Walking to Newcastle International Airport: A photoessay

Leaving Durham, England...

Past a mini roundabout at the edge of town.

To Newcastle International Airport, flying to Philadelphia via Heathrow's Terminal Five on the fringe of London.

After I check my suitcase I have a few hours before the flight leaves. Walking around outside with the idling taxis, I notice a route sign for pedestrians into and out of the airport. This would be a rarity in the United States--no one walks to the airport! But apparently in Newcastle, this is an option. The path winds alongside this glassy, Doubletree by Hilton with its placeless, airport-international styling.

 Behind the Doubletree hotel, the airport path intersects with a sidewalk that runs alongside B6198, a peripheral road that proceeds alongside the airport's perimeter. Across the road is the Premier Inn, with a slightly dated, cartoonish aesthetic.

Next to the Permier Inn the sidewalk continues past the Prestwick Terrace, a residential sliver bounded by roads, rails, and airport parking.

A gate and the runway just past.

The path continuing alongside B6198. I turned around about here because rain was starting to fall and I didn't have an appropriate jacket to put on.

On the way back I notices the cellular antenna sites mimicking the flagpoles--one on either side of the three white poles in the center of the image. Mobile communication infrastructure and the logistics systems--including places for individuals to stay before or after taking a flight--cluster around airports.

And then waiting for my flight to board, looking back out at the landscape.

Exploring the Landscape of Smart Urbanism in Philadelphia

The new corporate office cluster of the Philadelphia Navy Yard, a special economic zone for the southeastern Pennsylvania region, with its executive putting green in the foreground. For more photos see my Navy Yard photoset on Flickr.

What follows is an initial draft of research I presented at two conferences this June, first at the Symposium on Urban Informatics: Exploring Smarter Cities at Drexel University in Philadelphia, then a week later at the Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn? International Roundtable Workshop at Durham University in the United Kingdom.

Smart Urbanism in Philadelphia: Utilizing Social and Technical Systems to Promote Economic Growth

In this essay I examine Philadelphia’s engagement with the smart city concept through two interconnected projects, the Digital On-Ramps workforce development efforts that originated from consultation IBM's Smarter Cities Challenge provided, and the city’s economic branding and marketing efforts “Philadelphia: Smart City, Smart Choice” (pdf). My overall argument is that, while there will likely be many productive outcomes of both projects--new industries and jobs in those new industries for marginalized city residents--through these new, technologically-mediated forms of civic engagement and economic promotion, the greater utility of the ‘smart city’ is to present Philadelphia as an innovative, competitive node in the global economy.

The smart city as a concept can be defined as the municipal adoption of software, hardware, urban sensor networks, smartphone applications, or other forms of ubiquitous computing technologies to improve on urban issues and to achieve particular goals, such as economic growth. While there are numerous visions for the potential of smart urbanism to target localized, neighborhood-focused urban change, in Philadelphia the rhetorical utility of the concept has an economic, business-focus that translates to similar deliverables in the Digital On-Ramps project.

Programming for an Intelligent Philadelphia

The Digital On-Ramps workforce education effort emerges out of a proposal put forward to IBM's Smarter Cities Challenge, which was established in 2010 to provide free consultation to cities around the world around implementing technological solutions to urban problems. The Challenge ends this year, having consulted on approximately 62 of the intended 100 recipients. Cities asked for help on a number of issues, from workforce development to ecological sustainability to urban renewal. Philadelphia was part of the initial 2010 round of consultation. Mayor Nutter’s Office asked for help conceptualizing a workforce education portal to link unemployed or underemployed residents to online, easily accessible job training for work in emerging industries.

Initiated through the discussion with IBM, as well as ongoing work with a number of city government, educational, and non-governmental organizations (here is the list of partner organizations), the Digital On-Ramps project is advancing toward full implementation in the near future. The rationale for the project comes out of acknowledging the endemic poverty, low high school graduation rates, low overall literacy, and limited access to computers and broadband Internet among significant numbers of the city’s population, all contributing to long-term difficulty finding jobs. Digital On-Ramps seeks to overcome these multiple, inter-connected issues by providing a platform for ‘anytime, anywhere’ learning, a portal to train city residents across access platforms, from smartphones to tablet computers to desktops. The easy-accessibility is a convenience intended to allow users to participate when and where they have the time, instead of requiring users to travel to a particular place for the workforce training. The idea is that a user could learn the digital interface for a piece of office or manufacturing equipment, and then to connect that person with a company looking for workers knowledgeable in that equipment. Digital On-Ramps had an initial roll out in spring 2013 with 500 high school students at four schools participating. With this soft start, the project is targeting the advanced manufacturing industry as an initial focus for employment.

Advanced manufacturing is a very new industry that is slippery to define still. The push for this sphere of industry stems from efforts from the United States' federal government to reinvigorate the manufacturing capabilities of the United States by fostering business that centers on high-tech, high-precision, flexible and nimble production model, with the further ability to adjust to changing demands and products. 

A significant issue, however, is that the industry is brand new and Digital On-Ramps recipe for securing work for participants has not yet been proven. Beyond that, Digital On-Ramps is targeting the marginalized neighborhoods of the city that have not recovered from the post-industrial blight that has defined large regions of the city for the last fifty years, and it is not clear where these jobs in advanced manufacturing might be located.

Smart City Smart Choice

Now I will to shift to look at Philadelphia’s other application of the ‘smart city’ terminology: its place-based economic marketing and branding efforts, “Philadelphia: Smart City, Smart Choice”. The “Smart City, Smart Choice” marketing campaign is a component of Philadelphia’s business services web-portal, and is a nicely done introductory document to show the business-friendly side of the city. In the document, ‘smart’ refers to the central location of the city in the greater Northeastern United States as well as the many transportation options into the city, the opportunities for higher education and hiring a trained workforce, and the quality of life married to an affordable cost of living.

‘Smart’ in this example becomes a rhetorical device intended to promote a vision of the city as a creative, innovative, intelligent place to set up a business. This promotion ties in to the city’s efforts to re-cast Philadelphia in a more positive light, not as the next Detroit but as a city with the potential to regain its economic strength.

While Digital On-Ramps presents a new, productive way of providing workforce education and outreach, it can only do so much. Both it and the “Smart City, Smart Choice” campaign’s use of smart city language seek to bring economic growth to Philadelphia, but neither offer a clear pathway to improving marginalized neighborhoods in the city; instead the focus seems to be either in other, peripheral areas far from the city’s central neighborhoods, or in the already-strong, already well-developed central business district.

To an extent, the landscape of the smart city or the smart economy in Philadelphia is locating in areas away from the historical, industrial districts, the areas that have suffered the most decline as the city has transitioned away from its industrial economy and toward an information-based, service economy. While these new projects may provide jobs for residents throughout the city, the overall economic development does not seem to be bringing industry back to the core areas of the 19th and 20th century industrial economy.

The former site of the Stetson Hat Factory in North Philadelphia.The factory complex burned down in 1980 and nothing has been rebuilt in the intervening years.

As an example of this change, the location of what was the Stetson Hat Factory in North Philadelphia, just east of Temple University, is telling. I present it to show what an area of the city's modern industrial economy looks like today--to be fair, not every formerly-industrial neighborhood looks like this, but many do. The factory closed in 1971 and burned down in 1980, but until it closed this was where the iconic cowboy hats of the American West were manufactured. Today, forty years on, the site sits abandoned, like much of what was Philadelphia’s industrial core. While some of the post-industrial areas of the city have been gentrified into residential neighborhoods, sites like this one are not uncommon.

Zonespaces of the Globalized Information Economy

Looking north from the Delaware River waterfront.

As a means of exploring the spatial consequences of smart urbanism in Philadelphia, I want to pivot here to look at where advanced manufacturing, among other facets of the new, globalized economy, are locating in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Navy Yard is of the city but not in the city. It is an extra-urban special economic zone--as Keller Easterling terms it, a zonespace--for the global economy at the far southern fringe of the city itself. This 1000 acre, public-private development opened in 2005, after the US Navy turned it over to Philadelphia in 2000. Approximately 100 businesses employ over 8,500 people in the complex. There are numerous incentives for businesses to locate in the Navy Yard, including exemptions from state and local income tax, real estate tax, and sales tax at least until 2018. The entire zone is separate from the city, with security guards at the road entrances and the visible presence of Philadelphia police, but also geographically: two major freeways, a railroad corridor, and the professional sports complex divide the area from the southernmost neighborhoods of the city proper. With the twenty-four hour private security, the Navy Yard is only open to the public during business hours Monday through Friday. At the far side of the zone, the Delaware River separates the area from New Jersey. 
While Digital On-Ramps could be considered a-spatial due to its use of pervasive connectivity--a participant would not even have to be within city limits to access their account, the outcomes of these information and communication technology-driven economic development projects can be located. The spatial consequences of the dual smart city/smart urbanism discussion in Philadelphia can be seen in places like the Navy Yard, which is why I want to highlight its presence in the city.

The Navy Yard could be one of the best-maintained area of the city. With its mix of historic naval officers quarters, barracks, warehouses, industrial buildings, and new office buildings, it looks like a cross between the grounds of an established, sprawling university and a suburban, corporate research campus. Mature shade trees line the streets, bike lanes are newly painted on the recently resurfaced pavement, and there is little traffic except at the start and end of the work day.

Glaxo Smith Kline's new offices, employing an contemporary aesthetic rarely seen in Philadelphia proper.

Tasty Cake, PNC Bank, and Glaxo Smith Kline have built new buildings close to the entrance, while Urban Outfitters houses their global headquarters on the waterfront in a series of long and low renovated brick factory buildings. On the western end of the zone there is still shipbuilding businesses; the Navy houses research and development work, and both Penn State and Drexel University have research clusters.

A former Marine Corps barracks acts at a hub for the region's advanced manufacturing industry. The Building 100 Innovation Center is where advanced manufacturing has been developing in the Philadelphia region--federal grants run through offices located here, and the emerging industry is rooted in this location. Conceivably if an advanced manufacturing factory were to open, it could do so in one of the many historic factory buildings available for conversion nearby, which in turn could offer jobs to the Digital On-Ramps participants looking for work in the industry.

The Building 100 Innovation Center in the Navy Yard, where the early advanced manufacturing industry is locating in the Philadelphia region.

There are other areas of the city and the region where new industries and precision manufacturing are located, but little if any of these businesses can be found in the marginalized neighborhoods that have been targeted for participating in Digital On-Ramps. The emerging landscape of a smart Philadelphia has yet to re-invest in the areas that once represented the city’s innovation and economic wealth, such as neighborhoods of North Philadelphia surrounding the Stetson Hat Factory site.

Conclusion 

In the dynamic, changing landscape of Philadelphia today, the emerging economic activities that are targeted as contributing to ‘the smart city’ are to a large extent not found in the same locations as earlier industries. As a rhetorical device contributing to place-making efforts in the globalized digital age, the ‘smart city’ discussion focuses on much more on the possibilities change could bring instead of on the actual economic situation across much of the city. For Philadelphia, the ‘smart city’ is an effort to brand the city as a location for economic development that may or may not have a widespread impact on the actual city. Thus far the new businesses such as the advanced manufacturing cluster have not located in the areas of the city that have faced significant decline in economic opportunities over the last decades. By prioritizing a smart city over smart citizens, the potential to create widespread improvements is limited by the targeted focus on a particular form of economic growth. The special economic zone model of economic development that the Navy Yard represents is a new, global, extra-urban device that is located in the city but offers a new, unprecedented example of how to produce economic growth ways disconnected, geographically separated from the rest of the city itself.

Afterword

The Navy Yard's website contains much easily-accessible information, including the master plans for the complex, a printable walking tour (pdf), and information about the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Keystone Opportunity Zones, areas where taxation is reduced or eliminated in the interest of promoting economic growth. In addition to Rob Holmes of Mammoth as well as others, I am very interested in the spatial and political implications of special economic zones and free trade zones. Much of the discussion of these spaces seems to position them as elsewhere, far from city centers for instance, when, as the Navy Yard indicates, these places are already part of cities in the United States, their impact spreading throughout the country.

Finally, I have actively returned to using Flickr in the last few months, after a hiatus of at least four years. While the service is not perfect, it is easy to use; I'm considering it as a photographic back-end to this blog, where I can organize and update images that relate to my greater geographic research interests. There is a Philadelphia Navy Yard photoset with images from three visits to the site over the last year. For those readers in the Philadelphia area, I encourage you to visit the Navy Yard. It is open to the public, full of interesting architecture, and well worth a few hours of your time.

Using the smart city to promote economic competitiveness

Center City Philadelphia from Drexel Park in West Philadelphia

The lack of posting on this blog correlates directly with the state of my research on smart urbanism in Philadelphia. I hope to post more regularly soon, but in the meantime here is a teaser, in the form of an conference abstract for an upcoming event I will be participating in.

On Tuesday, June 11 I will present a bit of my recent research into smart urbanism and the 'smart city' as applied to Philadelphia at Drexel University's Symposium on Urban Informatics: Exploring Smarter Cities. In the organizers' words, the symposium will examine how "Technologies transform city life in countless ways. The symposium on Urban Informatics will bring together designers, city planners and managers, technologists, scholars and entrepreneurs in Philadelphia, at the heart of the northeast urban corridor, to explore the frontiers of the urban environment." I am looking forward to the discussions coming out of this event; it will certainly be a productive and hopefully provocative day!

What follows is an overview of what I intend to cover in my fifteen minutes.

Philadelphia’s smart city agenda: Enabling urban change or perpetuating existing social inequalities?

This essay examines what urban informatics technologies enable: how this electromagnetic terrain of a city actively impacts the urban landscape. By examining the digital infrastructure that support the Digital On-Ramps smart city project in Philadelphia, this essay will explore the systems, policies and technological scripts that produce a disposition toward responsive intelligence in the city. The Digital On-Ramps project proposes to connect Philadelphia’s under-served citizens to Internet-based workforce education and development training via smartphones, tablets, and traditional computers as a means of providing the skills necessary for these citizens to become competitive in a 21st century, globalized and service-oriented economy. Digital On-Ramps’ project requires a re-conceptualization of the infrastructure for education and content delivery, a renewed utility of digital telecommunication systems and, possibly, a lessened need for the traditional, physical spaces of schools and other established elements of the city’s built environment. All this combines with a tighter focus on new, digital actors for content delivery and consequently social and economic exchange itself. Through a place-based case study examining the numerous local and national actors involved in this smart city project, this essay will critique the push for workforce development outcomes through digital infrastructural efficiencies.

The central question the essay will address is: Does the Digital On-Ramps project benefit Philadelphia’s under-served, poorest citizens, or is the project geared more toward maintaining and improving Philadelphia’s image as a competitive, creative, and economically-relevant city in the globalized economy? The essay concludes that, while it is too early to see if, how, and where citizens will benefit from this project, the city’s smart city agenda has brought national and global media attention to Philadelphia.

Reading a condemned landscape: Nature Noir and the Auburn Dam site

An unrelated but not dissimilar area south of the Auburn Dam site 100 miles: Old Wards Ferry Road between Sonora and Groveland, California. Roads like this track throughout the Sierra Nevada Foothills, barely-paved, narrow and fairly dangerous routes following old miners' tracks. This road leads to a bridge and remnants of a ferry crossing the Tuolumne River just upstream from the Don Pedro Reservoir.* Photo by author, 2010.

Geoff Manaugh's recent post on Bldgblog about Cool, California and the Auburn Dam site concludes by asking what had happened to the place since John McPhee wrote about it in Assembling California in the early 1990s. In what follows I touch on the topic in a review of Jordan Fisher Smith's Nature Noir. This essay was originally written in 2007 for The Geography of Water Resources, a class in San Francisco State's Geography department taught by Nancy Wilkinson.


Reading a condemned landscape: Nature Noir and the Auburn Dam site

 “We do not seem much to love what space there is left [in the American West].  One thinks not only of the greed of developers, which is numbingly obvious, but of a widespread nihilism that now extends through much of the population, witness the reflexive littering, the use of spray paint on rocks, the girdling of trees near campgrounds, and the use of off-road vehicles for the maximum violence of their impact.  The West has ended, it would seem, as the nation’s vacant lot, a place we valued at first for the wildflowers, and because the kids could play there, but where eventually we stole over and dumped the hedge clippings, and then the crankcase oil and dog manure, until finally now it has become such an eyesore that we hope someone will just buy it and build and get the thing over with.  We are tired, I think, of staring at our corruption.”
    -the photographer Richard Adams, from the essay Working conditions: In the nineteenth-century West (1994, 138)

    Jordan Fisher Smith spent the better part of a career as a park ranger managing Auburn State Recreation Area, a space run over by California’s Gold Rush and then discarded to be drowned under a dam that will likely never be built. The Richard Adams’s quote that opens this review succinctly addresses the conditions present in the forested hills and rocky, overgrown canyon-bottoms Smith’s stories take place in.  Smith himself became tired of the corruption Adams speaks of; Nature Noir comes out of Smith’s refusal to fall into the easy despair over the state of his piece of the Sierra foothills. Nature Noir is not a lament for a devastated landscape, instead speaking of Smith’s respect and love of a long-neglected and still threatened area and the people who inhabit it.

Auburn State Recreation Area sits an hour east of Sacramento in the Sierra Nevada foothills, containing the mountain-and-river topography formed by the north and middle forks of the American River. In this area the terrain folds up on itself, rolling hills becoming steep inclines, oak and manzanita chapparal turning mixing with pines and an occasional cedar tree. Ridgelines descend east to west, cut over geologic time by streams and rivers that flow into the delta of San Francisco Bay. To move in any direction but especially north or south requires traversing up and down steep hillsides. To patrol an area like this is never easy, as we find out in the first chapter.  Radio communication can cut out, many of the bumpy, potholed roads have had little improvement since they were gold miners tracks 150 years ago, and the people the rangers encounter, arrest, or have to save are ones who inspire dialogue like this: “ ‘Is he dead?’ a woman asked.  ‘I hope so,’ some guy answered” (Smith 2005, 17). The book is character-driven, each chapter digging into a person or a situation, speaking of tragedies and other unfortunate events, as well as small moments of beauty. Underlying the human stories and tying the chapters together is the place itself, a natural area set to drown under a reservoir, but its fate put off over and over, likely forever.
Auburn State Recreation Area is the setting for these stories and becomes a character itself. The place is inseperable from the human stories. As Smith’s partner puts it, “There are no innocent victims in this place. The same people appear in alternating roles over the years. One day your guy was a perpetrator; a week or a year later he was a victim.” Working in a curious, upside down landsape like this required faith that the site, the job, and the people would in the long term become valued, but “in any case, a park ranger is a protector. You protect the land from the people, the people from the land, and the people from themselves” (Smith 2005, 19-20). What Smith goes on to discuss is the larger situation, which was entirely out of his control: protecting the land from state and federal politicians. In 1965 a dam was authorized on the American River, more to prevent flooding in Sacramento itself than to hold water. There are no average years of rainfall in Northern California. Constant cycles between drought, dry, wet, and wetter are the norm. Within that, half a season’s rainfall can come down with one storm. This can lead to flooding in the lowland places that are today cities like Sacramento and its surrounding office parks, suburban development, and farmland. The desire to dam, retain, and control the flow of water is one of the foundational stories of California: to ensure water supplies through dry summers and drought years, to protect crops, and especially to protect property investment in areas that were once floodplains before becoming towns, and can still return to being floodplains after a particularly strong storm.

Auburn Dam’s construction was authorized in 1965. It would sit upstream from the larger Folsom Dam and, as the US Bureau of Reclamation’s website states, “provide water for flood control, irrigation, recreation, municipal and industrial uses, water quality improvement, power generation, and fisheries enhancement.”  Nine years later construction began. A year after that “an earthquake measuring 5.7 on the Richter Scale occurred near the Oroville Dam, about 50 miles northwest of the Auburn site. Although the large earth-fill structure was not damaged, the event raised concerns about the safety of dams like the thin arch concrete dam proposed for the Auburn site. In April 1976, the Association of Engineering Geologists, Seismic Hazards Committee, issued a report stating that a moderate earthquake like the 1975 event near Oroville would cause the proposed dam at Auburn to fail.” (US Bureau of Reclamation 2007). The website of the agency in charge of building Auburn Dam states that a moderate earthquake would bring down the dam. Cost estimates to build a smaller dam in the late 1990’s were estimated at over $1 billion (Carle 2004, 193). Supporters of the dam still rally for construction—in April, 2007, “a House hearing on protecting the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta from catastrophic levee failures turned into a mini-rally for constructing an Auburn dam on the American River” (No Author, 2007). The good news for the canyons upstream from the un-built dam is that in 2002 the Bureau of Reclamation “closed the tunnel that diverted the water from the dam construction site, and let the river run again through its historic channel” (Carle 2004, 193). Chances that the dam will be built are very slim, but the supporters are still working hard to change that; because the federal law authorizing its construction has not been revoked they still have some hope.

Auburn Dam would not be the first instance of recent manipulation in these canyons. The American River in the section to be inundated by the Auburn Dam has been a site of gold mining since the start of the Gold Rush. Smith writes that, due to gold mining, “by the mid-1850s the American River canyons would have been unrecognizable to anyone who had seen them a few years before…When it was over, 255 million cubic yards of mine wastes and mud had gone down the American River alone” (79-80).  Forests were clear-cut wholesale, rivers were diverted in full, topsoil completely disappeared, and of the thousands of men who came seeking their fortune, only one in twenty came away some wealth” (Smith 2005, 79).  European Americans arrived on the American River (of couse it was not called that before the gold miners arrived) and immediately changed it irrevocably, bringing with them all the trappings of their culture and inventing what was lacking, be it hydraulic mining equipment, sturdy blue jeans, or the practice of jumping frogs for entertainment (Twain 1996). Some of the best writing in Nature Noir comes out of Smith’s disgust with how quickly and completely the California landscape was transformed:

“The novelty of rain is one of the few things I liked about hot summers in the canyons, a season I mostly detested when I worked as a ranger in them.  To be fair, however, the things I disliked about that time—the merciless sun that old forests would have shaded me from; the dust on my face, my uniform, and rescue equipment; the spiny star thistle that gets to flesh through thick jeans, wild oats that lodged in my socks, and the other disagreeable European annuals that overwhelmed the perennial meadows of the low Sierra—I eventually came to see as the marks of 140 years of bad treatment of this land.  So over time I learned to forgive this place for its bad manners and prickliness, for these are the inevitable outcomes of servitude, in land as in people” (Smith 2005, 121).

The utility of this landscape has been to provide for other places. The gold taken out of the hillsides and streambeds in the nineteenth century went to develop San Francisco and fuel the state’s economic growth. The proposed dam and reservoir would benefit areas downstream but, obviously, flood the site itself. Smith sums up this attitude, writing “The Gold Rush led to the Auburn Dam and a tradition of valuing what could be extracted from these canyons more than the canyons themselves” (2005, 80). Turning his experiece as a park ranger into stories, presenting the place as something more than the site of a proposed dam is a starting point to seeing the place differently. Water management infrastructures such as the Auburn Dam and reservoir exist to enable other uses, such as keeping Sacramento from flooding. Nature Noir tells of the social and ecological consequences when that utility is delayed indefinitely. In telling the stories of an often overlooked place, this work focuses needed attention on a section of California’s landscape where, for the most part, the stories ended when the Gold Rush petered out. The Sierra Nevada foothills have a bounty of places and people similar to what Smith describes, but not enough storytellers. This book provides a wonderful entry point into this damaged, beautiful terrain.

Sources:
   
Adams, R. (1994). Why people photograph: Selected essays and reviews. New York, Aperture.
   
Carle, D. (2004). Introduction to Water in California. Berkeley, University of California Pres.

No Author (2007). "Auburn Dam the Focus of Recent Congressional Panel, quoting David Whitney." Last accessed 17 April 2007, from http://www.auburndamwatch.org/blog/category/blog/.
   
Smith, J. F. (2005). Nature noir:  a park ranger's patrol in the Sierra  New York, Houghton Mifflin Company.
   
Twain, M. (1996). The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches (1867). New York, Oxford University Press.
   
US Bureau of Reclamation (2007). "Central Valley Project--American River Division, Auburn-Folsom South Unit."   Retrieved 10 April 2007, 2007, from http://www.usbr.gov/dataweb/html/auburn.html.

*Addendum: I grew up in Moccasin, California, south of the Auburn Dam site and about a three to four hour drive on Highway 49, the winding two-lane highway that cuts through the 'gold country' of the Sierra Nevada foothills north-to-south. Moccasin is a company town for San Francisco's Hetch Hetchy Water and Power, the utility that provides drinking water and hydraulic electricity for San Francisco and other cities in the Bay Area. What Smith describes in Nature Noir bears close resemblance to the Southern Mines region of which Moccasin is a part. I haven't been to the Auburn Dam site itself, which is why I've headed this post with a photo from just outside my hometown.

from providing a service to enabling low carbon futures: Boulder as a Sustainable City:

Looking west from the city's edgelends toward central Boulder from the Goose Creek Path. All photos from January 2013, taken by Alan Wiig.

A sustainable city has been defined in many ways. Yet the most frequently quoted understanding is from Our Common Future in 1987. This is a vision of the city that is able to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. - By Mike Hodson and Simon Marvin, from After Sustainable Cities? 

At the heart of these efforts [to mitigate climate change] have been attempts to redesign and reconfigure the infrastructure networks through which energy is produced and consumed in cities, and which shape their vulnerability to climate change [...] Because of the critical role that such systems play in shaping resource use and urban development, addressing climate change depends on their fundamental transformation. In short, strategic intervention in urban infrastructure networks will be central to any effort to achieve a low carbon transition. - By Harriet Bulkeley, Vanesa Castán Broto, Mike Hodson and Simon Marvin from Cities and the Low Carbon Transition

What makes a city sustainable? How are cities adapting to climate change and attempting to reduce their energy use through infrastructural change? Boulder, Colorado has been concerned with this issue since at least 2002, when the City Council passed "a resolution in support of the Kyoto Protocol and set a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to seven percent below 1990 levels by 2012" (source). Over the past decade the city has, among other efforts, attempted to lower their electricity consumption through more efficient production and delivery, which they are working to achieve through the real-time monitoring and analysis provided by a smart electrical grid (source). By knowing in real time how much energy the city is using and will need, the electrical utility can produce just enough power to meet demand. Boulder was a pilot city where Xcel Energy installed what they call a 'SmartGridCity', describing this as " a comprehensive system that includes a digital, high-speed broadband communication system; upgraded substations, feeders and transformers; smart meters; and Web-based tools available through My Account. Customers that live in this area are now among the first in the world to enjoy a system using smart grid technology to deliver its electricity." (source). Boulder and Xcel Energy are currently at odds with the ability of the utility to adequately deliver on the promise of the smart grid, and the city may take over the system and run it themselves (see Boulder's Energy Futures website). Regardless of who manages the electricity, the responsive, analytic, 'smart' capabilities of Boulder's electricity utility no longer provides energy alone. It now enables sustainability. The materiality of this relationship is latent in the infrastructure itself, as it holds, delivers, and for the end-user, provides a vital component of contemporary life. Whereas in the past, municipal infrastructures provided a service such as power or water or transportation. Now a digital overlay--a smart meter and smart grid--impart these efficient attributes, and the system enables a this transition toward smart and sustainable urbanism.

These power lines follow the mid-block alley through the neighborhood. 25th Street looking west between Pine Ave. and Spruce Ave.

The intent of a smart grid is to do implement sustainability; the 'sustainability' is found in the relationships between the electrical meters dispersed throughout the city, the residents who use the power, and the system itself. Sustainability cannot be located in particular places: it is impossible to point at it or touch it in the city. If however, sustainability is a factor of more efficient energy usage, then the ability for Boulder to become sustainable is embodied in its electrical infrastructure, in the jumbled network of wires, pylons and poles, right-of-ways, transformers, meters, outlets and plugs linking the power plants to the users.

Like any city, the infrastructural landscape of electricity in Boulder passes throughout the city's built and natural environments. Wires stretch overhead, utility poles promenade through mid-block back alleys in the residential core, disappearing underground in the downtown commercial corridor. By considering sustainability as a factor of energy use, Boulder is effectively making this landscape of energy visible in new ways, a visibility that, as Stephen Graham argues with regards to infrastructure in general (cite tk), typically becomes apparent only when it fails.

A smart meter.

The same smart meter, mounted to the wall of a home on Mapleton Avenue.

But then what does sustainability actually, actively do for the city, and where does it do this work? Day-to-day for the resident or passer-by, there is little to nothing different about using electricity in Boulder than in any other place—urban or not—in the United States. The electrical outlets in buildings are the same two pronged or three pronged interfaces between personal devices like a lamp or a laptop charger and the overall grid; streetlights and stoplights shine with the same intensity; the power lines and pylons tracking through the neighborhoods and into the surrounding countryside are of a similar aesthetic to elsewhere. The intent of the smart grid is not to change the common utility of electrical energy, but, through an networked, analytic intervention, to change how electricity is used in the city. Through incremental adjustment the goal is to achieve city-wide change. Like all infrastructures, electricity is visible in what it does not in what it is: streetlights cast light not just to cast light, but to illuminate an area so passerby can see where they are walking. Sustainability is latent in the reduced carbon footprint of the city, even if it is not built into any landmark objects that might visually represent this turn toward a new era of networked urbanism.

In order to better conceptualize this sustainability-as-infrastructure, I spent some time in Boulder in January 2013 investigating the spaces of electricity in the city. I wanted to trace the flow of energy into the landscape itself and back towards its origins, and in doing so to materialize energy and consequently sustainability within the electrical infrastructure itself.

Within central Boulder, the electrical system mainly connects buildings to power lines, running wires overhead onto buildings and to the smart meters before powering appliances and other devices inside. The simplest way to find the electrical grid is to look up, find the power lines and follow them to the closest substation, where the high voltage power is regulated down to a level that individual homes or businesses can use. Attached to the substation should be taller, high voltage power lines heading toward a power plant.

An electricity substation alongside Goose Creek, 28th St. and Mapleton Ave.

The same substation in daylight, looking west from the parking lot for Boulder Rock Club climbing gym.

A few blocks away from where I was staying was a substation alongside a utility right-of-way for a set of high voltage lines that head out of the city and toward a power plant just visible on the eastern horizon. The local grid in the neighborhood connects into this substation behind the Boulder Valley YMCA, next to the parking lot for the East Mapleton Ballfield as well as the Boulder Rock Club climbing gym. This substation then connects to a high-voltage system that runs parallel to Goose Creek, cutting overhead along a concrete path that follows the creek downstream and out of town.

Looking west at Goose Creek, Goose Creek Path, and the high voltage power lines overhead.

As the path continues east, passing through culverts and under  streets, it quickly enters Boulder's edgelands, an indeterminate zone of light industry, open fields, and long uninterrupted vistas of grassland and sky. The high voltage lines eventually diverge from the path, heading south-east while the path continues alongside the creek. The creek and utility right of way provide a path for walkers and cyclists, but also a habitat for hundreds of prairie dogs in an area where otherwise low, dispersed commercial warehouses and offices and their parking lots populate the terrain. This corridor cuts through the city's fringe, ending at the more prominent commercial and residential zones of the city. Even though it is on the margins, by virtue of bringing electricity into the city, this space is as much a part of the sustainable city as any other.

For Boulder, creating a sustainable city has not required building new urban districts. In this instance, the sustainable city is infrastructural, and it extends the city's desires out past the city limits, into the regional power grid and into the Front Range of Colorado itself. 

Prairie dog paths in the snow, radially moving between burrows.

The high voltage power lines heading east into the Front Range.

 A complete set of pictures is available at my Flickr page.

Ubiquitous computing and the smart city

An otherwise unrelated photo of the view looking east down Market Street from the 69th Street Terminal, at the western edge of Philadelphia. February 2013. 

This May I will present a piece of my dissertation research at the Media Cities International Conference, Workshops and Exhibition at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. As it draws from architecture, urban planning and design, and new media scholarship, the multi-disciplinary nature of the conference will certainly provide productive, engaging conversation. What follows is my paper proposal. 

Ubiquitous computing and the smart city: Assembling the urban landscape through digital infrastructures

To a large extent, both cities and their inhabitants rely on digital information and communication technologies to organize and manage their interactions, transactions, and affairs. The role of these ubiquitous computing technologies in enabling this constantly changing communicative, electromagnetic terrain is a key theme of urban scholarship today. In the scholarship, cities have gone from networked to post-networked, sentient to smart, but cities are inherently all of these things at the same time; these urban assemblages can be located and grounded through empirical research into existing cities. Conceptualizing these different eras of urban change, and the shifting technological and infrastructural forms on which they are built, through an investigation into one particular location presents a means of understanding the complex, plural geographies of the contemporary moment.  Through a place-based case study in Philadelphia, this essay examines how the utility of ubiquitous computing systems and other digital infrastructures are harnessed to provide the ‘urban intelligence’ of ‘smart cities’ purported to underlie the landscape today. The rhetorics surrounding—as well as the likely over-hyped possibilities of—smart urbanism are built within and upon material and digital foundations laid in the past. With a history stretching back into the 1600s, a strong nineteenth and early twentieth century industrial economy, a post-industrial, blighted present-day, Philadelphia presents a productive location to examine how a marginalized urban landscape integrates ubiquitous computing technologies into its fabric. With a focus on recent infrastructure and policy engagements seeking to make cities ‘smart’, this essay will highlight the data, standards, policies, and infrastructural systems that create the media through which a smart city might be produced. 

As part of its smart urbanism agenda—and with IBM’s assistance—Philadelphia is in the process of implementing an online portal for 21st century workforce training and education. By shifting these education and training goals to desktop and laptop computers, tablets, and smartphones, Philadelphia is actively engaging ubiquitous computing technologies for providing social and economic development in the city. In order to critique this smart urbanism project, in order to engage both how and where this project is affecting the city, this essay will trace the actors and networks—city government policy decisions, public/private partnerships, and the pervasive digital communication networks throughout the city that are involved in creating online learning opportunities—across Philadelphia’s post-industrial urban landscape. As Keller Easterling writes, the “active forms” created by scripts, protocols, and infrastructural systems are defining elements—or media—of the urban landscape today. Philadelphia’s smart urbanism projects are no exception: they create an active form of agency that this essay will chart through the material and digital spaces enabled by ubiquitous computing technologies.

Providence's Smart City Project: Developing a knowledge economy zone

Looking west and towards I-95 from Chestnut Street in the Jewelry District of central Providence. Until 2011, I-195 passed through this space. The rerouting and subsequent removal of I-195 through this corridor has prompted Providence to redevelop the area into a knowledge economy zone. All photos by Alan Wiig, November 2012.

Completed in the 1950s Interstate 195 cut through downtown Providence, Rhode Island, splitting neighborhoods in a fashion typical of many cities in the United States at the time. In 2011, the freeway was demolished and re-routed to the south of downtown, and Providence had an opportunity to intentionally design a new neighborhood. At the same time, IBM, Cisco, and the other core companies of what Dan Hill has termed the urban intelligence industrial complex began to promote their ideas for harnessing ubiquitous information and communication technologies such as wireless sensor networks with real-time analytic software to enable smarter cities. 

For the last few years, each week seems to bring more writing on smart cities and smart urbanism. Much of this writing is overwrought hype about the transformative potential of integrating digital technologies into an urban landscape, how this will lead to more economically efficient, ecologically sustainable, healthy, safe, innovative places. Much of this babbling clamour of many voices saying variations of the same thing exists as marketing from consulting and planning firms and branding by cities competing with each other in a globalized economy. Showing off a particularly cutting-edge smart urbanism plan offers a way to stand out among all the other mid-sized to large cities that are not quite global cities but still want to compete economically and culturally with the likes of London, New York, Singapore, and Tokyo.

The intersection of Chestnut Street and Ship Street. The orange spray paint indicates that the telecom provider is in the process of wiring these old brick buildings for high speed Internet, a necessary element of any information economy.

Providence had a unique opportunity to redevelop 23 acres of the city’s center; the redevelopment into what the city calls a ‘knowledge district’ is also considered by the city to be a ‘smart city’ project. Providence applied to IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge and in 2011 was selected in the first round, receiveing a few weeks of IBM consultation, and leading to a report on how Providence could harness ‘smart’ systems in the redevelopment. In this instance, the smart urbanism aspect of the project is not the district itself: the smartness is a market strategy, a  signal to information technology and biotech companies that Providence is amenable to new industries setting up in the area. IBM recommended that Providence implement a new online land use management system to streamline the permitting process of setting up a business in the knowledge district, which the city did. There is nothing inherently spatial about this smart urbanism project, except that it is designed for a city and is intended to lead to changes in the city’s urban landscape. The goal of this smartness is to create a favorable disposition for the economic development of the city, through making it easier to conduct business in the area. 

Smart urbanism involves the creation of what Keller Easterling calls active forms, of a spatial disposition towards enabling digitally-mediated outcomes or desirables such as a new economic development. These active forms are may co-exist with new or repurposed object forms: built structures through which these desirables are funneled. Smart urbanism is the implementation of systems created through the interweaving of policies, technologies—both hardware devices and software protocol, and the existing networked infrastructures of contemporary cities to achieve goals such as economic vitality.

Many of the existing commercial, office, and industrial buildings in the area are vacant, waiting for the new, 'smart' tenants. This two story building used to sit adjacent to the freeway, not it is in a desirable spot at the center of the knowledge district. What used to be a disadvantage is now beneficial.

In Providence, it is possible to locate these smart systems through the spaces they enable: the buildings, streets, and parkland of the knowledge district, as well as the new industries and residents the redevelopment is designed for. While the district will have plenty of broadband Internet, good cellular connectivity, and other amenities that are expected of a global city, the hype of pervasive sensor networks and other near-future technologies-of-today is less the goal than turning a piece of this economically stagnant, post-industrial, colonial-era city into a visible and competitive zone of the global, 21st century economy.

A walk through the Knowledge District

For now, the area is still relatively empty. In early November 2012 the freeway corridor, then vacant for a year, was green with grass not yet dormant for the winter. The corridor cuts a swath through the district, providing long views and light where was once concrete pillars, the rush of traffic, and automobile exhaust. On a Saturday morning the narrow, curving streets were nearly empty of vehicular and pedestrian traffic. The asphalt and brick cobbles were dotted with the orange spraypaint of a telecom provider marking where to bury fiber optic cabling. The buildings at the northern end of the zone, in the Jewlery District neighborhood, are mainly four and five story brick structures that offer a continuity with the past industry in the area.

A diner, with the three smokestacks of the Manchester Street Power Station in the distance.

Near what were likely the locations of I-195’s offramps are the remains of existing entertainment venues, bars, and tattoo parlours. How these businesses will fit into the knowledge economy remains to be seen. On the Providence River waterfront near where the river lets into the harbor, the Manchester Street Power Station provides a visual landmark for the area, its three smokestacks towering over the surrounding terrain. Across Point Street from the power station, the unoccupied Dynamo Building stretches a full city block, a shell of an industrial building awaiting a buyer to put the structure to a new use. How Providence utilizes the area opened up by the removal of the freeway will provide an example of spaces integrated with and through ubiquitous computing technologies to enable new industries in an old city. How the success of the knowledge district will be measured remains to be seen: other than Brown University's new medical school, there does not yet appear to be much in the way of new businesses. 

In Providence’s case, smart urbanism represents urban redevelopment to attract key contemporary industries of the globalized economy. The knowledge district, while situated in an historic part of the city, will likely have more in common with other information economy zones than with the rest of Providence itself. As this project develops, it will be interesting—to say the least—to see how these new spaces come together and how they integrate into the city’s overall landscape.

Sources of quotes and further information:

Dan Hill's recent piece, 'On the smart city, or a manifesto for smart citizens instead' on his blog City of Sound, critiques smart cities and the 'urban intelligence industrial complex', calling for the need to instead focus on enabling smart citizens. On a related and completely relevant note, last December Adam Greenfield posted on his blog Speedbird, 'The City Is Here For You To Use: 100 easy pieces', which offers a close and nuanced read of pervasive technologies in networked cities, arguing that ideas such as 'the smart city' have consequences and the implementation of these systems needs to be through public consensus not just top-down decision making.  

Keller Easterling's discussion of active form and object form can be found in numerous sources taken from her forthcoming book Extrastatecraft. I drew on her article 'We will be making active form' from Architectural Design's 'Special Issue: City Catalyst: Architecture in the Age of Extreme Urbanisation' from September 2012 and her Strelka Press e-book The Action is the Form: Victor Hugo's TED Talk. Additionally, to conceptualize how an area like the knowledge district becomes a zone of the globalized economy, I draw on Easterling's piece Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft from the Design Observer's Places website.

Detailed information on the planning process for Providence's knowledge district redevelopment and the IBM Smarter Cites Challenge report is available is here.

A construction site on the southwest edge of the zone.

My full photosets from the November 2012 fieldwork are posted at my Flickr page. Also on the Flickr page are photos from fieldwork in Boulder, Colorado looking at the smart meters and smart electrical grid the city has installed as part of their smart urbanism/urban sustainability energy futures work. I will write about that project soon.

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.