inclusion/exclusion in the city

 
From the chapter "Neobourgeois Space": 

What novelists like Perec, Beauvoir, and Rochefort -- no less than the Situationists performing their urban experiments in Paris during the same years, or Henri Lefebvre progressively recoding his initial concept of "everyday life" into a range of spatial and urban categories -- realized, was the emergence of a new image of society as a city -- and thus the beginning of a whole new thematics of inside and outside, of inclusion in, and exclusion from, a positively valued modernity.  Cities possess a center and banlieues, and citizens, those on the interior, deciding who among the insiders should be expelled, and whether or not to open their doors to those on the outside. -- Kristin Ross, from Fast Cars, Clean Bodies p. 149 - 150

What interests me about Ross's point, in the context of mobile connectivity and infrastructure, is how this inclusion/exclusion is reinforced through access to communication technologies.  The ease of wayfinding through a mapping app on a smart phone is only useful if you can access the phone and afford the data plan.  Is access to a smart phone a new inclusion into "positively valued modernity"?  And how is this access opened to outsiders?  The urban spaces have not changed much due to mobile connectivity, but the utility they spaces hold changes through on-the-go access to the Internet, for instance, through a smart phone.  Perhaps mobile and urban technologies can become more open and inclusive -- here is an example of public usb drives installed in New York City -- but, most likely, inclusion in urban society will necessitate leaving the phone in the pocket, inhabiting the physical city and not the cyber-city, and spending more time on the streets, on foot.

the invisible city

One Wilshire in downtown Los Angeles, a prominent colocation point on the west coast/eastern shore of the Pacific Ocean for global telecommunication providers. photo by Xeni Jardin, via flickr source

Kazys Varnelis's work, especially The Infrastructural City:  Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, is extremely useful for conceptualizing the space of telecommunications.  In looking over his essay on One Wilshire in The Infrastructural City again, I found this quote:

If the [Disney] Concert Hall represents late capitalism's obsession with the visual, One Wilshire represents the rise of invisible networks and unmappable forces in our lives.  The invisible city that grows from telecommunications is, by and large, a privatized infrastructure, its possession by private forces making it impossible to map.  Although the postmodern hyper-space of the Bonaventure [Hotel] is unmappable by the body, a legible floor plan can still be found.  No such plan exists for networked capital.  Diagrams of the Internet and of fiber optic lines are hard to find: the data is proprietary, a matter too important for corporations to allow free access.  Moreover, the complexity emerging along with the massive proliferation of connections increasingly makes it hard for even corporations owning the networks to understand their dimensions.  A floor plan of One Wilshire tells you little about what happens there.  Even for the corporate hive mind, the map is exceeded by a hypercomplex reality.  The space of global technological flows does not desire to become visual or apparent:  perhaps only some spray-paint [on asphalt] or a flag in the ground marks the presence of fiber below, and sometimes even that is elusive.  (pages 128-129)

Increasingly, conceptualizing the spaces of this invisible city require searching through pages upon pages of planning documents unearthed on the websites of municipalities to infer where a fiber-optic cable is run underground and which global corporation is putting it there.  This research is done more through identifying the spaces where conditions come together than by identifying the direct points or locations of the telecom infrastructures.

Telecommunication networking equipment inside One Wilshire. photo by Xeni Jardin, via flickr source