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.