Post Updated: After the Smart City, What? -- a talk at Harvard

Looking at downtown Philadelphia from the South Street Bridge. July 2013. For more Philadelphia images from the last few years, see here.

 RESCHEDULED FOR FRIDAY MARCH 14, 2014. 2:00 pm in Knafel Hall Room K262

On Wednesday, February 5 I will give a talk at Harvard University's Center for Geographic Analysis's geography@harvard monthly colloquia series. In the talk I will use Philadelphia as a case study example of how the 'smart city' as an idea or concept has impacted United States urbanism: what the 'smart city' has actually become, and where the 'smart city' might be found. This is another way of saying: what has become of the city in a 'smart city'?

The talk is open to the public; if you are in the Boston/Cambridge area from 12:30-2:00 pm on February 5 please stop by. 

Below is the abstract to the talk. For more information see the geography@harvard colloquia webpage.

 

After the Smart City, What?: Ubiquitous Computing Technologies and the Networked Urban Condition

 

The ability of data-driven, smart city projects to generate transformative urban change are popular, important topics today, but little attention has been paid to the actual, existing cities that underlie these social and technological developments, to charting how smart city projects have integrated into the urban landscape itself. The smart city is a culmnation of ubiquitous computing and the potential of wireless connectivity to effect change. In a smart city, smartphones, networked sensors, data analytics, and the like are intended to improve the flow of people, goods, and information throughout said city. However, the impacts of these changes often remain unclear and under-examined. It is necessary to not only ask what a smart city is and could become, but also who will benefit and where the impacts of these projects will be located. Beyond the celebratory rhetoric of urban intelligence that cities employ to attract business and improve day-to-day issues for residents, this talk will investigate how cities have actively transformed. Through a place-based case study of Philadelphia’s recent smart city efforts, this talk will begin by considering how the always-on, wireless connectivity of a smart, networked city has enabled new forms of civic exchange, municipal governance, and workforce-inclusion agendas. Next I will examine the spatial consequences of Philadelphia’s entrepreneurial efforts to attract key industries of the global information and innovation economy in ‘smart’ zones of the city. The talk will conclude with a consideration of the emerging geography of smart, digital Philadelphia as emblematic of networked urbanism overlaid with ubiquitous computing: as the near-future promise of the smart city to improve the urban condition has been integrated into often splintered and polarized urban landscapes, the areas of the city that attain a 'smart' status were already well-off. For a variety of reasons I will discuss, the benefits have not dispersed very well into the greater city, signaling that this era of digitally-driven urban improvement has not yet lessened longstanding social inequalities as much as was promised.

 

Location: 

Knafel Hall K262 - on Cambridge Street just behind the Graduate School of Design.

cellular antenna sites and pervasive connectivity on the road

Powerlines, cellular antenna site in the distance, and tall roadside signage  intended to be visible from auto-bound passerby on I-81. Taken from a Sunoco gas station. January 2014.

While connection to a cellular network is typically represented as either the signal bars on a mobile phone/smartphone's screen, or via providers' coverage maps (see the maps of coverage from: AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint). Outside of cities the areas of strong cellular coverage follow major highways and freeways across the United States, which makes some sense given that the majority of users in less-densely populated areas are traveling through (the lack of coverage in rural areas as an issue of digital inclusion, like the lack of rural broadband accessibility, is another topic entirely). For the mapping app to locate the vehicle as a blue dot on a screen, passing by at seventy miles an hour, or the social media to load to alleviate a moment of boredom, necessitates these tall, slender pieces of telecommunications infrastructure to be located alongside the transportation corridors.

These photos are from just north of the Mason-Dixon Line in south-central Pennsylvania. 

In the past, in this farming area barn silos were probably the tallest built elements found in the landscape...

...but now cellular antenna sites stand much taller. I-81 corridor, south central Pennsylvania. January 2014. The sunset light striking the barns and towers, and the pinks and soft blues in the background, make the towers stand out even more.

abandoned hydro-electric power plant

Abandoned hydro-electric plant. Wells Falls on Six Mile Creek, Ithaca, New York. November 2013.

Black Friday 2013 I spent exploring Ithaca, New York. In the afternoon my local guide took us on a windshield survey--aka a drive through the icy-slushy streets--of a few of the gorges that Ithaca is known for. The abandoned hydro-electric electricity generating station at Wells Falls provided a striking sunset scene of icy dereliction.

Looking down at the dam and falls seen in the previous photo. November 2013.