Boundary objects, things, and tracing associations

Clark Park on a warm day last April.

 
Boundary objects, things, and tracing associations: a short case study of mobile communication

Because mobile communication infrastructures are pervasive and repeating, mass-produced spatial products (Easterling 2005), locating every device and every networked element is impossible and not particularly fruitful; charting the spatial impact of telecommunications equipment across a city would not serve an overarching purpose. What could be useful is tracing the network of associations that connect actors together, such as two people talking to each other on mobile phones. The objects that connect these two people become things (Latour 2005) when they complete the circuit between the two individuals. These things can be located and they can be considered boundary objects: as the things that translate between languages and systems, that locate the global interoperability standards and IT economies that are all involved in producing mobile communication in the digital networks themselves. Envisioning these telecommunication systems as an assemblages of—in the case of mobile communication infrastructure—users, networking equipment such as cellular antenna, linesmen on the ground, engineers, telecommunications standards and protocol—changes the relationship between an individual and their mobile device to involve much more than two people talking to each other, or a person checking in to a social media, etc. When a spatial perspective is added atop this conceptualization, we can then locate where each of these actors and other things that produce mobile communication are in the landscape, tracing associations back and forth into one of the immaterial weaves—the electromagnetic terrain (Mitchell 2003)—that constitute a city’s urban fabric. 
  
Ubiquitous computing is messy and seamful—the digital overlay is never truly universal nor complete (Dourish and Bell 2011, 27-28)— technologies never quite work perfectly, networks are never actually pervasive and consequently mobile phone calls get dropped, and so on. The points where different systems and different types of eqipment meet are boundaries, the things that negotiate these interchanges are the boundary objects (Star 2002; Star and Griesmer 1989). Boundary objects are the meeting points where knowledge or information is transferred through social and technical infrastructural standards—such as those that allow for interoperability between different makes and models of mobile phones—that transcend time and space, but contain certain barriers to admission, such as the necessity to have a mobile phone to access the networks themselves. As a 'passage point' through which knowledge/information passes, the boundary object transmits across time and space in any number of ways depending on the subject matter (Star and Griesemer 1989, 393). Boundary objects can be grounded in a landscape, but they also facilitate spatial jumps between places far apart. The boundary objects of systems such as mobile communication create their own electromagnetic terrain of radio waves, antenna, fiber optic cables, connection points and more, as these things shift digitized information including the human voice between individuals through a complex network located in distinct places but repeated or reproduced at greater or lesser concentrations essentially everywhere.
  
Considering mobile communication systems as a boundary objects is a way to locate the numerous geographic shifts the mobile phone creates within the network itself, where closeness is no longer a factor of spatial proximity for the individual users, but is for the network equipment of mobile communication itself. The mobile phone in an individual’s pocket does not indicate social cohesion in any one particular place, but that  all users are connected to their individual social networks, wherever those other individuals are in the neighborhood, metropolis, or world.
  
To trace the boundary objects translating between the different networks that act to connect two individuals together through a mobile phone conversation, I will outline a call to the friend in Seattle. For this description I will use myself making a phone call while sitting in Clark Park in West Philadelphia as an example, and build off of general descriptions about how mobile phones connect to the cellular network, and more specific research (Asher 2005 130-131; Hayes 2006, 303-311). The first and primary boundary object is my Apple iPhone itself. This consumer device that I pay a monthly subscription feel to AT&T for, to access the voice as well as the cellular data network for connecting to the Internet wirelessly when I am away from my apartment’s wifi network, translates my voice into a digital signal that is processed into radio waves sending at around 800 megahertz of the electromagnetic spectrum (Ascher 2005, 144), to the nearest cellular antenna on AT&T’s network. Some online research tells me that there are 300 cellular antenna within two miles of the 4300 block of Baltimore Avenue, the northern edge of Clark Park (Antenna Search 2011). The closest antenna the search finds that definitively belongs to AT&T is 1.46 miles away, sitting 145 feet in the air atop a building at 500 South 27th Street. From where I am sitting, this antenna is across the Schuylkill river and on the edge of center city Philadelphia. It represents the second boundary object, transferring my immaterial, digitized voice from the cellular grid into AT&T’s regional, fiber-optic cable based telecommunications grid. This antenna would typically transmit my voice through a network of fiber optic telecommunications cables buried in the streets to AT&T’s mobile switching center, but the antenna at 500 South 27th Street is located on the roof of this structure already, so it likely just sends my signal into the building (TelcoData.US 2011). This building represents a third boundary object. It transfers this local phone call to AT&T’s larger grid, likely handing off the call to a long-distance fiber-optic cable that routes the signal across the continent to Seattle, where the process is reversed. And all this happens in less time than my friend or I can notice: there is no lag between talking and hearing a reply. Boundary objects translate languages and shift between different networks—in this case between human and computer-programming—they translate between electrical signals to radio waves, then back to electrical signals. These signals move between short networks linking within a specific area into networks that span between metropolitan areas or even underneath oceans linking continents. The paths are short or long distance, but never enacting a global scale or a local scale: the signals travel between distinct places that can often be located and named, even if the meshwork of cables between the two points cannot be directly identified due to the dispersed and privatized nature of the telecommunications networks. If action is form (Easterling 2012), then these boundaries locate the actions of ubiquitous computing in space, assigning it a form in the shape of the networking equipment that produces mobile connectivity.

Digital things do not and cannot exist separate from the material landscape; this is the nature of pervasive systems such as mobile communication and to a large extent the Internet in general. The electromagnetic overlay of everyday exchanges enabled through devices like an iPhone encompasses more than the individual user, stretching across space to the network equipment and other elements of the telecommunications infrastructure that allow the device to connect to the larger networks. A concept like boundary objects provides a means of describing these new things that are deeply intertwined with our lives, but separate from us as individuals, existing at the intersection of information and space itself.

Citations

Antenna Search,. 2011. “AntennaSearch - Search for Cell Towers, Cell Reception, Hidden Antennas and More.” http://www.antennasearch.com/sitestart.asp.

Ascher, K. 2007. The Works: Anatomy of a City. New York City: Penguin (Non-Classics).

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

Easterling, K. 2005. Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Easterling, K. 2012. The Action Is the Form: Victor Hugo’s TED Talk. 1st ed. Moscow: Strelka Press.

Hayes, B. 2006. Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

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

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

Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. 1989. Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology , 1907-39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387–420.

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

TelcoData.US. 2011. “TelcoData.US: View Switches by Switch Type.” TelcoData.us Telecommunications Database. http://www.telcodata.us/search-switches-by-switch-type?type=Cellular%20Mobile%20Carrier%20Switching%20System.

The Empire of the In-Between

Amtrak's Acela train passes through West Philadelphia. Photo taken by Alan Wiig, looking south from Woodland Cemetery. In the distance is the Grays Ferry neighborhood and a closed Dupont paint factory.

Stopping for a time in the Empire of the In-Between: Pieter Hugo’s photographs with an accompanying essay by Adam Davidson in the November 4 2012 New York Times Sunday Magazine look at how the Mid-Atlantic corridor between New York City and Washington DC has become such a devastated landscape. The images Hugo made during two weeks this fall explore the neighborhoods directly adjacent to the Amtrak railroad corridor connecting New York and DC and survey the “heroic wreckage” (p. 26) of the terrain with a sympathetic eye that also does not gloss over the desperation of the neighborhoods. Hugo’s eye hones in on scenes in a way that he has developed photographing strange, unique corners of Africa, such as hyena men in Nigeria or a computer waste dump in Ghana. The continuity of these African images with what was found in the Mid-Atlantic  indicate how removed these US communities are, even as they sit just outside the window of Amtrak’s Acela trains. By creating portraits of the corridor’s residents, and by visualizing the track-side landscape with a similarly vivid intimacy, Hugo’s images show the people and places that are more often sped past from on high, sitting in Amtrak’s air-conditioned rail cars. Even though, as Davidson points out, “for most of the 180 or so years of the train line’s existence, the endpoints of this journey—New York and D.C.—were subordinate to the roaring engines of productivity in between” (p. 26), today the in-between exists too often just as a backdrop. What is most compelling about Davidson’s essay is his discussion of  the recent history of the service-industry economy in the North-East United States and how it has affected a particular part of the region: the corridor of the Mid-Atlantic that borders the train that the Orgmen of the new economy take between New York and DC, a corridor that was built around the rail line but for an earlier, industrial economy that no longer has a part in the region, even as the formerly industrial cities and their citizens are still present, figuratively and literally watching the trains roll past. Davidson explains the situation in this corridor in as concise a manner as I’ve come across, writing:

...the train passes directly through or near 8 of the 10 richest counties in the United States, but all of this wealth is concentrated near the endpoints of the journey: Manhattan’s sattellites in northern New Jersey and the towns where lobbyists and government contractors live in suburban Virginia and Maryland. This is a geographic representation of a telling contradiction. For the past 30-plus years, through Republican and Democratic administrations, there has been much lip service paid to the idea that the era of big government is over. Long live free enterprise. And yet in the case of those areas surrounding the capital, wealth has gravitated to the exact spot where government regulation is created. Why? Because many businesses discovered that renegotiating the terms between government and the private sector can be extraordinarily lucrative. A few remarkable books by professors at NYU’s Stern School of Business argue that a primary source of profit for Wall Street over the past 15 to 20 years could be what I call the Acela Strategy: making money by exploiting regulation rather than by creating more effective ways to finance the rest of the economy. (p. 29)

Davidson’s argument succeeds because it does not single out one political party or another for failing to support the region, nor does the argument push ephemeral, intangible ideas such as outsourcing, the global economy, neo-liberalism or other similar policy decisions as the problem. These concepts and their underlying logic are complicit in the crumbling neighborhoods and empty factories, but blaming the situation on one or many issues would create a simple conclusion that does little justice to the corridor itself. Davidson identifies the places that today are successful economic zones, and those that are not, and makes clear that spatial proximity no longer leads to a distribution of jobs and a ‘trickle-down’ of profits. The present realities do not reflect a positive outlook for the near future. As Davidson continues, “calling for a return to the days when everybody who was willing could make a good living at the factory is a fantasy, maybe a lie and certainly an implicit acknowledgement that nobody has any idea what to do with the underemployed in the slums of Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Southeast DC” (p. 35).

For the passengers on Amtrak’s Acela trains what matters is moving quickly between Penn Station in New York and Union Station in DC, then heading to offices on either end. For these passengers and the economy they work in, to quote the sociologist Bruno Latour: “between the lines of the network there is, strictly speaking, nothing at all” (from We Have Never Been Modern, 1993 p. 118). Yet there is plenty between the lines, places physically close but in reality very far from Amtrak’s rail network and the service economy it supports. This reportage shows what is present between the end-points of the rail network; it shows what exists today in these cities built for industries that no longer function, with road grids and housing and even citizens cut off from the dominant economic activities of the region, disconnected from political agency in DC and the economic action in New York City.
The success of this essay is that it locates the new economy not solely in its shiny new offices but in its opposite, in the places that have been left far, far behind even though they are in-between the two endpoints and for much of the nation’s history were a driver of the economy itself. The successful economy in the Mid-Atlantic corridor is now suburban, found in the bland single story machine shops and exurban office centers that line the freeway corridors, sitting outside of the cities that originally organized the growth and development of the region. The new economy is also embodied in the rail line itself, and just like the other businesses of the service industry, Amtrak requires relatively few employees to maintain these trains and the tracks themselves. If this were the whole of Hugo and Davidson’s work, it would sit as an interesting piece of quality journalism. But the work pushes further by considering the rail network as an active agent in the story itself. Davidson locates the problem in economic and policy decisions made in DC and New York, decisions made possible on and through the Acela trains as they rumble past these places that have been effectively abandoned.

Underlying this argument about the spatial outcomes of this political-economic muddle is the North-East railroad corridor itself, this transportion infrastructure that also play an active part of the photo-essay. The smooth movement between DC and Wall Street relies on the railroad. Davidson’s work ties closely with Keller Easterling’s analysis of what she has termed the extrastatecraft of the contemporary moment, where politics have become tightly intertwined with infrastructure and urbanism, where statecraft and economic activities are different from past formations; consequently these extra-ordinary new relationships rely directly on things like this rail corridor and the trains that travel it. Understanding the everyday poverty of the cities’ residents and the continued decay of the urban landscape cannot be separated from the Acela trains that pass through the corridor, this network that enables a contradictory set of political and economic relationships between DC and New York City that benefit the two cities and their associated economic services, but leave what is in-between to fall further and further apart. Telling a story of the blighted, post-industrial cities of Mid-Atlantic via slowly exploring the rail corridor that once served these cities but now facilitates their continued decay is a creative, honest, and bleak but needed story of the North-East United States today. 

pathholes and other hazards of walking

Looking down the top section of the Loma Linda path, at Queens Road.

The Berkeley Hills just northeast of the UC Berkeley campus have a number of short, often steep walking paths stitching between the more circuitous roads through the area. While the streets that automobiles drive on in the Hills are narrow, difficult to navigate, and a spaghetti-mess of more-or-less intact asphalt, the paths cut alongside seasonal creeks, at fence-lines and under bay laurel, oaks, and redwoods. Often the paths cut straight down toward the lower neighborhoods, eventually depositing the walker on Euclid or another main road that funnels traffic toward to the university campus, or drops further, toward the Shattuck Avenue commercial corridor and the Gourmet Ghetto.

In August I was in Berkeley for a day and was able to explore the La Loma Path, which is on an existing but newly opened section of public right of way. The paths are built, restored, maintained, and advocated for by a local group called the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association, but a situation has emerged common to the NIMBYism (not in my backyard) often found in cities like Berkeley--especially in the very wealthy areas such as the Berkeley Hills--where this new path on public land has become a contested element of the landscape. The property owners adjacent to the path seem to feel that the occasional walker is a nuisance and a danger, as indicated in the hand drawn, chalk signs depicted below. Regardless, the trail is an excellent addition to the neighborhood and I encourage those readers in the Bay Area who have not yet explored the trails to do so. A map of Berkeley's Pathways is available at many bookstores as well as at the Path Wanderers website.

What follows is a short photo-essay of the walk, with some commentary in the captions.

A path-side fence note, indicating where either humans or perhaps dogs should shit.

More fence notes written in chalk on the newly opened pedestrian right of way, noting: "GO HOME PATHHOLES!!! WE WANT QUIET!!!" as well as "EMERGENCY + 12 kV [electrical power] lines = French Fried Path Critters! Yummy!". Electrical lines pass by overhead; the neighbors are either worried for people walking on the path, or threatening that walking the path could lead to death. But then wouldn't living next to the path also be dangerous?

Where the path cuts across Campus Drive there is a campaign asking people to "Join the Kindness [R]Evolution Today!" The smaller sign to the right implores  "Neighbors please be civilized and considerate: Dear Berkeley,
Please help our music teacher regain her essential privacy and safety in her own home and use the easliy available alternative walkway on Glendale Ave just across the Glendale - La Loma intersection (at the bottom) an only 3 houses north (at the top). She needs to have peace and no more disturbance (after 10 months of horrors) in order to recover from injuries of a car accident caused by a drunk driver and more recent police brutality during her unfair arrestes in her own home. May G-d (sic) allow you to fill your heart with the compassion to the suffering of those you meet on your path!" There is a link to the Kindness Revolution website as well. While it is unfortunate that the resident is suffering from many injuries of various natures, I wonder if directing anger and frustration about these issues is best done in through a sign that reflects more-so frustrations that what was considered a private part of one person's backyard is not part of the Berkeley's foot-based transportation network.

The path alongside the music teacher's house.

A dragonfly waiting on a not-quite-ripe blackberry for the August fog to burn off and the air to warm. The blackberries were not quite ripe.

As a perk for winning a Nobel Prize, UC Berkeley faculty are given access to the areas where parking is restricted only to Nobel Laureates. I'm guessing the house in the background here is the residence of an emeritus faculty member who took his or her sign with them upon retirement.

Bamboo acting to fence a property in, with a redwood in the background, banana trees and a palm of some variety in the middle ground.

Figs and apples ripening together, overhead. Berkeley and the Bay Area in general are such a mixture of ecosystems, including, in this case two fairly different types of fruit.

and the airports

Looking north at Philadelphia International Airport, from Hog Island Road. October 2012.

The very sites they were most drawn to--the business centres, the shopping plazas, the franchise restaurants, the tourist spots and the airports--would appear slightly illusory, never really experienced in spite of the photographs taken, the souvenirs bought and the money spent. -- from The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India by Siddhartha Deb (p. 52)

municipal adaptations, by humans and by vegetation

The sidewalk ends but a path continues. South Broad Street, far south Philadelphia. October 2012.

One of the more enjoyable Internet-based finds I've made over the last year has been the work of Chris Berthelsen and his Tokyo-based urban lab, a-small-lab. His weekend explorations to the metropolitan fringes of Tokyo, walking around and exploring for the tiny disruptions of gardens in the concrete and asphalt landscape of urban Japan, or the  creativity of Tokyo's residents to improve upon or fix small elements of their day-to-day lives is a window into the small details of living in a city and a country that has, for me at least, remained foreign aside from the writings of Haruki Murakami, the films of Hayao Miyazaki, and assorted articles about Japan's place global economy or awesome espresso. And perhaps Murakami, films, and articles all conspire to keeping Japan foreign. But Berthelsen's work opens up the urban fabric of Tokyo, the little pocket gardens along a sidewalk or the place of semi-mythological feral raccoon-dogs in the nighttime streets and back alleys is an enjoyable, informative, and highly insightful diversion from my scholarly research on and daily life in cities in the United States.

In the spirit of Berthelsen's work, I've attempted over the past month to first 'see' and then to document similarly unique and/or strange but normal elements of Philadelphia. In the photo above is a local adaptation of an poorly-thought out sidewalk situation. The road on the right merges into Broad Street on the left, the main north-south artery through central Philadelphia. Rather than continue the sidewalk to cross to its continuation, the planners just ended the concrete, leaving residents to continue the path themselves. The three photos below, while perhaps not fitting with the DIY impulse that a-small-lab seeks out, document vegetation overtaking views in Fairmount Park. The benches at one point presented a view of the Schuylkill River, along with the Delaware River on the eastern side of the city, one of the two rivers that define central Philadelphia's boundaries. The park's gardeners come through and mow the grass regularly, but the fringe of shrubbery and trees has completely overtaken any view, leaving the benches to present a scene of urban nature likely not intended by the landscape architects who located the benches where they are. The three benches are ordered with the first one furthest downstream and consequently closest to the city itself, and the other two progressing out and upstream toward the city's edge.

Bench 1 in Fairmount Park along West River Drive. At one point this bench overlooked the Schuylkill River, but the riot of growth now interrupts the view.

Bench 2, also not overlooking the Schuylkill River.

...and Bench 3, looking out at trees instead of the river. These three photos from mid-September 2012.

utility boxes and cellular antenna in Paris

A telecom utility box in Paris alongside Boulevard de Sébastopol. Metal boxes like the larger one on the left house and organize the neighborhood's telephone and Internet connections. Note the cut in the sidewalk's concrete leading away from the box--perhaps new fiber optic cabling was connected to this box recently.

Telecommunications equipment in Paris exists as a visible but muted element on and above the streets, sometimes even acting as a billboard for advertizing. Behind the doors of these utility boxes and latent within the radio signals broadcasting from the cellular antenna, are a collection of the communicative circulations that make up a very small part of the city's social exchange at a given moment.

A second telecom utility box in Paris doubling as a canvas for advertizing. Note the Space Invader on the wall in the far left corner.

On the top-left corner of the red brick building at the center of the photograph is a cellular antenna. Cellular infrastructure in Paris was much less visible than the equipment in the US, at least in the areas I walked through. This photo was taken where Rue du Faubourg Saint Denis and Boulevard de Magenta come together.

an infrastructural field report from Autun, France

A cobblestone hillside pathway flanked by tall walls, with a black electrical or communication cable descending the wall in a steel pipe that emerges from its sheath to enter a junction box, then plunging straight into concrete to travel underground. All photographs by Alan Wiig, July 2012.

Located underneath or alongside the roads and paths of Autun, France, manhole covers, utility enclosures, and other containers represent entry points into the infrastructures around which cities, including small, historic cities with origins extending back to the Roman empire such as Autun, are organized. Considering the common, public elements of these infrastructural networks as components of a city or necessitates a reconsideration of what a city is, to include the many flows of people, goods, information and resources whose respective and often intermingled systems stretch far beyond any individual city’s territorial, political boundary. These infrastructural covers, enclosures, and signage are embedded within and alongside Autun’s streets, an interface with the material and digital flows that keep the city connected, watered, heated, cooled, entertained, cleaned, organized, and so on.           

What follows is a small selection chosen out of about 100 photos taken within a few blocks of Hotel les Ursulines on the hillside above Autun Cathedral in a half-an-hour lunchtime walk that the Lancaster University (UK) sociologist Elizabeth Shove and I took on Friday 20 July 2012. Elizabeth and I were in Autun for a conference, From networked to post-networked urbanism: new infrastructure configurations and urban transitions, organized by Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires et Sociétés (LATTS), a technology, infrastructure and society research organization based out of Paris. The paradox of having discussions on urban infrastructures and post-networked, or as some participants put it, supra-networked urbanism at a conference held in a small city surrounded by Burgundian wine country led to our quick exploration of the things that connected Autun to the larger networks and flows that stretch across its region and beyond. We wanted to visualize what made Autun as much a part of a supra-networked urbanism as, for instance, Paris. Just as roads and other transportation networks connect Autun to places beyond the city itself, so do the other infrastructures we found embedded in the streets. In looking closely at these iron and steel covers, fiberglass and plastic boxes, small and large junctions, and cables of many sizes and colors, we found a whole culture of design and manufacture, maintenance, and repair of these quotidian things that are typically passed by and over the the way between places. Elizabeth later uncovered that “PAM/Saint Gobain makes manhole covers used in Autun, Paris, Saxmundham (a small town in East Anglia, UK) and Lancaster”. Networks of different historical eras, many different providers, and various systems are all intertwined in organized as well as haphazard ways, grafted alongside older buildings and walls, integrated into newer structures, and even, sometimes, waiting for a future use, as is the case with the coiled wire sits protruding out of the stuccoed wall in the last picture. The systems may change, evolve, or be removed, but these infrastructural things are as much a part of Autun as any other aspect of the landscape from the homes and businesses to the agriculture in the fields surrounding the city.

Thanks to Olivier Coutard and Jonathan Rutherford of LATTS for inviting me to participate in the conference in Autun. 

If you are interested in seeing more of the photographs in the set, leave me a message in the comments section and I'll see what I can do.

 how the wavy design of the cover on the top left of page 4 holds gravel and sands like a rill on a creek-bottom.

Patched holes, remnants of earlier covers.

This is a close up detail of the cable descending the wall in the topmost image in this post.

At some point in the near or distant future, this cable will be put to use.

fiber optic cables passing through the Trenton Train Station

The orange-topped post indicates the path of the fiber-optic cables traveling between alongside the Amtrak corridor between Washington DC and New York City. Photo taken from the end of the platform at the Trenton Train Station, Trenton New Jersey. The path people and goods take between metropolitan regions is often the same as the path information takes. Photo by Alan Wiig, May 2012.

A Book Reading for Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

Andrew Blum's Tubes on top of a buried Level 3 fiber optic (that is what the LVL3 F/O stands for) at Lancaster Ave. and 38th St. in West Philadelphia. At this location the Internet that Level 3 provides is heading  from Drexel University and central Philadelphia out the Main Line.

For those readers in the Philadelphia area, architecture/urbanism/technology writer Andrew Blum will be speaking about his brand new book Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet this coming Thursday June 7 at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Details here.

The event starts at 7:30 at the Central Library, and is free as per the library's mission and name. This is the description from the library's events page:

Andrew Blum is a correspondent at Wired and a contributing editor at Metropolis, whose writing about architecture, design, technology, urbanism, art, and travel has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, The New Yorker, Slate, and Popular Science. Blum studied English and architecture history at Amherst College, and received his M.A. in human geography from the University of Toronto. From tiny fiber optic cables buried beneath Manhattan’s busy streets to the 10,000-mile-long undersea cable connecting Europe and West Africa, Blum chronicles the intriguing development of the internet in his new book, Tubes.

Once I finish Tubes I will write up a complete review, but from what I have read, Blum has succeeded in both untangling the multitude of complex relationships between places, people, corporations, and of course digital technologies that comprise this thing called the  Internet. The stories he tells are engaging and grounded in the  both of this network of networks and of the geography surrounding it. Technologies never exist without people to keep them functioning; a central point of the book--perhaps the central point--is to affirm how the Internet exists in specific places and is maintained through human relationships.

I've been waiting for this book ever since Blum published this piece in Wired a few years ago tracing the path of an email across North America. Anyone interested in the subjects I cover in this blog should read Tubes, and if you live in Philadelphia, come out on Thursday to the talk.

If you don't live in Philadelphia, Blum is continuing his book tour, details here.

pervasive connectivity through add-on antenna

Crowne Plaza Hotel in downtown Philadelphia, with two white cellular antenna in the upper right corner of the image.

The Crowne Plaza Hotel at 1800 Market Street in downtown Philadelphia has two cellular antenna wedged on the edge of their parking garage above the hotel's entrance. Providing cellular connectivity in dense urban areas can often entail this sort of creativity of placement for cellular network equipment. Maybe hotel guests were complaining as they parked their automobiles that their mobile calls were being dropped. This situation represents an addition of a cellular site to the built environment, plugged in as an opportunity to further develop the pervasive connectivity users have grown to expect, without any direct modification of the building's architecture itself. I expect sightings of equipment plug-ins like this will continue as more established rooftop locations are exhausted. Urban responses to network culture's needs for always-on connectivity have impacted the built environment very little compared to the urbanism of earlier eras. In the twentieth century, tall office buildings were enabled in part by telephone systems connecting the different floors;  will wireless, mobile communication lead to the development of new types of buildings, or just more creative re-use of existing structures, as evidenced by what the Crowne Plaza Hotel has done on their parking garage? 

sidewalk advertizing of a data center

Digital Realty Trust advertizing for their data center services at 833 Chestnut St., Philadelphia. April 2012.

Digital Realty Trust manages a data center at 833 Chestnut in central Philadelphia; this is one of the few, if not the only, data centers I have found that actively advertizes their business to passerby on the outside of the actual building in which the data center is housed. I wonder how much business the company has received through this sidewalk advertizing.

A view of 833 Chestnut Street from Market Street. April 2012.

laying down roads to build the city

New road, lights, and palm trees awaiting further development in western Las Vegas. March 2009.

The coming of spring in Philadelphia and the subsequent enclosing of the landscape in foliage, heat, and humidity for the next six months has me thinking about the desert. The sky is a different blue in the aridity of Las Vegas, and the horizon much further away than in the northeast US.

The desert emerges as a flat ground, accepting this development without even having to clear the site of overgrowth or debris. Lay down the asphalt, run electricity, water, gas, and telecommunication lines alongside the road, and start building. (Oh, and don't forget the palm trees. It isn't Las Vegas without the palms.) This is the one layer of urban development at this ragged urban fringe where the Las Vegas butts up against the foothills. The infrastructure is put down and the buildings sprout from from it.

New construction at the western edge of Las Vegas, March 2009.

antenna and advertizing in Manhattan

On the Manhattan side of the Manhattan Bridge, New York City. February 2012.

The billboard in the photo above is washed out, but on the left side of it can be made out the AT&T logo, advertizing an aspect of AT&T's mobile communication services. The juxtaposition of cellular antenna and billboard advertizing mobile communication services is perhaps telling of the need for a blanketing layer of cellular connection at a high-traffic zone in Manhattan, and the value of a prime location for advertizing at a high-traffic zone. Some research on this location at the Antenna Search website did not indicate if the antenna on top of this building are for the AT&T cellular network.

tubes and wires

Sansome Street near the University of Pennsylvania. There appears to be a fire department connection, two drainpipes, and at least two telecommunication lines all interfacing through the same general space, in a building that likely pre-dates everything but the drainpipes.

Ubiquitous connectivity in the post-networked landscape

AT&T cellular network equipment near Norristown, alongside the Pennsylvania Turnpike. This infrastructure mediates between the user making a call as they drive down the Turnpike and the telecommunication network itself. The user only has to carry their iPhone, but to make that phone functional requires sites such as this to be spread throughout the landscape. The iPhone is pocketable, but the rest of the system is very much not. This location is adjacent to the Schuylkill River rails-to-trails bike route between Philadelphia and Valley Forge, for anyone is interested in looking at the setup firsthand.

This July I will be presenting at "From networked to post-networked urbanism:  new infrastructure configurations and urban transitions", a roundtable conference in Autun, France, organized by LATTS, the French technology, infrastructure and society research organization. Below is the outline to the paper I will present.

Ubiquitous connectivity in the post-networked landscape: Situating the infrastructure of mobile communication through boundary objects

Mobile communication is one example of a system central to the production of post-networked urbanism. As the mobile phone has become a core device of interaction and cultural exchange, what impact is the provision of ethereal and wireless, always-on connectivity having on the urban landscape itself? In this essay I will argue that situating the telecommunication infrastructure supporting mobile communication offers a means of understanding the new relationships to space and place in this post-networked urban landscape, relationships where proximity and distance are now a matter more of connection through a technological device than location itself. The use of mobile phones and Internet-enabled smartphones has become more and more central to the everyday experience of most urban dwellers, and an understanding of the impact these connective systems--cellular antenna and towers, colocation centers, buried fiber-optic cables, and the like--have on the urban landscape provides a means of comprehending what the development of a post-networked urbanism actually involves. Mobile communication is a product of the embedding of ubiquitous computing technologies in the landscape (Shepard 2011). These mundane, everyday systems foreground the connectivity for the individual user through objects of hyper-design such as Apple's iPhone, whereas the other end of the connection, the mobile telecommunication networks often fade into the visually cluttered urban background. Examining the impact of mobile telecommunication infrastructure on the urban landscape opens a path to exploring these post-networked urban spaces.
   
Using the infrastructure of mobile telecommunication in the greater Philadelphia region as a core example of the ubiquitous technological systems that are widespread in the post-networked urban landscape of the global north, this essay will investigate the impact these infrastructural spaces have on and in a city. I will apply the concept of 'boundary objects' (Star and Griesemer 1989) as a means of tracing the inter-connections between immaterial, digital flows of mobile connectivity in space, and of identifying the networks that stretch throughout the world, but can be located in specific places.
 
Established means of critical analysis do not offer a suitable language for exploring post-networked urbanism. Tracking the multitude of assemblages that make up a post-networked city can be done by harnessing actor-network theory and assemblage urbanism (Farias and Bender 2010; McFarlane 2011). When proximity and distance are reconfigured through the technological mediation of devices such as mobile phones, analysis that maintains the territorial, spatial boundedness of the object of study cannot offer an appropriate means of conceptualizing the entirety of a post-networked city. For infrastructure studies to begin to address the new interactive and responsive relationships with infrastructural systems that the digital mediation of everyday life has wrought will necessitate the continued elaboration of new methodological approaches that can stitch together the associations and interactions between the physical and immaterial as well as the metabolic and the digital, shifting between individual users and the post-networked landscape itself.

Keywords: ubiquitous computing; mobile phone; telecommunication; Internet; actor-network theory; assemblage; boundary object; Philadelphia


Sources

Farias, I., and T. Bender eds. 2010. Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. London ; New York: Routledge.

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

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., and J. R. Griesemer. 1989. Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology,     1907-39. Social Studies of Science 19 (3):387-420.

Farias, I., and T. Bender eds. 2010. Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. London ; New York: Routledge.

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

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., and J. R. Griesemer. 1989. Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science 19 (3):387-420.

The Un(known) City

A piece of the infrastructural underground, underwater. Sierra Nevada Foothills.

 
A better understanding what Steve Pile articulates in the quote below encapsulates much of the work of this blog:

The development of the underground city involves a double-edged sword of progress (just as the unconscious involves the tension between opposing elements; just as the uncanny involves the play of the familiar and the strange): technologies capable of building the city underground are simultaneously destructive and creative. In order to enable the metropolis to function, to clean its streets, to rid it of disease, and to allow ease of movement of goods, information, and people, there are a vast array of underground systems. As much as progress was measured in the size and spectacle of large buildings, grand projects, wide boulevards, so under the streets lay railways, sewers, gas and water pipes, pipes for compressed air and telephone (telecommunication) cabling. As architectural and urban design render the city on the surface known and transparent through spatial practices such as urban planning, streets are repeatedly dug up, reburied, and scarred by the doctoring of the city's intestinal world. The city is indeed built on networks of information, money, and people, but these do not exist in cyberspace: they are encased in iron and plastic under the ground.

from: Steve Pile. 2001. "The Un(known) City...or, an Urban Geography of What Lies Buried below the Surface". in The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

wireless Internet broadcasting from a crumbling church

Re-use of an existing structure: Clear Communication 4G wifi antennas mounted on St. Peters Church of Christ, 47th Street and Kingsessing Avenue, West Philadelphia.

This stone church, built around the turn of the 20th century, when West Philadelphia was initially developing into a streetcar suburb, has fallen into severe disrepair over the last number of years, but today it supports an antenna array for Clear's 4G wireless Internet. Here is Clear's coverage map. The church does not seem to hold services anymore. The roof is collapsing in many places. At least two trees are growing out of the structure itself. The stained glass on the west-facing wall has collapsed in on itself. At the same time, the turret broadcasts wireless connectivity throughout the neighborhood. I use it even, at my apartment a few blocks away. This church and its wireless connection to the Internet illustrate a central issue of networked urbanism: places can become connective nodes to the Internet or cellular networks, but be disconnected to their neighborhoods themselves. For Clear, this location provides a tall point in the neighborhood from which to site their antenna without having to build a tower. For Clear's customer, the Internet connection matter and the location where the network equipment actually sits is secondary, but the site--the infrastructure of Internet connection--has a relationship to the city as well. In this instance, the location exists in a state of disrepair bordering on abandonment, where the addition of Clear's antenna in the last few years are probably the only modification or renovation to the church in decades. The provision of wireless Internet connectivity flows through this place of worship falling into ruin; the network matters and, to a degree, the church and the neighborhood itself does not. If the turret crumbled apart, would Clear rebuild the stonework or just look for another location? I would imagine that Clear would move their antenna to another point in the area, as would any other Internet or mobile communication provider.

As wireless, mobile connectivity becomes still more central to how people move about cities such as Philadelphia, these situations will continue to emerge. Using mobile phones, accessing the Internet, and all the everyday gestures and actions that go on in a networked city require an infrastructural back-end to connect that mobile phone, and this infrastructure exists in or on top of places like St. Peter's Church of Christ in West Philadelphia. The New Aesthetic that James Bridle has been documenting prolifically and eloquently is not solely new things and places and the like. It is often the re-use of older systems, buildings, and technologies. This thick mixing of old, new, and near-future is the networked city, where the wireless connection to the communication infrastructure may be out of sight, but is still present somewhere, like on the top of an century-old, crumbling stone church.

 Detail of St. Peter's Church of Christ highlighting the tree growing out of the stonework as well as the dilapidated roof.

The western side of the church. Note the stained glass window has broken apart.

Two windows at street level, backlit from inside.

blue windows, a water tower, and cellular antenna

Creative re-use of a water tower as a mount for cellular antenna on Fairmount Ave. between 4th St. and 5th St. in North Philadelphia. February 2012.

The use of existing structures such as water towers and smokestacks as high-points to mount cellular antenna is common in Philadelphia. The post-industrial urban landscape is littered with sites such as the above one, a boarded up factory site advertizing its current tenant the 'Trans-Atlantic Co.' which according to their website is an importer of security and shelving equipment. Even if the water tower is still in use, which is unlikely, the Trans-Atlantic Company apparently has no need for windows, having boarded up and painted bright blue  every window in the building. What was likely a factory with natural lighting through these now-boarded windows has turned into a warehouse where windows are not needed, the lighting provided by electricity.

The building now provides a high point from which the ethereal, wireless connectivity is broadcast throughout the neighborhood, but, seen in the photograph below, the building's presence on the street is closed off, a canvas for a lovelorn graffiti artist to bemoan his or her love, apparently named Snicks, leaving Philadelphia. This site provides an example of b how the ubiquity of wireless communication is actually produced. Those signal bars on the iPhone come from somewhere, places like the antenna atop this building in North Philadelphia.

A frontal view of the Trans-Atlantic Company's warehouse, with graffiti atop blue-painted boarded up windows.

infrastructure of mobile telephony and the physicality of the Internet

An AT&T cellular tower sits between the playground for the Hawthorne Cultural Center and a block of two-story, brick row-homes at the intersection of Carpenter Street and South 13th Street in South Philadelphia. A flock of birds settled on the top of the tower just as the picture was taken. January 2012.

A key, ubiquitous communication node in a networked city like Philadelphia is the cellular antenna and cellular tower. In addition to connecting mobile phone calls, these cellular antenna create the ethereal link between an individual’s smartphone and the Internet. To check an email, find directions with Google Maps, interact with social media, or to access any number of other uses of the mobile Internet requires these ubiquitous, monotone rectangular boxes to be mounted atop high places throughout the landscape. The ‘always-on’ nature of mobile connectivity is created through the maintenance of these cellular networks. The individual device, such as an Apple iPhone, may fit in a pocket, but the background network is immense. Data centers house the servers which contain our digital footprint and a vast array of fiber-optic cabling transmits this information, and the final connection to the user is made through cellular antenna. While the design and utility of that iPhone is of particular concern to the user and to Apple, the design of the infrastructural support to that device often looks like a haphazard afterthought.
In a city such as Philadelphia, these antenna are typically situated three ways. Antenna can be mounted atop commercial or residential buildings, often on former industrial structures such as water towers or smokestacks. They can be located at the top of electrical transmission towers, or they can occupy freestanding towers dedicated specifically to providing mobile connectivity. Freestanding cellular sites in Philadelphia often occupy the interstitial margins of the city, wedged into an empty lot alongside a major roadway or towering over a residential neighborhood. The infrastructural aesthetic for cellular equipment seems to focus on presumptions of anonyminity as well as functional concerns placed before formal design. Muted colors such as whites and greys dominate, with little attention paid to the impact on connecting the design of the structure with the adjacent neighborhood. At the street-level, these towers and their attendant ground-level equipment are typically surrounded by a chain link fence displaying some information about who owns and operates the tower, such as AT&T, as well as one or more ‘No Trespassing’ signs. While these ‘No Trespassing’ signs are a legal necessity for practical reasons as well as safety reasons, it is worth considering how mobile communication, this system that provides connection to each other and to the Internet occurs through spaces that are separated from the urban landscape itself, sequestered behind fences while at the same time towering over the surrounding area.

As the individual device in the hand of the user becomes a normalized element in everyday life, the impact of mobile communication infrastructure in the landscape itself is overlooked. The hyper-designed object of an iPhone cannot function without the connective background provided by cellular antenna. While the utility of mobile telephony is contained on the screen of that iPhone, the impact of the network on the landscape itself is distinctively physical and visible, located in equipment like these cellular towers.

Everyday Structures at the 2012 AAG conference in New York City

Just south of the South Street Bridge, a quonset hut houses the Springfield Beer Distributors, soon to be relocated due to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia's push across the Schuylkill River, with a single mast cellular tower in the background.

The Association of American Geographers annual conference is in New York City this year. On Saturday 25 February, at the early hour of 8am, I will be presenting research drawn from fieldwork in the Philadelphia region over the last year or so. Attending the conference requires a paid registration, but if anyone readers out there can make it, please say hello afterward.

Here is a description of the session, Geographies of the Internet: Situating information and communication technologies in the urban landscape

As ubiquitous computing, broadband Internet, mobile communication, and the related information and communication technologies become more and more embedded in our daily lives, there is a need to examine the spaces of connection and dis-connection through many analytic lenses. This session will utilize qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches to studying the geographies of the network society, from examining the spaces of mobile communication infrastructure in the metropolitan landscape to mapping the accessibility of broadband Internet. The goal of this session is to critically interrogate the places produced by and through the "Net": these ephemeral and often obscured systems that are at the core of our daily lives as scholars and citizens.

And here is the abstract for my paper presentation, Producing mobile communication: situating digital infrastructure in the urban landscape:

Contemporary urban life is closely linked to the digital telecommunication connection provided by mobile connectivity. While the ethereal presence of the telecommunication networks is visible in the signal bars on a mobile phone, the less-visible physical presence of this digital infrastructure is creating a new utility within the urban landscape that needs to be considered as a component of contemporary urban life. This presentation interrogates one of the primary components of ubiquitous computing: the digital infrastructure of cellular antenna and the like that produces mobile connectivity; this presentation also  examines the communication infrastructure's relationship to the street itself. Using the case of Philadelphia, I address how connecting individuals occurs in spaces disconnected from the street and urban public space in general. I will discuss how to apply a methodological framework from brought out of critical urban studies can be combined with concepts from science and technology studies such as boundary objects to consider the co-production of the urban today through the built landscape of the city itself as well as the ethereal spaces of mobile communication. I argue that spatializing the infrastructure of mobile connectivity and is an important and undervalued component of understanding the twenty-first century urban landscape.