Above-ground impact of the 2nd Avenue Subway construction

2nd Avenue at 86th Street in Manhattan, looking north. September 2013.

 
The megaproject tunneling underneath 2nd Avenue in Manhattan, scheduled to sync into the New York City Subway system in December of 2016, has provided some marvelous images of the process of digging enormous passageways underneath existing streets and inhabited buildings, in order to actually construct the subway line. Another much, much more visible but, I would argue, less noticed element of this project is the re-purposing of part of 2nd Avenue itself to stage the construction equipment and materials, house the project managers, and provide ventilation and access to the digging sites all has to locate somewhere, and that somewhere is, at least in the 2nd Avenue and mid-80s blocks, in the far eastern lane of the boulevard.

A collection of eight streetlights awaiting placement. September 2013.

A space intended to move traffic has been transitioned--for the time it takes to complete the digging below--into a construction site for a project invisible to see above ground. Like most building sites in Manhattan, this one is loud at times with the rumble of large trucks carting away soil and debris, but the material is nowhere to be seen, carried up from the underground load-by-load, driven off somewhere else, perhaps to New Jersey? In the meantime, 2nd Avenue is home to a collection on-site office trailers, what the Center for Land Use Interpretation terms "the invisible architecture of the urban environment".

Note the signage on the blue tarps indicating what business is obscured by this construction structure. The muted, neutral grey of the temporary building speaks well to its "invisibility". September 2013.

Looking south into the construction area. September 2013.

For more great photos of documenting the process of building the subway line, New York City's Metropolitan Transit Authority's Flickr page is worth a look. The MTA's Flickr account is a great example of the utility of social media to city agencies - there is lots of behind the scenes, under and above-ground photos of areas of New York City that most visitors and residents are never able to gain access to.

Essay published: Everyday Landmarks of Networked Urbanism

 In downtown Philadelphia not far from City Hall,a cellular antenna array is located on top of an AT&T mobile phone retail store and a hair salon. Photograph taken by author, 2013.

The current issue of the Journal of Urban Technology was just released; it includes an essay I wrote, Everyday Landmarks of Networked Urbanism: Cellular Antenna Sites and the Infrastructure of Mobile Communication in Philadelphia. Readers of this blog will recognize many overlapping themes and concerns in the essay as it more formally details the research on mobile communication systems and ubiquitous computing infrastructures in Philadelphia.

The journal's publisher, Taylor & Francis, offers fifty free downloads of the essay at this link for those of you without academic affiliations.

The abstract and introductory section of the essay follows.

At the center of the image is an AT&T cellular antenna affixed to an electricity pylon alongside the Schuylkill River flyover for Roosevelt Boulevard in Fairmount Park, Northwest Phila- delphia. Photograph taken by author, 2012.

Everyday landmarks of Networked Urbanism: Cellular antenna sites and the infrastructure of mobile communication in Philadelphia

ABSTRACT: Harnessing the utility of mobile communication and the mobile Internet is a common, everyday aspect of the urban condition today. The wireless connectivity these pocketable devices harness is produced through an electromagnetic overlay that emanates from cellular antenna and towers. These sites have a distinct if often overlooked presence in the urban landscape of the United States. Through fieldwork in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, this essay examines the aesthetic impact of telecommunications network equipment such as cellular sites as a means of locating these sites as key socio-technical actors in one of the information and telecommunication infrastructures of contemporary, networked urbanism.

Alongside the Schuylkill River on the western edge of downtown Philadelphia, two of AT&T’s cellular antenna arrays are bolted to the top of this building, 500 South 27th Street, which is a prominent node in AT&T’s national telecommunication network. Photograph taken by author, 2011.

Introduction

Study a city and neglect its sewers and power supplies (as many have), and you miss essential aspects of distributional justice and planning power. Study an information system and neglect its standards, wires, and settings, and you miss equally essential aspects of aesthetics, justice, and change. (Star, 1999: 379, citing Latour and Hermant, 1998).

Anywhere a connection to a mobile communication network can be found, a cellular site is nearby. Cellular antenna broadcast their communicative potential throughout an area, disregarding distinctions between public and private spaces—as well as the built and natural environment—as the network equipment connects individuals to each other and to the Internet via larger systems of fiber-optic cabling, data centers, and so on (for further discussion of the engineering of telecommunications systems, see Ascher, 2007; Hayes, 2006). To check an email, find directions with a locative mapping program, interact with social media, or to access any number of other uses of the mobile Internet requires the dispersal of ubiquitous, monotone grey and white, thin vertical rectangular boxes mounted throughout high points in a city. The “always-on” nature of mobile connectivity is created through the maintenance of these cellular networks, a situation described by human-computer interaction as well as urban scholars as “ubiquitous computing”, which is defined as the dispersal of computing power—through devices like mobile phones—into the urban landscape itself, with the subsequent changes to urban movement and the flow of information throughout a city and the world (Dourish and Bell, 2011; Greenfield and Shepard, 2007; Weiser, 1991). The potential of ubiquitous computing is inherently dispersed throughout a city’s “electromagnetic terrain” (Mitchell, 2003: 55), but at the same time the connection to information and communication networks requires the cellular sites—among other equipment such as wireless Internet (wi-fi) routers—from which this service emanates.

The individual device, such as an Apple iPhone, may fit in a pocket, but the background network is immense, stretching across cities and encompassing much of the world. The last leg of the infrastructural support is wireless and immaterial, but the rest of the system exists as distinct spaces of network equipment embedded within the landscape (see Ascher, 2005: 130-131; Hayes, 2006: 303-311 as well as Graham and Marvin, 2001). As the writer Andrew Blum’s work charting the infrastructure of the Internet shows, data centers house the servers which contain our digital information footprint; a vast array of terrestrial and submarine fiber-optic cabling transmits this information (Blum, 2012), and the final connection to the user can be made through cellular antenna (Hayes, 2006). The aesthetic design and utility of, for instance, an Apple iPhone is of particular concern to the individual user and to Apple, but the design of the infrastructural support is more mundane, similar to other elements of municipal infrastructures such as electricity pylons or wooden telephone poles tying together fixed-line telecommunication systems. Because cellular sites often sit higher than the surrounding city, they become what engineers Claire Barratt and Ian Whitelaw call an “everyday landmark” of the city (Barratt and Whitelaw, 2011: 184). Considering cellular sites as landmarks of contemporary networked urbanism is a productive first step in examining the role this equipment play in cities today.

Philadelphia presents a productive location for examining these issues because the city encompasses many interwoven urban eras from the Colonial to the post-industrial present day. The physical infrastructures of modern, nineteenth-and-twentieth century Philadelphia—water, electricity, gas, street transportation and railroads—are layered with the late twentieth century’s information and communication infrastructures, as well as freeways, a major airport, and the ubiquitous connectivity systems of the twenty-first century, on a street grid originally laid out in the seventeenth century by the city’s founder, William Penn (Dunn and Dunn, 1982: 5). Freestanding cellular sites in Philadelphia often occupy the interstitial margins of the city, wedged into an empty lot alongside a major roadway or standing over a residential neighborhood. While an analysis of the locations of cellular sites indicates that many of the skyscrapers and other buildings of the central business district have cellular antenna either on top of or bolted to the side of their walls, these locations are high up on private property and consequently difficult to observe (General Data Resources, 2013).
  
The infrastructural aesthetic for cellular equipment seems to focus on presumptions of invisibility and anonymity as well as functional concerns placed before formal design considerations. Muted colors such as whites and greys dominate, with seemingly little attention paid to the impact on integrating the design of the structure with the urban fabric of the adjacent neighborhood. The towers’ heights are meant to disperse the cellular signal over a large area, while the antenna themselves act as a “base station” sending and receiving radio-transmission of information are typically clustered in groups of three parallel to the ground to broadcast their signals (IEEE, 2012b). 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 or Verizon, as well as one or more “No Trespassing” signs. Cellular sites are a perpetually repeatable component dispersed throughout cities and the world to provide wireless network connectivity; the aesthetic intent of this equipment is not locally variable nor does it readily adapt to the particular historic legacies of the neighborhoods in which the equipment is situated. Even so, cellular sites may not have a unique presence in the landscape, but they are still a key actor the networks enabling information exchange in cities today.

This essay focuses on the equipment that supports the wireless exchange of information in the urban space of Philadelphia as a means of locating and grounding these immaterial flows in the built and natural environments of the city itself, of making visible the systems responsible for transforming the landscape into a space for the active, wireless transmission of information. I first discuss mobile communication and the mobile Internet as a component of networked urbanism today using recent developments spatializing and urbanizing Actor-Network Theory to do so (Farias and Bender, 2010; Latour, 2005; McFarlane, 2011). The majority of the essay takes the information and infrastructure studies scholar Susan Leigh Star’s call for ethnographies of infrastructure (1999), from which the introductory quote is drawn, to investigate the aesthetics of cellular antenna and tower sites. The intent of this examination is to draw attention to this new layer of urban infrastructure that in less than twenty years has become a pervasive element in the landscape of cities and open spaces throughout the United States, and to consider what it takes for a mobile computing device to connect to the globalized telecommunications networks.

[continues...]

To read more of the essay, go to the Journal of Urban Technology's site at Taylor & Francis to download the final essay for free; the pre-production version of the essay is available for download as a .pdf here.

KEYWORDS: infrastructure, wireless, mobile communication, cellular antenna tower, Philadelphia, AT&T 

Standing high above its south Philadelphia neighborhood, this AT&T cellular tower backs on to the playground for a community center. Photograph taken by author, 2012.

Thinking the ‘smart city’: power, politics and networked urbanism

Because every discussion of "The Smart City" has to have a enthusiastic but generic image to convey city-ness, this image shows some buildings in central Philadelphia with dappled sunlight reflecting from one mirrored surface onto another. Photo by Alan Wiig, March 2013.

My Internet and urbanism, geography colleague at Clark University Taylor Shelton (@kytjs) and I are organizing a session at the 2014 Association of American Geographers annual meeting, in April in Tampa, Florida. We are looking for a few more contributors, so please reach out if the topic correlates with your research interests (contact emails below).


Thinking the ‘smart city’: power, politics and networked urbanism

Organized by Alan Wiig (Temple University) and Taylor Shelton (Clark University)

The fact that cities are increasingly being augmented by digital hardware and software, producing massive amounts of data about urban processes, has been well documented in recent years. Discourses around so-called ‘smart cities’ and tend to position them as either a panacea, an entirely new conceptual and material breakthrough, or as a kind of dystopian imposition of technological rationality onto cities, leaving the precise nature of this social and spatial reorganization unclear. This session will engage these issues through empirically-focused, but conceptually-rich, research on how digital information and communication technologies do not simply connect cities to distanciated networks, but also drive new forms of urban development and new methods of civic exchange and political contention between municipalities and their residents.

This session seeks papers that document and analyze how these new socio-technical systems are reconfiguring the relationships of urban governance, and how these systems remain embedded in longstanding social structures at both local and global scales. We are also interested in how geographers might offer a unique perspective on the processes and outcomes of smart urbanism, especially given the dominance of computer scientists and management consultants in the making of these projects. Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:

-- Policy mobilities and the ‘smart city’ model
-- Politics of urban data
-- Smart cities and technocratic planning
-- Smart cities as new urban entrepreneurial assemblages
-- Virtual spaces in the networked city
-- Role of transnational corporations in promoting smart city developments
-- Smart cities and urban environmental sustainability
-- Smart cities in the Global South
-- Cybernetics and the intellectual history of smart urbanism

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to Alan Wiig (alanwiig [at] temple.edu) and Taylor Shelton (jshelton [at] clarku.edu) by October 21 to ensure sufficient time for review.

Considering the energy demands of mobile connectivity

In the center of the image on the far wall is a mobile phone charging station in Boston's South Station during the afternoon rush hour. Photo by author, August 2013.

What is the role of electrical energy and batteries in enabling mobile communication? How might we develop a practically-minded, spatial grammar through which we could describe the material/electrical/digital relationships between energy, mobile communication and digital connectivity, social exchange, and personal mobility? Beginning a year or so from now then continuing in the summer of 2015, I will be an international visiting fellow of the DEMAND Centre at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. To quote from their website, DEMAND--Dynamics of Energy, Mobility, and Demand--"takes a distinctive approach to end use energy demand, recognising that energy is not used for its own sake but as part of accomplishing social practices at home, at work and in moving around. In essence the Centre focuses on what energy is for." The Centre takes the dynamic, interconnectedness of practices of mobility of bodies, goods, and information, and the energy consumption needs that are inherent in providing these services, as an entry point to understanding what energy is used for and why those uses are considered valuable.
 

A close-up of the charging station in Boston's South Station. The description on the screen states: "Battery low? Charge up here. Charges faster than a wall charge." There is a credit card swipe and what looks like six plugs for the most common mobile phones. The service provider, Go Charge (motto: "Never miss a moment"), seems to be capitalizing on users running out of battery and not having a charging cable and plug with them. When unbroken connection to social media, etc. is deemed essentially mandatory, the underlying systems necessitate not just providing pervasive connectivity--through cellular infrastructures and the like--but also having energy in the battery that powers the mobile computing device. Photo by author, August 2013.

Tying to my longstanding interest in the spatial ramifications of the Internet and mobile communication, my project will examine how electrical energy is used to provide individuals with these services. What is the role of charging and batteries in powering these Internet-enabled computing devices--smartphones primarily--that connect users to the global telecommunication systems that in turn mediate a significant portion of everyday social exchange? The central issue motivating this project is: how do individuals negotiate keeping their communicative, computing devices charged and how is this impacting the landscapes of everyday mobility such as train stations and airports, railroad cars and airplanes? How are buildings and transit systems adjusting to the increasing demand for power and electrical outlets to charge personal computing devices, and, in turn, is the need for charging areas impacting considerations of the design and layout of these transit nodes? These empirical questions lead to more theoretical considerations about the materiality of energy in the form of batteries, the high-design of devices--such as an Apple iPhone--versus the utilitarian intent of the charging plugs, cables, and wall sockets, and even to the sociology of standards that are latent in all these considerations. 
 
For this project I will document the informal, everyday practice of charging and recharging devices by conducting an visually-motivated ethnography of the role of electricity and batteries, and the process of charging electricity into batteries, that enables mobile communication. I will develop a conceptual framework to then approach a socio-spatial understanding of the everyday practice around the--most likely--multiple intersections of charging, batteries, mobile communication, and general, personal mobility in and around Lancaster and connecting to London and the United Kingdom at large. 

Seat-based power outlets in Boston's Logan International Airport, with signage for the service both on the chair-backs and on the adjacent wall, stating "power up". Negotiating a flight today necessitates topping up a laptop or smartphone's battery so work or entertainment can continue until arrival at an intermediary airport or the end-destination itself. What is interesting from an electricity perspective is that power generation and delivery is regional whereas the inter-connectivity of the Internet and global telecommunication systems is--by their very nature--not regionally bound. In many ways the overarching story of digital communication is not about bits and bytes transmitted over distance but of the pulses of light--energy--contained within fiber optic cabling that move about, becoming a text message or an email or a video of a cat.

Preliminary fieldwork in train stations in the North-East United States and airports throughout the US as well as Heathrow indicates that with the exponential increase in the use of personal, mobile computing devices, the need to power and recharge these devices is constantly growing. While individually, these smartphones do not draw much energy, how extensive is the overall demand for electricity to power these digital things? Is this demand considered by planners of current and future transit operations? 

For now I have more questions to guide the research than findings to report. I have started a photo-set on Flickr of charging stations and charging practices in train stations and airports as a way to collect some preliminary fieldwork-documentation of this topic. The set can be viewed here.