the networked city and geographic blogging projects

An AT&T cellular antenna bordering the Hawthorne Cultural Center's playground on one side and a residential neighborhood on the other at South 13th St. and Carpenter St. in South Philadelphia.

Everyday Structures was recently mentioned on Mammoth, an architecture/landscape/infrastructure blog that I would consider a a key contributor to the emerging dialogue that seeks to examine anew our networked, crowded, polluted, amazing and always-changing landscape. I wanted to acknowledge how rewarding it is to receive mention from a blog I have followed for the last few years, and to address some of the points raised in Mammoth's post about this blog.

Rob Holmes writes at Mammoth:

In a recent conversation with a couple other landscape architects, I noted that I think geographers are, in many ways, doing a better job of conceptualizing landscape than landscape architects, particularly with relation to infrastructural conditions in the networked city — Wiig’s blog is an excellent example of that.

This is an on point observation because one of the reasons I started this blog was to address these issues. The sphere of architecture blogging that has become prominent, such as Bldgblog, City of Sound, Mammoth itself, Kazys Varnelis's blog, Pruned, Infranet Lab and even newer additions such as Urban Omnibus and Polis come more from an architecture and design focus. This is in no way a bad way to approach the contemporary landscape, but there are other ways to do so. My interest has been in the relationships that emerge when you mix together old and new spaces, and more-so, in the spaces of the infrastructural systems that support our contemporary, networked landscape. There are some people doing similar work that I really enjoy, such as Friends of the Pleistocene and Necessity for Ruins, and even a Geography professor blogging at Cosmopolis, Matthew Gandy, whose work has been instrumental to my scholarship (I also need to mention the Center for Land Use Interpretation as a key contributor to my way of seeing infrastructure and the networked city). But there is always room for new voices as well as the need for geographic investigations to step away from the traditional means of publishing in academic journals. I see the geography of the networked city as one where proximity and distance are mediated through wireless, ubiquitous technological devices such as mobile phones, where space is interspersed with hertzian flows of communicative information that may be invisible to the human eye, but are still locatable in the infrastructural components that produce and maintain these flows.

The geography of the networked city is at base its infrastructure--the systems that maintain the flows of people, goods, and information across a constantly shifting landscape, what Kazys Varnelis termed the 'networked ecologies' of our cities. Varnelis defines 'networked ecologies as:

a series of codependent systems of environmental mitigation, land-use organization, communication and service delivery…[These infrastructures] are networked, hypercomplex systems produced by technology, laws, political pressures, disciplinary desires, environmental constraints and a myriad other pressures, tied together with feedback mechanisms. Networked ecologies embody the dominant form of organization today, the network, but these networks can be telematic, physical, or even social. (from the introduction to The Infrastructural City, page 15)   

Mammoth organized and contributed to a bloggers' reading group based around the most complete guide to the networked city thus far: The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, which Varnelis edited. As Rob Holmes points out above, Everyday Structures is an attempt to continue this investigation into the landscape of the networked city, into the mix of natural and cultural, infrastructural backgrounds and the foregrounded built environment of cities today.

The Infrastructural City is an overview that leaves open the need to continue these discussions, as well to add to the subjects covered. There are many new geographies emerging out of (or into?) the networked city, relationships layered among industrial technologies of the modern city, the suburban and rural spaces scattered about, and the natural environment that still underlies everything else, even in the networked city. With the holiday lull between semesters in effect right now, I will get back on track with this blog. I have the time to devote to putting together more writing and photography, to continue tracing the spaces and places that make up the networked city today.

orange tubing, underground

In SEPTA's Juniper Station the other night, waiting for the trolley to West Philadelphia, I noticed the horizontal orange conduit at the top of the photograph running along the ceiling, in contrast to the dark green and dirty light grey of the rest of the wall. I would bet that the orange tubing houses some fiber optic cable, running between buildings above ground, but through the public transit tunnel underneath. On the other hand, the cable might connect to the cellular antenna that provide mobile connectivity in the station, or it work in both scenarios.

the geologic city at work

Asphalt folding and flowing around a taxicab's tires. Midtown Manhattan, early fall 2011.

For those who have not yet picked up a copy of the Friends of the Pleistocene's Geologic City: a Field Guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York, I strongly encourage you to do so. The guide delves into the geologic underpinnings of New York City, from the Chilean origins of the rock salt that is spread on the city's streets every winter to the Indiana limestone that clads many of the city's iconic buildings. Geologic City is a small book that has the ability to radically change how we see urban places, to situate the flows of human and natural elements at various speeds from the speed of light or the speed of sound, to the flow of water or the erosion of stone, among the cultural and economic exchanges that are more commonly foregrounded as the work of a city such as New York City. My favorite part of the book is the inspiration it offers to conduct similar explorations of other places. While I would enjoy seeing another North American city treated in a similar fashion, it would be great to see this approach applied, for instance, to an African city or an Asian one.

suburban despair...?

Near the Cracker Barrel alongside the Cross County Trail heading into Plymouth Meeting, PA.

Living in Philadelphia without a automobile of my own, I rarely head into the suburban fringe ringing the city except on bicycle rides. The Schuylkill River Trail runs upriver past Valley Forge, at some point in the next few years heading all the way to Reading. The Cross County Trail winds its way north away from the Schuylkill into Plymouth Meeting, through a wetland, past a power plant with a tall smokestack, then quickly into the morass of lightly-planned strip malls, corporate chain stores, and other indicators of upper middle class living in the United States.

What I enjoy about heading out to this area is how visible the infrastructural networks are. There are high voltage electricity lines parading across the fields, and this stormwater management system adjacent to the Cracker Barrel's parking lot is nicely designed and well-maintained. The stormwater retention pond looks almost natural; the willows and other foliage are healthy and doing their job keeping the soil in place through their root structures. 

But that bright red shopping cart, what is it doing keeled over in six inches of water? Did it wash down in the last storm, or was it thrown down from above, the victim of some minor theft? Regardless, the red shopping cart from one of the nearby box stores provides some welcome color into this late fall scene, exposing how this almost-natural-looking landscape is the product of human intervention, down to the abandoned shopping cart laying on its side in the pond.

 

warning: underground cable

A utility pole in Lincoln Park, Chicago. In the alley behind Big Apple Finer Foods. I always enjoy seeing the different fonts and symbols AT&T and the other telecommunications providers use, and how the designs change over time. These white stickers seem to have replaced bright orange ones.

old and discarded, old and restored and for sale

Televisions. Manhattan. October 2011.

Typewriters. Philadelphia. October 11. Neither of these devices were produced to connect to the Internet. The typewriters don't even have a screen, let alone a touchscreen. With as much time as I spend on various computing devices--primarily a laptop, a desktop, and a mobile phone--it is difficult to consider typing on a typewriter or consuming popular culture from a television and not through online sources. And both of these technologies are not even that ancient; the typewriters will certainly still function when all of my current computers have ceased working.

 

brown pipe

along the Schuylkill River. This tube will soon hold up a traffic sign.

portable cellular antenna site in the redwoods

Between Porter College and Kresge College, University of California, Santa Cruz, June 2010.

Peter Sloterdijk, data centers and the spaces of networked, psychedelic capitalism

What was 365 Main's Oakland data center near Jack London Square, now owned by Digital Realty Trust. 2nd St. and Brush St., Oakland in January 2010. (photo by author; map here).

Peter Sloterdijk: In your exploration of the "architectures of foam," you write that modernity renders the issue of residence explicit. What do you mean by that? 

Peter Sloterdijk: Here I am developing an idea that Walter Benjamin addressed in his Arcades Project. He starts from the anthropological assumption that people in all epochs dedicate themselves to creating interiors, and at the same time he seeks to emancipate this motif from its apparent timelessness. He therefore asks the question: How does capitalist man in the 19th century express his need for an interior? The answer is: He uses the most cutting-edge technology in order to orchestrate the most archaic of all needs, the need to immunize existence by constructing protective islands. In the case of the arcade, modern man opts for glass, wrought iron, and assembly of prefabricated parts in order to build the largest possible interior. For this reason, Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, erected in London in 1851, is the paradigmatic building. It forms the first hyper-interior that offers a perfect expression of the spatial idea of psychedelic capitalism. It is the prototype of all later theme-park interiors and event architectures. The arcade heralds the abolition of the outside world. It abolishes outdoor markets and brings them indoors, into a closed sphere. The antagonistic spatial types of salon and market meld here to form a hybrid. This is what Benjamin found so theoretically exciting: The 19th-century citizen seeks to expand his living room into a cosmos and at the same time to impress the dogmatic form of a room on the universe. This sparks a trend that is perfected in the 20th-century apartment design as well as in shopping-mall and sports-stadium design-there are the three paradigms of modern construction, that is, the construction of micro-interiors and macro-interiors. (p. 128)*

///

Sloterdijk identifies the place in the middle of the 18th-century where capitalist society embedded itself even more into the urban fabric. This "psychedelic capitalism" identified itself through an exhibition space that would twist and morph into the generic, everyday shopping mall--before that mall became so bland to be unseen and thus naturalized in the landscape as the place where shopping happens, the type of building had to be created.

If the Crystal Palace transformed society, as a space that moved social and economic relations inside, is there a subsequent contemporary example that has equally transformed our networked society? Is it still the shopping mall, or could it be a data center? Data centers house the Net, hosting websites, storing email, and the like. They do not provide interior spaces for individuals to shop or socialize, but they do organize and produce the flows of information around which society, to a large extent these days, functions. The shopping mall now competes with online retailers, the salon where people would gather to socialize now competes-and has probably lost-to online social media such as Facebook. But the design of the data center is in no way celebrated and is rarely even acknowledged in the urban landscape in the way Sloterdijk talks of the Crystal Palace. As is evident in the picture above of a data center near downtown Oakland, the design seems intended to reinforce the secure, citadel-like, veiled anonymity of the building and, consequently, the activities that go on inside. There is little in the way of hyper-interiors in a data center. The interior space they produce is located on the computer's monitor or the smartphone's touchscreen, accessible only to the individual holding the device. The space itself fades into the urban background, visible only when you are looking for it.

The utility of urban space to declare the motives and intentions of "psychedelic capitalism" in its current incarnation still exists, just look at any spectacular skyscraper development, but perhaps the organizational space for our society today is embodied in the largely anonymous data centers that are scattered about the landscape, providing the data for our ubiquitous connectivity, but, spatially at least, fading into the metropolitan background we move through daily.

*from an interview with Peter Sloterdijk at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 17 February, 2009, where Sloterdijk asked himself the questions. Transcribed in Harvard Design Magazine 30, Spring/Summer 2009. 

yellow pipes