information and communication technologies linking inter-urban and intra-urban networks together and between other nodes both near and far in the information economy are central to the socio-economic output (Mitchell 2003). The networked city is the above-ground, visual representation of the flows of the networked infrastructures that underlie the urban fabric (Graham 2002). It is important to note that the networked city is built on and around the modern, industrial city and the post-modern suburban sprawl. The networked city prioritizes flows of information, but supported by flows of modern infrastructural networks—water, electricity, and gas, and transportation (Kaika and Swyngedeouw 2000).

Architectural scholar Kazys Varnelis considers the networked city as more than a singular urban are, instead considering the megalopolitan sprawl of, for instance, the greater Northeast or Southern California as the contemporary networked city (Varnelis 2011). The on-the-ground condition of the networked city can be considered one of splintering urbanism (Graham and Marvin 2001), of glocal disconnect and zones of premium network provision, where the modern ideal of universal infrastructure provision has failed and certain areas of a city are left to crumble into ghettos, post-industrial brownfields, and other areas of general and particular neglect, while other areas, such as central business districts, edgeland office parks, corporate entertainment or heritage zones, airports, and other globally repeatable spatial products (Easterling 2005) are hyper-connected to each other, but disconnected from the particular city as a whole. Infrastructure networks in a landscape of splintering urbanism no longer—if they ever did to begin with (Coutard 2002)—exist to provide a unified urban ideal based on collective progress, but instead today provide individualized benefit at the expense of the city as a whole. 

Assemblage:
Assemblage scholarship, as a geographic application of Actor-Network Theory, offers a means to study the spaces through which human and non-human actors, and the connecting, mediating networks, interact (Amin and Thrift 2002; Farias and Bender 2010; Latour and Hermant 2006; McFarlane 2011b). Assemblage scholarship includes the spaces through which the networks flow directly, not just as a background element to the relationships being charted. Infrastructure in the contemporary landscape is a product of the social as well as a conduit through which the social is constituted (Easterling 2011; Star 1999; Star 2002). It is possible to consider the various systems bundled together as ubiquitous computing as unique networked ecologies, and to map out how these systems interface with each other and with the city at large. Ubiquitous computing, as the spatialization and spread of everyday digital technologies into the landscape, and the networked information technology infrastructural systems that connect these communicative devices, defies place-bounded analysis. As these ubiquitous systems redefine proximity and distance for the user, they re-inscribe the landscape through instanteous connectivity. Associations between disconnected spaces are made through these pervasive communication networks. Assemblage scholarship is a means to trace these networks across space, through and between the various networked ecologies of the contemporary landscape, ecologies that may or may not be spatially proximate, but are still joined.

An example of assembling the landscape of the networked city is found in the term ‘networked ecologies’ (Varnelis 2008). Although the term has yet to gain widespread recognition in geographic scholarship, I find it a useful term to contain the natural and cultural worlds and the many infrastructural systems that network many things together. Networked ecologies are the meshwork of human and technological, built and natural environments that constitute cities today. Infrastructural networks interface between the various networked ecologies across time and space. For instance, a water supply as a natural ecology may pass from one watershed to another to provide a city with this vital element, connecting two disparate locations. Or, a telecommunications system, localized in one city links that place with every other connected place in the world, through a complex weave of fiber-optic cables, satellites and satellite base stations, data centers, co-location points, and mobile phone antenna. This connectivity is not organic, it is actively built and maintained, but at the same time, it is not spatially separate from the rest of a city. It is placed in real places, not just in the end-user’s device such as a mobile phone. No place is solely human or completely natural; this condition is amplified exponentially in urban settings. The spaces of a contemporary city are assembled through flows of natural systems such as water through infrastructures that are enmeshed with other infrastructural systems creating many layers that then interact with local iterations of human and other urban animals’ habitations, as well as with political regulations and cultural values. This call and response between the near and the far, the human and the technological, material and digital flows and the embedded groundedness of physical infrastructure, underlies the cultural activities and economic products that are typically foregrounded as the prominent, visible face of a city.

Sources:

Amin, A., and N. Thrift. 2002. Cities: Reimagining the Urban 1st ed. Malden, MA: Polity/Blackwell.

Castells, M. 2000. The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Volume I 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Coutard, O. 2002. “Premium Network Spaces”: A Comment. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26 (March):166-174.

Crang, M., and S. Graham. 2007. Sentient Cities: Ambient intelligence and the politics of urban space. Information, Communication & Society 10 (6):789-817.

Dourish, P., and G. Bell. 2011. Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing. The MIT Press.

Easterling, K. 2005. Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Instituet of Technology.

Easterling, K. 2011. Fresh Field. In Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism, eds. N. Bhatia et al. New York City: Princeton Architectural Press.

Farias, I., and T. Bender eds. 2010. Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. London ; New York: Routledge.
Galloway, A. 2004. Intimations of everyday life: Ubiquitous computing and the city. Cultural Studies 18 (2-3):384–408.

Graham, S. 2002. Flow City: Networked Mobilities and the Contemporary Metropolis. Journal of Urban Technology 9 (1):1-20.

Graham, S., and S. Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. New York: Routledge.

Greenfield, A. 2006. Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Berkeley: New Riders Publishing.

Greenfield, A., and M. Shepard. 2007. Situated Technologies Phamplets 1: Urban Computing and its Discontents. New York City: The Architectural League of New York.

Kaika, M., and E. Swyngedouw. 2000. Fetishizing the Modern City: The Phantasmagoria of Urban Technological Networks. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24.

Latour, B. 2005a. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York City: Oxford University Press.

Latour, B. 2005b. From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public. In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, eds. B. Latour and P. Weibel, 14 - 43. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

Latour, B. and Hermant, E. (2006 [1998]) Paris: Invisible City, trans. L. Carey-Libbrecht. Available at: http:// www.bruno-latour.fr/livres/viii_paris-city-gb.pdf

Law, J., and J. Urry. 2001. Enacting the social. Economy and Society 33 (3):390-410.

Mitchell, W. J. 2003. Me++:  The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

McFarlane, C. 2011a. Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

McFarlane, C. 2011. Assemblage and critical urbanism. City 15 (2):204-224.

Sassen, S. 2011a. Open Source Urbanism. Domus. http://www.domusweb.it/en/op-ed/open-source-urbanism/ (last accessed 15 November 2011).

Sassen, S. 2011b. Talking back to your intelligent city. http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/cities/talking-back-to-your-intelligent-city (last accessed 15 November 2011).

Shepard, M. (ed.). 2011. Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space. 2011. Cambridge, MA: The Architectural League of New York and MIT Press.

Star, S. L. 1999. The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist 43 (3):377-391.

Star, S. L. 2002. Infrastructure and ethnographic practice Working on the fringes. Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems 14 (2):107-122.

UNPF (United Nations Population Fund). 2007. State of the World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth, http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2007/ presskit/pdf/sowp2007_eng.pdf (accessed 30 October 2011).

Varnelis, K. 2008. Introduction: Networked Ecologies. In The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, ed. Varnelis, Kazys. Barcelona: Actar.

Varnelis, K. 2011. A Manifesto for Looseness. http://vimeo.com/33423863 (last accessed 11 December 2011).

Zimmerman, R., and T. A. Horan. 2004. Digital infrastructures: enabling civil and environmental systems through information technology. Routledge.

the networked city and geographic blogging projects

An AT&T cellular antenna bordering the Hawthorne Cultural Center's playground on one side and a residential neighborhood on the other at South 13th St. and Carpenter St. in South Philadelphia.

Everyday Structures was recently mentioned on Mammoth, an architecture/landscape/infrastructure blog that I would consider a a key contributor to the emerging dialogue that seeks to examine anew our networked, crowded, polluted, amazing and always-changing landscape. I wanted to acknowledge how rewarding it is to receive mention from a blog I have followed for the last few years, and to address some of the points raised in Mammoth's post about this blog.

Rob Holmes writes at Mammoth:

In a recent conversation with a couple other landscape architects, I noted that I think geographers are, in many ways, doing a better job of conceptualizing landscape than landscape architects, particularly with relation to infrastructural conditions in the networked city — Wiig’s blog is an excellent example of that.

This is an on point observation because one of the reasons I started this blog was to address these issues. The sphere of architecture blogging that has become prominent, such as Bldgblog, City of Sound, Mammoth itself, Kazys Varnelis's blog, Pruned, Infranet Lab and even newer additions such as Urban Omnibus and Polis come more from an architecture and design focus. This is in no way a bad way to approach the contemporary landscape, but there are other ways to do so. My interest has been in the relationships that emerge when you mix together old and new spaces, and more-so, in the spaces of the infrastructural systems that support our contemporary, networked landscape. There are some people doing similar work that I really enjoy, such as Friends of the Pleistocene and Necessity for Ruins, and even a Geography professor blogging at Cosmopolis, Matthew Gandy, whose work has been instrumental to my scholarship (I also need to mention the Center for Land Use Interpretation as a key contributor to my way of seeing infrastructure and the networked city). But there is always room for new voices as well as the need for geographic investigations to step away from the traditional means of publishing in academic journals. I see the geography of the networked city as one where proximity and distance are mediated through wireless, ubiquitous technological devices such as mobile phones, where space is interspersed with hertzian flows of communicative information that may be invisible to the human eye, but are still locatable in the infrastructural components that produce and maintain these flows.

The geography of the networked city is at base its infrastructure--the systems that maintain the flows of people, goods, and information across a constantly shifting landscape, what Kazys Varnelis termed the 'networked ecologies' of our cities. Varnelis defines 'networked ecologies as:

a series of codependent systems of environmental mitigation, land-use organization, communication and service delivery…[These infrastructures] are networked, hypercomplex systems produced by technology, laws, political pressures, disciplinary desires, environmental constraints and a myriad other pressures, tied together with feedback mechanisms. Networked ecologies embody the dominant form of organization today, the network, but these networks can be telematic, physical, or even social. (from the introduction to The Infrastructural City, page 15)   

Mammoth organized and contributed to a bloggers' reading group based around the most complete guide to the networked city thus far: The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, which Varnelis edited. As Rob Holmes points out above, Everyday Structures is an attempt to continue this investigation into the landscape of the networked city, into the mix of natural and cultural, infrastructural backgrounds and the foregrounded built environment of cities today.

The Infrastructural City is an overview that leaves open the need to continue these discussions, as well to add to the subjects covered. There are many new geographies emerging out of (or into?) the networked city, relationships layered among industrial technologies of the modern city, the suburban and rural spaces scattered about, and the natural environment that still underlies everything else, even in the networked city. With the holiday lull between semesters in effect right now, I will get back on track with this blog. I have the time to devote to putting together more writing and photography, to continue tracing the spaces and places that make up the networked city today.

orange tubing, underground

In SEPTA's Juniper Station the other night, waiting for the trolley to West Philadelphia, I noticed the horizontal orange conduit at the top of the photograph running along the ceiling, in contrast to the dark green and dirty light grey of the rest of the wall. I would bet that the orange tubing houses some fiber optic cable, running between buildings above ground, but through the public transit tunnel underneath. On the other hand, the cable might connect to the cellular antenna that provide mobile connectivity in the station, or it work in both scenarios.

the geologic city at work

Asphalt folding and flowing around a taxicab's tires. Midtown Manhattan, early fall 2011.

For those who have not yet picked up a copy of the Friends of the Pleistocene's Geologic City: a Field Guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York, I strongly encourage you to do so. The guide delves into the geologic underpinnings of New York City, from the Chilean origins of the rock salt that is spread on the city's streets every winter to the Indiana limestone that clads many of the city's iconic buildings. Geologic City is a small book that has the ability to radically change how we see urban places, to situate the flows of human and natural elements at various speeds from the speed of light or the speed of sound, to the flow of water or the erosion of stone, among the cultural and economic exchanges that are more commonly foregrounded as the work of a city such as New York City. My favorite part of the book is the inspiration it offers to conduct similar explorations of other places. While I would enjoy seeing another North American city treated in a similar fashion, it would be great to see this approach applied, for instance, to an African city or an Asian one.

suburban despair...?

Near the Cracker Barrel alongside the Cross County Trail heading into Plymouth Meeting, PA.

Living in Philadelphia without a automobile of my own, I rarely head into the suburban fringe ringing the city except on bicycle rides. The Schuylkill River Trail runs upriver past Valley Forge, at some point in the next few years heading all the way to Reading. The Cross County Trail winds its way north away from the Schuylkill into Plymouth Meeting, through a wetland, past a power plant with a tall smokestack, then quickly into the morass of lightly-planned strip malls, corporate chain stores, and other indicators of upper middle class living in the United States.

What I enjoy about heading out to this area is how visible the infrastructural networks are. There are high voltage electricity lines parading across the fields, and this stormwater management system adjacent to the Cracker Barrel's parking lot is nicely designed and well-maintained. The stormwater retention pond looks almost natural; the willows and other foliage are healthy and doing their job keeping the soil in place through their root structures. 

But that bright red shopping cart, what is it doing keeled over in six inches of water? Did it wash down in the last storm, or was it thrown down from above, the victim of some minor theft? Regardless, the red shopping cart from one of the nearby box stores provides some welcome color into this late fall scene, exposing how this almost-natural-looking landscape is the product of human intervention, down to the abandoned shopping cart laying on its side in the pond.

 

warning: underground cable

A utility pole in Lincoln Park, Chicago. In the alley behind Big Apple Finer Foods. I always enjoy seeing the different fonts and symbols AT&T and the other telecommunications providers use, and how the designs change over time. These white stickers seem to have replaced bright orange ones.

old and discarded, old and restored and for sale

Televisions. Manhattan. October 2011.

Typewriters. Philadelphia. October 11. Neither of these devices were produced to connect to the Internet. The typewriters don't even have a screen, let alone a touchscreen. With as much time as I spend on various computing devices--primarily a laptop, a desktop, and a mobile phone--it is difficult to consider typing on a typewriter or consuming popular culture from a television and not through online sources. And both of these technologies are not even that ancient; the typewriters will certainly still function when all of my current computers have ceased working.

 

brown pipe

along the Schuylkill River. This tube will soon hold up a traffic sign.

portable cellular antenna site in the redwoods

Between Porter College and Kresge College, University of California, Santa Cruz, June 2010.

Peter Sloterdijk, data centers and the spaces of networked, psychedelic capitalism

What was 365 Main's Oakland data center near Jack London Square, now owned by Digital Realty Trust. 2nd St. and Brush St., Oakland in January 2010. (photo by author; map here).

Peter Sloterdijk: In your exploration of the "architectures of foam," you write that modernity renders the issue of residence explicit. What do you mean by that? 

Peter Sloterdijk: Here I am developing an idea that Walter Benjamin addressed in his Arcades Project. He starts from the anthropological assumption that people in all epochs dedicate themselves to creating interiors, and at the same time he seeks to emancipate this motif from its apparent timelessness. He therefore asks the question: How does capitalist man in the 19th century express his need for an interior? The answer is: He uses the most cutting-edge technology in order to orchestrate the most archaic of all needs, the need to immunize existence by constructing protective islands. In the case of the arcade, modern man opts for glass, wrought iron, and assembly of prefabricated parts in order to build the largest possible interior. For this reason, Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, erected in London in 1851, is the paradigmatic building. It forms the first hyper-interior that offers a perfect expression of the spatial idea of psychedelic capitalism. It is the prototype of all later theme-park interiors and event architectures. The arcade heralds the abolition of the outside world. It abolishes outdoor markets and brings them indoors, into a closed sphere. The antagonistic spatial types of salon and market meld here to form a hybrid. This is what Benjamin found so theoretically exciting: The 19th-century citizen seeks to expand his living room into a cosmos and at the same time to impress the dogmatic form of a room on the universe. This sparks a trend that is perfected in the 20th-century apartment design as well as in shopping-mall and sports-stadium design-there are the three paradigms of modern construction, that is, the construction of micro-interiors and macro-interiors. (p. 128)*

///

Sloterdijk identifies the place in the middle of the 18th-century where capitalist society embedded itself even more into the urban fabric. This "psychedelic capitalism" identified itself through an exhibition space that would twist and morph into the generic, everyday shopping mall--before that mall became so bland to be unseen and thus naturalized in the landscape as the place where shopping happens, the type of building had to be created.

If the Crystal Palace transformed society, as a space that moved social and economic relations inside, is there a subsequent contemporary example that has equally transformed our networked society? Is it still the shopping mall, or could it be a data center? Data centers house the Net, hosting websites, storing email, and the like. They do not provide interior spaces for individuals to shop or socialize, but they do organize and produce the flows of information around which society, to a large extent these days, functions. The shopping mall now competes with online retailers, the salon where people would gather to socialize now competes-and has probably lost-to online social media such as Facebook. But the design of the data center is in no way celebrated and is rarely even acknowledged in the urban landscape in the way Sloterdijk talks of the Crystal Palace. As is evident in the picture above of a data center near downtown Oakland, the design seems intended to reinforce the secure, citadel-like, veiled anonymity of the building and, consequently, the activities that go on inside. There is little in the way of hyper-interiors in a data center. The interior space they produce is located on the computer's monitor or the smartphone's touchscreen, accessible only to the individual holding the device. The space itself fades into the urban background, visible only when you are looking for it.

The utility of urban space to declare the motives and intentions of "psychedelic capitalism" in its current incarnation still exists, just look at any spectacular skyscraper development, but perhaps the organizational space for our society today is embodied in the largely anonymous data centers that are scattered about the landscape, providing the data for our ubiquitous connectivity, but, spatially at least, fading into the metropolitan background we move through daily.

*from an interview with Peter Sloterdijk at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 17 February, 2009, where Sloterdijk asked himself the questions. Transcribed in Harvard Design Magazine 30, Spring/Summer 2009. 

yellow pipes

geographies of algorithms

60 Hudson Street, a key node in the global financial market, as well as the former Western Union Headquarters. 

Kevin Slavin's July 2011 TED Talk on the role of algorithms in the financial market and the direct correlations between these financial algorithms and our everyday lives is available to watch on the TED website. At 12:00 minutes into the talk, Slavin discusses the changing architecture of lower Manhattan. The carrier hotel where the regional and global communication networks come together is at 60 Hudson Street, the former site of the Western Union Telegraph Company's headquarters. Buildings near 60 Hudson are being retrofitted to house servers and other equipment for financial firms, since proximity to the network hub means financial trades can happen microseconds faster, which can mean more profit for the firms. Real estate near 60 Hudson St is spiking in value because placing a firms servers close to the colocation point allows them to run the financial algorithms through black box trading that are apparently 70% of Wall St. trades today (these figures come from a talk Slavin did at the Lift Conference earlier this year in Geneva). Through cutting a few milliseconds off of trading times--the lag time it takes for the digital information to physically reach Wall St itself--money can be made. This is a fairly particular real estate situation -- perhaps only applicable in Manhattan, London, and Tokyo -- but interesting none the less. At 7:50 into the Lift Conference talk, Slavin states that by retrofitting office buildings to hold servers, "buildings, structures are changing for the needs of algorithms that have no agenda or correlation to anything a human would be doing in that space." In the TED talk, Slavin elaborates on this new conceptualization of the landscape, discussing a recently-built fiber optic communication line between Chicago and New York that exists only to facilitate these algorithmic trades. These trading systems that have no tangible existence outside of the computers and communication infrastructure that houses them, let alone a connection to the everyday existence of humanity, are impacting the urban and non-urban landscape significantly.

The image quality in Slavin's talk is not that high. I thought I'd put up some photos of 60 Hudson Street that I took in March 2010 in case anyone was interested to see how the building looks from the sidewalk.

60 Hudson Street's main entrance.

"Learn how to blog" workshop flyer on the sidewalk outside the facility. The polar opposites represented here are great - a photocopied, physical flyer advertizing an online class to learn how to create digital content, outside one of the most important hubs for the global Internet in North America.

The remains of two Space Invader tiles--some street art based on 8-bit video games glued to a cinder block wall across the street from 60 Hudson.

 For a bit more discussion about 60 Hudson Street in the context of tracing the route an email takes across the United States, see Andrew Blum's piece "Netscapes" in Wired Magazine from 2009.

tall and narrow

Sea Isle City, Jersey Shore.

customer owned service

Sea Isle City, Jersey Shore. I hadn't seen a sticker indicating 'customer owned service' before. I suppose the owners do not want the utilities to mess with their wires. It is something of a reversal from the typical utility pole stickers, that seem to warn of arrest if anyone messes with the cables.

the production of the urban

Mobile communication technologies allow individuals to be connected to their social network nearly anywhere. But place still matters. No one lives in the ether of hertzian space. More-so, our lives are still demarcated by physical, tangible boundaries: doorways, traffic on the streets, private property, urban planning decisions to run a freeway through a neighborhood. That individual can be connected to the ‘Net’, but they are still stuck in traffic on the freeway, waiting to get home. The supposed liberation that was to arrive with always-on access to the Internet through a smartphone is convenient, but still tied up in the real spaces we live in and move through daily. Smartphones do not smooth out potholes on the street, nor do they fix a leaky roof (and if a hurricane knocks out the electricity, once that battery dies, the connectivity dies as well. Assuming the mobile network didn't get cut out by the hurricane at the same time the power went out). Mobile connectivity forces society to reconceptualize our relationship to space, to include the immaterials of Net-based information providing useful information (or not), to tie to the global, digital flows of the Net-based communication systems. Henri Lefebvre, in The Production of Space (originally published in 1974), offers a way to re-think the concrete physicality of the urban landscape into a multitude of flows working at numerous scales from the local to the global. He reconceptualizes the urban landscape into a space that encompasses the material and immaterial movement of energy and information around which our everyday lives under network society are produced.

Here is the quote:

Consider a house, and a street, for example. The house has six storeys and an air of stability about it. One might almost see it as the epitome of immovability, with its concrete and its stark, cold and rigid outlines. (Built around 1950: no metal or plate glass yet.) Now, a critical analysis would doubtless destroy the appearance of solidity of this house, stripping it, as it were, of its concrete slabs and its thin non-load-bearing walls, which are really glorified screens, and uncovering a very different picture. In the light of this imaginary analysis, our house would emerge as permeated from every direction by streams of energy which run in and out of it by every imaginable route: water, gas, electricity, telephone lines, radio and television signals, and so on. Its image of immobility would then be replaced by an image of a complex of mobilities, a nexus of in and out conduits. By depicting this convergence of waves and currents, this new image, much more accurately than any drawing or photograph, would at the same time disclose the fact that this piece of ‘immovable property’ is actually a two-faceted machine analogous to an active body: at once a machine calling for massive energy supplies, and an information-based machine with low energy requirements. The occupants of the house perceive, receive and manipulate the energies which the house itself consumes on a massive scale (for the lift, kitchen, bathroom, etc.)

Comparable observations, of course, might be made apropos of the whole street, a network of ducts constituting a structure, having a global form, fulfilling functions, and so on. Or apropos of the city, which consumes (in both senses of the word) truly colossal quantities of energy, both physical and human, and which is in effect a constantly burning, blazing bonfire. Thus as exact a picture as possible of this space would differ considerably from the one embodied in the representational space which its inhabitants have in their minds, and which for all its inaccuracy plays an integral role in social practice. (Lefebvre 1991, 93)

power lines, cloud

layered steel plates

near the University of Pennsylvania. August 2011.

Near Marshall, California on Tomales Bay is the Marconi Conference Center State Historic Park, on the site of Guglielmo Marconi's Marshall Receiving Station, where trans-Pacific wireless communication signals were received. This concrete block anchored guy wires that held in place one of the tall receiving antenna for the station. The antenna are no longer present; these concrete blocks are one of the few infrastructural remnants of the wireless station. Without the innovation of Marconi and other early wireless communication engineers, our contemporary world of instantaneous, digital and mobile communication would not be the same. This historic location is now a conference center, and any memory of its original use is relegated to photographs and written description. This photo taken by the author, January 2011. I plan on writing more about the space of Marconi's wireless infrastructure soon.

My two blogs, Pockets of Space and Everyday Structures, have now both been mentioned at Things Magazine in the last six months. As I wrote in April regarding Pockets of Space, it is always rewarding to have your work mentioned on websites you actually read, in this case the only meta-blog I regularly follow. Again, thanks for the mention at Things Magazine.

preparing the street for new fiber optic cables

Lombard Street in the low 20s, Center City Philadelphia. Near the AT&T communication facility at 500 S. 27th St it appears that AT&T and Verizon-in the center of the photograph you can just make out 'VZ' spray painted in orangeis going to be cutting up the asphalt to put down new fiber optic communication cables. The neighborhood is full of these markings from AT&T, Verizon, and Level 3; I am assuming new communication systems are entering Center City, emerging out of the AT&T communication facility at the corner of 27th Street and South Street.

Where Google Maps Street View comes from. Caught in action 25th and Spruce, Philadelphia.

louvered box

Philadelphia, above the Delaware Expressway.

convergence

On the Schuylkill Trail near Norristown, there is a electrical utility line that supports a cellular phone antenna site for AT&T - the communication infrastructure at the base of the pole has AT&T branding on it. This location illustrates well the convergence of multiple infrastructure networks, and the co-location of one utility atop another. We have two electrical systems in view, with the line in the center-left of the photograph and more in the background, a railroad track on the left, and the Pennsylvania Turnpike passing overhead. AT&T's cellular antenna is most likely located where it is to support people talking while driving on the turnpike, not for cyclists or pedestrians on the Schuylkill Trail.

a definition of infrastructure

Sanford Kwinter's Requiem for the City at the End of the Millennium (Actar, 2010). For a fuller look at of the collection of essays, see Dan Hill's post at City of Sound. 

Sanford Kwinter provides a long, winding, but useful definition of what infrastructure is, in his chapter "Urbanism, an Archivist's Art?", on page 59 of the above-mentioned text:

By "infrastructure" one means every aspect of the technology of rational administration that routinizes life, action, and property within larger (ultimately global) organizations. Today it can be argued that infrastructures own a little part of everything. Infrastructure includes the systemic expression of capital, of deregulated currency, interest rates, credit instruments, trade treaties, market forces, and the institutions that enforce them; it includes water, fuel, and electrical reservoirs, routes, and rates of supply; it encompasses demographic mutations and migrations, satellite networks and lotteries, logistics and supply coefficients, traffic computers, airports and distribution hubs, cadastral techniques, juridical routines, telephone systems, business district self-regulation mechanisms, evacuation and disaster mobilization protocols, prisons, and subways and freeways with their articulated connections; it includes libraries and weather-monitoring apparatuses, trash removal and recycling networks, sports stadiums and the managerial and delivery facilities for the data they generate, parking garages, gas pipelines and meters, hotels, public toilets, postal and park utilities and management, school systems and ATM machines; it covers celebrity, advertising and identity engineering, rail nodes and networks, television programming, interstate systems, entry ports and the public goods and agencies associated with them (Immigration and Naturalization Service, National Security Agency, Internal Revenue Service, Food and Drug Administration, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms); it comprises sewers and alarms, the multitiered military-entertainment apparatus, decision engineering pools, wetlands and water basins, civil structure maintenance schedules, epidemiological algorithms, cable delivery systems, police enforcement matrixes, licensing bylaws, greenmarkets, medical-pharmaceutical complexes, internet scaffolds, handgun regulations, granaries and water towers, military deployment procedures, and street and highway illumination schemas; in short, infrastructure concerns regimens of technical calculation of any and all kinds. 

Kwinter's point is useful, that infrastructure is embodied in everything we use - that infrastructural systems touch all aspects of life today, from the scale of the individual to the globe.

exposed: #2 in a series

Corner of Cecil B. Moore Ave. and N. 13th St. Temple University, North Philadelphia.

a USPS facility on the back of a data center

Callowhill and N. 13th St., North Philadelphia. Spring 2011.

Terminal Commerce Building's eleven story high, square-block of data center space at 401 North Broad houses a small post office on the building's backside. After some brief research online, I am not sure if the post office is still in use. Likely the postal facility is a throwback to the building's original use as a furniture wholesale warehouse (click the first link above for more information). Even if the facility is still in use, I doubt this post office sees as much foot traffic today as it did when the building provided space for physical, tangible goods.  This shuttered post office provides an instance of one of the many juxtapositions present in our lives today, where the immaterial connections to other people and places provided through technologies such as a mobile phone and the Internet are more present than the physical connections maintained through a post office and the mail system. This small post office on the backside of the Terminal Commerce Building situates in one location two communication systems: the physical presence of a digital node in the Internet's infrastructural backbone, and a node in the USPS's mail distribution and logistics infrastructure.

AT&T fiber travelling alongside the Amtrak corridor

Woodland Cemetery, West Philadelphia. The wooden marker with the number 5 on top marks an AT&T fiber optic communication cable, possibly the one that travels between Washington DC and Boston. A map of this system is at the long-lines.net website here.   

exposed: #1 in a series

South Broad Street, Philadelphia.

the geography of the rings of Saturn

From W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn:

The small propeller plane that services the route from Amsterdam to Norwich first climbed toward the sun before turning west. Spread out beneath us lay one of the most densely-populated regions in Europe, with endless terraces, sprawling satellite towns, business parks and shining glass houses which looked like large quadrangular ice floes drifting across this corner of the continent where not a patch is left to its own devices. Over the centuries the land had been regulated, cultivated, and built on until the whole region was transformed into a geometrical pattern. The roads, water channels and railway tracks ran in straight lines and gentle curves past fields and plantations, basins and reservoirs. Like beads on an abacus designed to calculate infinity, cars glided along the lanes of the motorways, while the ships moving up and down river appeared as if they had been halted for ever. Embedded in this even fabric lay a manor surrounded by its park, the relic of an earlier age. I watched the shadow of our plane hastening below us across hedges and fences, rows of poplars and canals. Along a line that seemed to have been drawn with a ruler a tractor crawled through a field of stubble, dividing it into one lighter and one darker half. Nowhere, however, was a single human being to be seen. No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. One sees the places where they live and the roads that link them, one sees the smoke rising from their houses and factories, one sees the vehicles in which they sit, but one sees not the people themselves. And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth, extending their dominion by the hour, moving around the honeycombs of towering buildings and tied into networks of a complexity that goes far beyond the power of any one individual to imagine, from the thousands of hoists and winches that once worked the South African diamond mines to the floors of today's stock and commodity exchanges, through which the global tides of information flow without cease. If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end, I thought, as we crossed the coastline and flew out over the jelly-green sea. (pages 90-92)

Since the spring semester let out last week, I have been re-reading my favorite of Sebald's works, for the first time since 2004. Returning to this unique novel-travelogue-plus-plus with the geographic perspectives brought on by spending the last five years spent studying geography in graduate school, I wonder if all I am doing in my own work is attempting to take apart this long quote I typed out above. We have multiple, interconnected human and natural landscapes seen or imagined from a perspective of aerality, transportation infrastructures, networked ecologies, information flows, commodities, all tied together in space, in the absence of the human inhabitants.

fiber along the road

Automobiles turning, the fiber optic cable runs parallel to the road. Marlton Pike West, in the Garden State. That little white and orange marker in front of the "SO Cornell Ave -->" and "ALL TURNS -->" signs indicates the Internet and other forms of digital communication are flowing alongside the automotive and pedestrian traffic on this route.

pelton wheels

Sierra foothills. December 2010. The one in the foreground is around three feet wide and maybe twenty five feet in diameter.

Invisible Infrastructure: Hertzian Space and Digital Flows of Philadelphia

AT&T Communication's Building at 500 South 27th St., from the South Street Bridge.

For those of you in or nearby Philadelphia, the Grid/Flow conference at Temple University takes place this Thursday and Friday, April 7 and 8 (schedule here). Admission is free; the organizers have culled a diverse group of scholars together for conference and it will be an interesting, worthwhile event. I feel it is also important to support these sort of interdisciplinary conferences at Temple University--they bring a dynamism to the campus that is not often present. I will be giving a talk in the 2:30 to 5:00 session on Friday on the infrastructure of mobile communication; below is the abstract I submitted, Invisible Infrastructure: Hertzian Space and Digital Flows of Philadelphia:

The transformation of nature into culture that is continuously producing the contemporary urban landscape occurs through infrastructure.  Modern infrastructural networks—water, electricity, transportation, and communication—course below and above the street-level grid of a city such as Philadelphia, providing the support structures for urban life.  A conceptualization of Philadelphia is not complete without considering these metabolic systems that transform the natural environment into the urban.  While not as vital to everyday urban life as water or electricity networks, telecommunication systems are a vital component of the urban environment. As telecommunication has become untethered to place via mobile, digital technologies such as the cellular phone and the Internet, a new layer of privatized infrastructure has spread throughout the city. These globally networked infrastructural systems of the information society are engaged with via the devices that the end-user holds, such as a mobile phone, while the physical infrastructure remains in the background, effectively invisible.  Bringing these digital communication infrastructures forward, and situating them within the larger, networked urban infrastructure systems of Philadelphia, is a way to ground the material and immaterial flows of digitized information that are central to our networked society.  This presentation will utilize photography and mapping techniques to illustrate the place of digital communication infrastructure within the larger context of Philadelphia's urban environment.  It will highlight the connection this digital communication infrastructure has with earlier forms of transportation infrastructure, seen in, for instance the running of fiber-optic cables along railroad track right-of-ways, putting the digital flows of the information economy in the same location as the material flows of the industrial city.  These digital flows create a hertzian space that effectively commodifies the ether surrounding the air we breathe, transforming a basic component of urban nature into a vessel for a privatized telecommunication network.

AT&T's building at 500 S. 27th St. through an iPhone on the AT&T network. The Grid/Flow presentation will include a case study on this facility.

homeless camp, broadband fiber optic lines

Underneath Chestnut Street, on Schuylkill Banks. Philadelphia.

Long-haul, interurban broadband fiber-optic lines are often buried alongside railroad tracks; their presence is typically indicated with a white plastic post with a orange or black top that will say "Do not dig here" and "Property of ___ Corp."  We as the end user on a computer or smartphone do not have or need to know what places the data is traveling through to get between our screens and the servers that house the website we are using, but the digital data is moving through space, buried under these markers. In the photo above that I took on late morning Tuesday, there is a small homeless dwelling situated alongside one of these fiber cable markers. Does the inhabitant know what he or she is sleeping on top of? Do they have a mobile phone to access the digital infrastructure that is passing directly beneath them? In this space of motion--information, railroad, and automotive above on Chestnut Street, this temporary camp was situated. This becomes an urban juxtapositions of life in the network society.

reinforced riverbank

The Seine's channelized riverbank. Winter 2008.

exposed

Lower Manhattan.

the remains of some digital infrastructure

A stack of discarded servers sitting on the loading dock of 500 South 27th St. in Philadelphia, a large, regional AT&T telecommunications facility. This loading dock sits directly below the sidewalk approach onto the new South Street Bridge. This equipment, waiting to be discarded, indicates that something goes on here, even if very little activity is visible. Rarely are workers to be seen inside the building or outside on the grounds. This building is very interesting in its brick, bunkered anonymity. It has no entrance visible from the street, few windows, and no signage other than an AT&T sign on the roof, visible from the South Street Bridge but not the sidewalk. At the same time, this site is a regional connection point for AT&T's mobile phone networks. Connecting people, in this instance, occurs in a space disconnected from its neighbors, a walled off fortress that is integral in producing and maintaining mobile connectivity.

a channelized riverbank on the Seine, Paris.

"quai quai" Winter 2008.

redirecting the water supply onto the streets

38th and Woodlands Walk. UPenn, just east of West PHL.

What happens when water infrastructures fail? In this case, late this morning, 38th St turns into a small river, traffic stops flowing, and everyone stops to watch. Apparently a 20 inch water main broke. All this water diverted out of the Schuylkill River to supply Philadelphia with drinking water, filtered for potability, now returning to the Schuylkill. Note in the foreground of both pictures all the gravel--the water flowing out of the broken main has effectively formed a small, curbside beach for the time being.

protecting San Francisco's water supply

An owl, off duty and housed at the old baseball field in Moccasin, California.

The City and County of San Francisco is using birds of prey to manage the water quality at Moccasin Reservoir.  The birds and their handlers keep ducks and other migratory waterfowl off the reservoir in order to maintain the quality of San Francisco's drinking water.  These birds scare off other birds that would defecate in what becomes drinking water 150 miles west of this point.  By employing these birds and their handlers, San Francisco reduces the amount of chemicals needed to treat their drinking water.  San Francisco runs their water through filtration systems, but the less pollutants in it beforehand, the less they have to clean it, and the less the City has to spend cleaning it, before it reaches the tap.  The birds housed in these non-permanent fence-structures constitute a living, breathing, and flying, and ecologically-friendly part of the system of water delivery for San Francisco.  This encampment of trailers, pickups and fences represents a support structure for the infrastructure that delivers water to San Francisco.

Birds of prey at rest.  Moccasin.

Moccasin Reservoir.  December 2010. 

Telecom 450

Gladfelter Hall, 4th floor.  Temple University.

patterns of historic human-caused erosion

A flooded Columbia State Historic Park, December 2010.  The erosion caused by gold mining in the 1850s to 1870s extensively shifted the drainage patterns in the region, leading to flooding, which in this case acts as an agent of further human-caused erosion. 

I am pretty enthusiastic at the geologic direction being taken by certain segments of the architecture/built environment/landscape blogs, leading up to the "Landscape Futures Super Workshop" Bldgblog put on recently in Los Angeles (see also Friends of the Pleistocene's work on the Geologic City  for more of this long-view exploration of the geologic origins of the built environment).  The geologic space of the contemporary city is a fascinating and highly relevant direction for geographically-minded artists and scholars to turn.  While not directly infrastructural nor relevant to digital communication or the spaces of mobile connectivity, I am posting below some research I have been doing on anthropic geomorphology, human-caused erosion.

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As earth moving and manipulation technologies have evolved, humans have gone from hunting and gathering, to using iron ploughs, to industrial agriculture, and from walking footpaths to commuting on continent-spanning freeway systems.  Humankind’s impact on global-scale geomorphology has grown with the exponential population gains.  The rates of anthropic erosion that are a by-product of modern, global living now greatly exceed rates of natural soil formation.  Anthropogeomorphology has over the last century attempted to quantify the extent of human-induced earth change.  More recent scholarship has attempted to predict future change.  Since humans are now the primary agent of geomorphology, the global scale and short time-frame of change will be as damaging to humanity’s long-term survival as global climate change.

Below is a review section of recent and not-so recent scholarship into anthropogeomorphology.

HISTORIC HUMAN-CAUSED EROSION

Although the extent of anthropogenic geomorphology has grown enormously since the Industrial Revolution, it is a process that has occurred since the Paleolithic period 1,000,000 years ago.  The first anthropogeomorphic activity was the making of seasonal shelters from rock through the moving of boulders for the walls, and “foundations and floors from small rubble” (Hooke 2000, 843).  Constructing rock shelters was most likely the only major anthropogeomorphic activity until “ten thousand years ago, in the late Paleolithic, [when] humans quarried flint” (Hooke 2002).  This need for flint for stone tools initiated the first instances of mining (Hooke 2000, 843). 

The initial permanent human settlements have been traced back to around 14,000 BC.  Agricultural cultivation started between 6,000 and 8,000 BC and led to the first centralized, urban spaces (both Morris 1994, 3).  The development of villages then cities, meshed with the rise of agrarian societies, together initiated the use of more building materials for the permanent dwellings and the need for irrigation projects to water the crops.  The construction of canals and dikes followed, and became the first large-scale earth-moving activities (Hooke 2000, 843).  In roughly the same time period the wheel was invented, which “facilitated transport of geologic materials, both ore and stone, as well as other trade goods.  Because loads in carts cannot be moved efficiently over rough terrain, roads were invented to make maximal use of the increased hauling capacity provided by the wheel (Hooke 2000, 843). 

Copper mining and then bronze smelting, combining copper with tin, initiated new mining techniques.  It was not until the Iron Age, 2,500 years ago, that iron became cheaper and thus available to a larger population.  This initiated a positive feedback loop where, as one activity required the other, iron plough blades as well as iron hand tools allowed agriculture, mining, and stone masonry to advance upon the earth, creating the need for more iron ore to be mined, and so on.  The more iron cast, a greater manipulation of the natural landscape was made possible (Hooke 2000; 2002).  With more processes, more materials, more efficient technologies, and most importantly, a growing global population, anthropogeomorphology has continued unabated, growing exponentially with the passing years (Haff 2003).

The primary cause of global-scale erosion became anthropogenic “sometime during the latter part of the first millennium A. D.” Human-caused erosion is not just a symptom of industrial society—it predates that by a millennium (Wilkinson 2005, 161).  Through an examination of “prehistoric denudation rates imposed on land surfaces solely by natural processes,” Bruce Wilkinson determined that:
  
“Mean denudation over the past half-billion years of Earth history has lowered continental surfaces by a few tens of meters per million years.  In comparison, construction and agricultural activities currently result in the transport of enough sediment and rock to lower all ice-free continental surfaces by a few hundred meters per million years.  Humans are now an order of magnitude more important at moving sediment than the sum of all other natural processes operating on the surface of the planet” (Wilkinson 2005, 161).

More important than the erosion alone, this erosion associated with agriculture and construction  “exceed soil formation by an order of magnitude” (Wilkinson 2005, 161).  Not only do human actions account for the majority of erosionary activities, it also greatly outpaces soil formation.  To determine these rates Wilkinson set a baseline through estimating the “uplift and erosion [of sedimentary rock which] results in a progressive decrease in epoch-long interval rock volume with increasing age.”  He goes on, stating that “data on surviving amounts of sedimentary rock therefore allow for estimation of epoch-long rates of sediment accumulation, which in turn relate to rates of physical and chemical denudation over Earth’s subaerially exposed surface for at least the past half-billion years” (Wilkinson 2005, 161).  As the base level of all human actions, the amount of earth-change construction and agriculture accomplish in creating sustenance and shelter are so grand they are difficult to conceive of.  We as humans both individual and as a species impact the Earth enormously:  “soil and rock movement currently amounts to ~21t per person per year (6 from construction, 15 related to farming)” (Hooke 2000).  Also, over-irrigation, which leads to soil salination, and fertilization of cropland are both instances of chemical weathering (Brown 1970, 79).  Even if the erosion is balanced across continents, the overdeveloped north accounts for much more than the global south.  Wood and other construction products are made elsewhere, and agricultural commodities and products travel to global markets.  The links are complicated and only the earth-change is universal. 

Construction sites cause significant erosion—in Japan alone urban land use development accounted for 1.3 x 10 (to the 9th) cubic meters a year in 1970 (Kadomura 1980, 138).  The need for construction materials from offsite and out of the area, of a sort that modern modes of transportation make possible, is also impacting geomorphic processes greatly:  “Demand in the UK [for aggregates for concrete] has gone from 20 million tones per annum in 1900, to 50 m tones in 1948, to 276 m tones in 1973.  It is an increase per capita from 0.6 tones per year to 5 tones per year” (Goudie 2000, 269). 

At the rate it is occurring today, “the amount of [eroded] material would fill the Grand Canyon of Arizona in ~50 years,” again a scale much larger than that of the landscape, which is the largest the human eye can take in.  This matters geomorphologically because “over the interval of anthropogenic erosion, delivery of sediment to rivers quickly exceeds rates of transport that are possible in fluvial systems that have more or less attained geomorphic equilibrium over a significantly longer prehistory with an appreciably lower sediment flux” (Wilkinson 2005, 163-164).  What humans do at every level is to disrupt geomorphic equilibrium; this is anthropogeomorphology’s end-result. 

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While much of this research is solidly academic, the statistical information about society's use of geologic materials such as the aggregates for concrete, is fairly stunning when considered as an agent in erosion and general geomorphic change.  With every new building and road, let alone skyscraper or elevated freeway, a bit more of the earth's surface changes location, never to return to its point of origin.  Seeing the city as the current end point of the flows of ores and aggregates, even down to the computer I am typing on and that, ostensibly, this blog will be read on, changes how one views the landscape.  The asphalt paving on the roads again becomes dead dinosaurs, the brick facade of a row home no longer solely reddish rectangles stacked two stories high. 

Works Cited

Brown, E. H. (1970). "Man shapes the Earth." The Geographical Journal 136(1): 74-85.
      
Goudie, A. (2000). anthropogeomorphology. Dictionary of physical geography, 3rd ed. D. S. G. T. Andrew Goudie. Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishing.
   
Goudie, A. (2000). The human impact on the natural environment.  5th ed. Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press.
   
Haff, P. K. (2000). "Prediction and the anthropic landscape." Eos Trans. AGU, 81 (48) Fall Meet. Suppl., Abstract xxxxx-xx.
   
Haff, P. K. (2003). "Modeling and predicting human impact on landscape." GSA 2003 Seattle Annual Meeting, abstracts.
      
Hooke, R. L. (2000). "On the history of humans as geomorphic agents." Geology 28(9): 843-846.
   
Hooke, R. L. (2002). Humans are geomorphic agents. Geological Society of America 2002 Denver Annual Meeting, Denver, CO.
   
Kadomura, H. (1980). "Erosion by human actvities in Japan." GeoJournal 4(2): 133-144.
   
Morris, A. E. J. (1994). A history of urban form:  Before the industrial revolutions, third edition. New York, Longman Scientific & Technical/ John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
      
Wilkinson, B. (2005). "Humans as geologic agents:  A deep-time perspective." Geology 33(3): 161-164.