Creating the Digital City: Geographies of the Internet's Infrastructure

(click on the image to enlarge)
A collage of photos of data centers and colocation points.  photos by author; left to right from top down:  Digital Realty Trust at 833 Chestnut, Philadelphia; 365 Main at 720 2nd St, Oakland (the large white building in center distance); 60 Hudson St, New York City; 365 Main at 365 Main St, San Francisco; Quonix Networks at 2401 Locust St, Philadelphia; Terminal Commerce Building (on the left) at 401 North Broad St, Philadelphia; Level 3 Oakland at 1313 53rd St, Emeryville.

This coming Sunday I will be presenting at the Association of American Geographers 2010 Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.  My abstract is below; the image above is a collage of some of the photos that make up my research over the past few months into the landscape of cyberinfrastructure.  If anyone reading this is able to come to the session, please introduce yourself.


Creating the Digital City: Geographies of the Internet's Infrastructure

is part of the Paper Session:
Theorizing the Digital City



Abstract:
The digital city is here, and although this space has been theorized for at least a decade, there is little research into the infrastructural networks that support these emergent urban landscapes. While geographers have critically examined the role of traditional infrastructures—water, sewer, streets, electricity, and telephone—in creating modern cities, little attention has been paid to the role of the Internet's infrastructure in creating urban spaces today. The geographers that directly study the Internet have traditionally done so either from an economic geography standpoint or from the perspective of the utility of the cyberspace itself. This presentation aims to address how the Internet reaches our computer screens and mobile phones via the infrastructural networks that ground the technologies in the urban landscape. This presentation will situate the social and spatial impacts of the digital city's physical infrastructure: the data centers and fiber optic cables as well as the hertzian spaces that merge to provide ubiquitous Internet connectivity for the contemporary city. For example, what is the historic development of urban data centers: where are they sited and why, and how do these businesses interact with their surroundings. The methodological utility of different theoretical approaches, ranging from urban political ecology to postmodernism, will be critiqued and then applied using central Philadelphia as a case study. Understanding how we conceptualize proximity and how the scale and interdependence of interactions are fundamentally changing within these networked ecologies is a needed component for studying urban spaces today and into the future.

cellular phone tower

Washington Ave. west of Broad. Philadelphia.

Terminal Commerce Building's power supply

with the Philadelphia Inquirer building's top peeking above. This is
a view from the backside of the complex, and shows some of the
electrical infrastructure needed to keep the data center running.

fuel lines

in West Philadelphia.

tape and glass

cracked glass bricks at a data center in Philadelphia.

data centers taking over New Jersey?

The New York Times real estate section had a piece by this past week by Jotham Sederstrom:  North Jersey Finds Popularity as Home for Data Centers.  In this down economy, on one of the few growing real estate markets is in the construction of data centers.  In New Jersey two million square feet of data center space is in some stage of construction.  Multiply that by average costs of $1,200 per square feet, and you have $2.4 billion dollars going into this industry in New Jersey alone.  The reason northern New Jersey is quickly becoming home to this industry is its close proximity to New York City, but without the immense real estate costs associated with building in the city itself.  To quote the article at length:

"Data center providers and industry analysts said that North Jersey was an ideal location for the data needs of New York City’s large financial services industry. In a business that does countless transactions in a second, a greater distance would add milliseconds to every action taken online, but if the center is situated too close to Manhattan, construction costs can soar.  Michael Boccardi, chief executive of Cervalis, a 10-year-old data center provider with facilities in Connecticut and New York State, said his company chose a site in Passaic County for its first New Jersey facility for those reasons.
“We felt that we wanted to be close but not too close, but still within that core 25-mile vicinity of New York City,” Mr. Boccardi said of the 150,000-square-foot operation, which he said would open by the end of the month and accommodate many of the financial services firms that were affected by Sept. 11."

That financial service firms located in lower Manhattan will soon exist partially in north Jersey is a strange element of contemporary, digital urbanism:  the urban is not just connected to the suburban Passaic County through workers commuting into New York City, but also through the instantaneous, continual transmission of data back and forth between the offices full of workers but little computer equipment, and the data center, full of equipment but very few employees.


View Larger Map

Above is the satellite map of the location of 5851 Westside Avenue, North Bergen that the Times article focuses on.  It is just two miles west of the Hudson River, across a bit of marshland from the New Jersey Turnpike.  As urban society becomes more and more digital, the data that these actions produce has to be stored somewhere, often in places like this one.
 

failed communication point

in West Philly, in the snow.

The Infinity, 365 Main, and the USPS Embarcadero Postal Center

                                        photo by Author.  downtown San Francisco, January 2010.

Here is a pretty interesting urban juxtaposition to be found in downtown San Francisco.  On the 300 block of Main Street, between Folsom and Harrison, there is a luxury condo complex at 333 Main called The Infinity, the original and namesake 365 Main data center at 365 Main, and across the street, the Embarcadero Postal Center, which is entered around the corner at 226 Harrison.  The luxury condos provide downtown living for some agents of gentrification, 365 Main houses a portion of the  the Internet, and the USPS facility organizes then delivers non-electronic mail.  This situation is representative of 21st century San Francisco's digital city.  It is a mixture of high-tech economy, housing that is out of reach for much if not most of the city's populace, and an analog holdout in the form of the Postal Service.  While it is likely that someone who works at 365 Main lives at The Infinity, I would be surprised if anyone at the USPS facility could afford to live there.

By the way, if anyone walks by 365 Main to take a picture of the building, be prepared for security to come out and tell you that you cannot photograph it, even if you are on the public sidewalk, which San Francisco defines as such:  "Public right-of-way is defined as all City roadways and sidewalks bordered by private properties, (improved and un-improved.)" Source

fiber optic cabling

entering/exiting the Terminal Commerce Building. Philadelphia.

lots of wires

in Berkeley, California.

I can see fiber optic cabling, a petroleum pipeline, some electricity equipment in the middle-ground of the photo, and barbed wire above the chain-link fence.