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.