Call me Al: Alison Powell on Community and Technology

Bibliography

Bibliography

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Conclusion -- Seeing Clearly With Both Eyes

In conclusion, while the banal continues to hold power, the sublime is never far away. Perhaps a reappropriation of ICT infrastructure helps us to see with both eyes the sublime promise in the banal wireless signal.

This revelation of the economic and social underpinnings of the ICT infrastructure that so many urban dwellers take for granted has focused on the banality of this infrastructure. However, in every discussion of banal technology, the technological sublime lies just beyond the field of vision. If we are, as Mosco invites us to do, “seeing vigilantly with both eyes,” (2004, p. 10) then we should be able to discern the shadow of the sublime in Île Sans Fil’s attempts at developing social connections using wireless internet connections. But that sublimity also depends upon WiFi’s increasing banality: one of the reasons that community wireless infrastructure projects are succeeding in major cities such as Montreal, Seattle and New York is that the technology is programmed by default to share an internet signal. This banal technical fact underlies all of the attempts to harness this technology for the benefit of society. In addition, WiFi’s cheapness and ubiquity means that it is difficult for commercial operators to develop a working business model in urban areas, where free signals spill from residential and commercial sources, not to mention non-profit groups. This places groups like Île Sans Fil in a situation where many urbanites expect WiFi services to be free of charge (Sandvig, 2004). The group’s sublime visions for wireless technology may always and already be profoundly shaped by the banalities of design and economics.

However, perhaps we all need a dose of the sublime from time to time. This investigation of ICT infrastructure’s banality has pointed out the economic exigencies that drive particular trends in infrastructure development, as well as the social fallout that can occur because of these decisions. These banal matters are important and influential, but a vision of the sublime potential in the same infrastructure can enliven development that may change the way that those economic and social factors are imagined or created. Revealing the banal may also reveal the sublime. By looking closely at the banal, we may be able to see in the distance the next glimmer of the sublime, motivating us once again to attempt to change the way things are right now. Perhaps by making visible the often ignored, we can begin to think more about the real in the virtual, the local in the global.

Paradoxes of Visibility -- Politics

However, from a perspective of splintering urbanism, there are numerous paradoxes inherent in Île Sans Fil’s work. As Sandvig (2004) points out, some aspects of providing free wireless hotspots have problematic political and economic underpinnings. One of these is the organization's work with Business Improvement Districts, groups that are often associated with pro-business, splintering activities.

Ile Sans Fil acts as a sponsor for the Montreal Fringe Festival. Photo by Boris Anthony.

Île Sans Fil’s members acknowledge the participation of businesses and community groups in their marketing material. For them, partnering with businesses has simply been an efficient and effective way to increase the number of hotspots they provide, raising their profile in the city and attracting media attention and new users.
Even more efficient and effective for raising the group’s profile has been their recent partnership with the St. Laurent Merchant’s Association (a BID). The Merchant’s Association is currently undertaking a campaign to “clean up” and “streamline” the street, removing visual clutter while improving services. One of the services they have decided to provide is complete wireless internet coverage from Sherbrooke St. to Mont-Royal Ave. The Merchant’s Association purchased the hardware and arranged the donations to Ile Sans Fil, businesses agreed to share their internet connections, and Île Sans Fil members installed the equipment and will provide support services.

For the Merchant’s Association, wireless connectivity represents another value-added function that distinguishes this “micropolis” (Graham & Marvin, 2001) from other locations in the city. In some ways, partnering with a BID is antithetical to Île Sans Fil’s goals for providing more widely-accessible internet service, as BIDs are often associated with urban splintering and consolidation of services. But there is another interpretation that demonstrates the importance of Montreal’s local politics, and the potential for future community-based infrastructure development. Partnering with a community organization instead of a commercial operator is indeed less expensive for the St-Laurent Merchant’s Association, but it also presents a progressive image, one that some commentators have lauded as an example of ‘Public-Community Partnership’ that offers an alternative to ‘Public-Private Partnerships’ (Dumais, 2005). In Montreal, where an active community sector already includes numerous organizations (Communautique, Reboot, and Koumbit to name only a few) working with technology, perhaps the inclusion of a community-based partner on a project of this scale suggests that local politics support a community-based alternative to commercial ICT infrastructure. Furthermore, Île Sans Fil has begun negotiating with CAM, a local co-op ISP to create a partnership whereby CAM would offer to provide bandwidth for Île Sans Fil hotspots, and potentially broadcast Île Sans Fil signals from its antennas. As much as Île Sans Fil’s approach contains paradoxes, then, it also contains interesting possibilities for changing the way ICT infrastructure, at least in one local place, is developed and used.

Visibility as Strategy and Tactic - Signal Visibility

In addition to targeting new members and volunteers through strategic visibility in the media, Île Sans Fil also targets laptop users by making their name visible to users of mobile devices, either through the use of signage in desirable areas, or through associating the group's name with the wireless signals themselves. This visibility, for the most part targets the privileged few who own these devices -- and who know where to look.

Île Sans Fil also ensures the visibility of its services by marking the spaces, both physical and virtual, in which its signals can be found. In the physical spaces, stickers and signs (like the nearly invisible one above) bearing Île Sans Fil’s logo are displayed prominently on the doors of establishments offering their services. Like the brands of coffee served at the café, or the type of chocolate available at the créperie, the Île Sans Fil logo and brand emerge as a recognizable part of Montreal’s commercial scenery, appearing on the doors of cafés and restaurants in the Plateau, downtown, and Old Montreal areas. Over time, this ideally establishes Île Sans Fil as the ‘default’ public wireless provider. However, the invisible space in which wireless internet signals are transmitted represents another potential space for marking. A wireless device can only pick up three signals in one location, and each one of those signals bears its own SSID, (service set identifier) which is the name or ID associated with a wireless network that appears when a computer searches for an open wireless network. Île Sans Fil uses its website www.ilesansfil.org as the SSID for each hotspot it sets up. Very often, the signals marked by these SSIDs are in direct competition with signals emanating from commercial providers. When a potential Île Sans Fil user turns on her device, she will be able to read the names of all three signals available in the area. If Île Sans Fil’s other visibility tactics have been successful, she will recognize their name among the otherwise oblique SSIDs . Broadcasting their branded SSID in areas where they know a commercial operator also provides a signal is another of Île Sans Fil’s tactics for marking virtual, as well as physical space.

These tactics for visibility are paradoxical in that they mirror those of commercial operators, who are competing for market share of the same group of wired elite. The visibility that Île Sans Fil hopes to gain through media exposure and installations in already highly wired ‘elite’ districts (downtown, Old Montréal) is visibility directed at influential groups: research conducted by Ile Sans Fil indicates that the majority of their users are university-educated males in professional occupations, or university students who have access to relatively expensive mobile computing devices. Despite the very real efforts that Ile Sans Fil makes to place infrastructure in areas that are unserved by commercial providers, in many ways its installations are most visible to groups that are already desirable, and well-served, by other high-quality communications infrastructure. The group argues that this is a normal progression in the development of new infrastructure, and that as time passes the costs of entry to the mobile telecommunications market will lower, and with their service already established, they will be able to diversify the communities they serve.

Visibility as Strategy and Tactic -- Media Visibility

Considerations of visibility are as important in revealing the politics of grassroots technology development as they are in revealing the implications of corporate technological advances. Ile Sans Fil, for example, leverages their visibility in mainstream and alternative media outlets as a way to compete with similar corporate ventures.

Ile Sans Fil members at the St-Laurent Boulevard Street Fair (photo by Robert Crecco)

Working from a marginal position in the competitive world of high-tech, Île Sans Fil is simultatneously part of underground culture as well as being connected to the technological cutting edge. These two influences combine when the group attempts to make its ideology and services visible. Since its formation in 2002, Île Sans Fil has actively pursued media coverage in both mainstream and alternative media, but it has also been sought out by members of the media looking for an engaging story on an emerging, trendy technology. Group members are available for interviews, and the group has been featured three times in the weekly magazines Voir and Mirror, as well as in the anglophone national daily Globe and Mail, the francophone daily Le Devoir, the Toronto monthly Spacing Magazine, zine review Broken Pencil, and alternative publications Accès Libre, and the Quebec Linux Journal. For the group, this visibility is considered essential for several reasons: first, without paid staff, media coverage provides free visibility and name-recognition. Since most potential hotspots are approached in person by volunteers, media coverage can help to extend the location of hotspots beyond those near where volunteers live. Second, given that one of Île Sans Fil’s long-term goals is to to establish a non-profit, free-of-charge model for public wireless access as a successful alternative to a for-pay model, media coverage can help to disseminate this message. Most importantly, media coverage encourages businesses and individuals to work with Île Sans Fil. Île Sans Fil has been very successful in this regard, having been named as a sponsor for the Montreal Fringe Theatre Festival, the street festival La Frenesie de la Main, and the social action study weekend Les Journées Alternatives. These activities create a wider potential user base for the “social software” applications that the group is currently developing, but they also position Île Sans Fil as a community provider of information technology solutions.

Introducing Ile Sans Fil

Montreal's Ile Sans Fil is a volunteer group dedicated to expanding internet access in public spaces. Their activities demonstrate some of the paradoxes inherent in using grassroots commuity organizing to distribute cutting-edge technology.

Île Sans Fil is a volunteer organization created in 2002 and composed of 40 members who donate their time to “providing free public wireless internet access to mobile users in public spaces throughout Montreal, Canada” (Ile Sans Fil, 2003). Group members are engineers, academics, students, technologists, artists, and management consultants. Castells might describe them as the ‘networked elite’. (1999). They are predominantly male, well-educated, and committed to creating wireless ‘hotspots’ in public places. Each of these hotspots shares a wired internet connection through a wireless router reprogrammed with open-source software created by Île Sans Fil. The software ensures that every visitor to an individual hotspot sees the same opening page: a page that displays local art and provides the opportunity for the production and sharing of content relevant to that specific location.

Some locations, such as the Laika café and the a href="http://auth.ilesansfil.org/portal/index.php?gw_id=25" >Atwater library have worked creatively with the functionality of the portal splash page. The project is simple, charming, and effective. Local businesses are enticed by the potential of offering free service to their clients, community groups are interested in sharing local content, and new media artist have a mechanism for displaying their work. Île Sans Fil is currently more successful than commercial wireless internet providers, with nearly 50 hotspots located in cafés, restaurants, parks, community centres, libraries, and other locations across Montreal. Part of their success no doubt stems from the cost of their services: establishing a hotspot is free of charge, after the equipment has been purchased at wholesale. The only cost for continuing maintenance and service is a $50 per year donation to Île Sans Fil.

However, the diversity of the locations at which service is provided also distinguishes Île Sans Fil from commercial providers: because of the low cost for setting up a hotspot, community centres, artists collectives and even interested individuals can afford to set one up, provided that they already have an internet connection and the roughly $100 it costs to purchase a wireless router. This accessibility has made it possible for Île Sans Fil to provide wireless internet service to areas of the city that are not likely to be commercially viable. For example, the group has connected wireless routers in the relatively disadvantaged neighbourhoods of Saint-Henri, Pointe-St-Charles, and Petit-Patrie, as well as in the suburbs of St-Leonard and Longueil. They have provided wireless internet installations to community groups Communautique and Centre-St-Pierre, as well as to the Studio XX artists’ collective. These accomplishments are a source of pride for Île Sans Fil members, who are keen to distinguish their service as both superior to, and different from, that of commercial providers. They continue to develop the portal page to facilitate easier and better-developed community content.

Wireless Internet and The Politics of Places

It is not as if ICTs are somehow external to cities or divorced from their politics. At individual city levels as well as at global levels, the presence of ICT networks and infrastructures is part of the politics of places. Although the forces of capital fixity and hypermobility operate to consolidate wealth and power, ICT networks are often used to work against these privatizing and marginalizing forces. In the next sections I look at how Montreal's community wireless group Ile Sans Fil negotiates with various types of visibility in the very particular social context in Montreal.

A wireless antenna almost invisibly graces a storefront

The power relationships underlying urban splintering and its economic, spatial, and social implications heavily favour large corporations, and can create a disengagement of elite communities from local areas. In other chapters I have attempted to make these relationships visible to allow us to see more clearly the base upon which our everyday actions rest. Now I will consider how independent media development brings forward elements of this power and influence by describing a community group that develops and distributes wireless internet access.

Despite the global processes that reinforce splintering, local movements continue to attempt to rebalance splintering. Historically, these movements have included telephone cooperatives (de la Sola Pool, 1977; Fischer, 1992; Martin, 1991), cable television cooperatives, co-op Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and FreeNets (Cohill & Kavanaugh, 1997). Currently, the cutting edge of this movement against splintering is represented by community wireless internet groups, who use inexpensive (often commercial) wireless internet hardware to cheaply connect computers to one another and to the internet. These groups attempt to use emerging technology to reduce or share the cost of internet access, and to make it possible to access the internet wirelessly in public areas. One of these groups, Montreal’s Île Sans Fil, has as its primary goal the provision of free wireless internet access across the city of Montreal. The group also aims to provide wireless service in areas not deemed profitable by commercial operators, and to create software that will encourage deeper engagement in one’s local place. However, the tactics used by the group to maintain their media visibility and status create paradoxes that reveal on a local level some of the complex relationships first described in the chapters of Part One.

The Shapes of Spaces -- Physical Traces

Other physical changes shape cities as new ICT industries emerge. ICT infrastructure leaves physical marks on urban space, which make visible the often tenuous power relationships underpinning them. All of the complex data-processing and multimedia processing facilities upon which technopoles depend are supported by other infrastructures, such as the telephone network, the electrical grid, and fresh- and waste-water services.

Pile (2001) describes how ICT infrastructures are physically integrated into urban areas, sharing space with highways, sewers, electrical conduits and other essential switches and wires in what Graham (2004) calls the “murky, dirty, and difficult spaces of the city’s often ignored underground realm” (p. 144). Indeed, new communications infrastructure often follows the traces of the old, threading along corridors created for electricity or telephone lines, or colonizing old office buildings for use as ‘telecom hotels.’ Graham writes, “telecom hotels are anonymous, windowless buildings and massive, highly fortified spaces which house the computer and telecommunications equipment for the blossoming commercial internet” (Graham, 2004 p.171). They need to be located close to the centres of IT development and as such often move into office space vacated by a decentralizing office market. Their presence often marks the location of key zones of power and influence, as much or even more than the purpose-built IT districts and gentrified urban cores. As much as we imagine ICTs to free information and individuals from the constraints of place, they are very much connected physically as well as politically to individual locations.

The Shapes of Spaces -- Gentrification

The introduction of ICT-linked capital, among other things, may be a catalyst for the physical and economic transformation of urban spaces. Here, Montreal's Plateau Mont-Royal displays some of the physical traits of gentrification.

Technopoles, whether global or second-tier, have been encouraged to attract the all-important ‘cyber’ capital through strategic investment by local governments and even smaller “corporate-controlled bodies like Business Improvement Districts (BIDs)” (Mosco, 1999). In some first-tier “cyber” cities like the City of New York, governments provided pre-wired buildings, access to high-bandwidth networks, dedicated generators or generator farms, and housing for the highly-educated, highly paid employees of technology firms. This investment has always come at the expense of more widespread infrastructure maintenance across whole urban areas, as Mosco (1999) points out. Strategic new construction, whether New York City’s Battery Park City located a short walk away from Silicon Alley, or Montreal’s Cité Multimedia, the centerpiece of a purported cluster of technology and high-end residential development, reinforces the development of high-income enclaves around ICT-intensive industries. These enclaves are often cut off from the surrounding urban fabric (Battery Park City is a good example) but sometimes encroach upon them, accelerating the process of gentrification that has been altering North American urban centres in the past two decades. When wealthy employees of technology companies move into traditionally poor areas, the economic and social effects are often remarkable and visible.

Solnit and Swartenberg (2000) describe the colonization of the SOMA (South of Market) area of San Francisco during the 1990’s by millionare technology workers, who drove out the poor and those who were engaged in non-lucrative pursuits such as art, social activism, or social service. This influx of highly-paid commuters, who travel to suburban Silicon Valley for work, intensifies the pressure on a neighbourhood that has already seen significant changes in its demographic makeup throughout the previous twenty years . The dot-com boom, and the association of SoMa with “cyber-cool” escalates the impacts on the shape of the city. Solit and Swartenberg report, “All over the city, buildings are being torn down and replaced with bigger ones, long-vacant lots are being filled in, condos built and sold, old industrial buildings and former nonprofit offices turned into dot-com offices and upscale lofts” (2000, p.14). The immense amounts of capital associated with the IT industry fundamentally reshaped the physical and social city. Although the process occurred first, and perhaps most obviously in San Francisco, the physical and social traces of ICT and dot-com economies are visible across North America. In Montreal, the Plateau Mont-Royal area has been fundamentally altered by many factors including the influx of new capital (much of it connected to the burgeoning software development industry), with higher rents, lower vacancy rates, and other symptoms of “the Darwinian nature of unfettered capitalism” (Solnit & Swartenberg, 2000 p.16).

This unfettered capitalism creates the perfect prerequisite for continued urban splintering. As the poor are forced out of neighbourhoods in central cities, they often move to more distant suburbs, dependent on crumbling transportation infrastructure and often outside of the zones in which companies consider it beneficial to upgrade telecommunications infrastructure. This establishes newly constructed or newly gentrified areas as “islands of privilege” (Graham and
Marvin 2001) and, in addition to destroying or undermining traditionally diverse proximal communities, small businesses, and neighbourhood services, often means that the former members of those communities often end in areas underserved by basic infrastructures. In addition, gentrifying neighbourhoods with active commercial areas often witness the growth of BIDs, which begin to control the maintenance of intrastructure (including public spaces). These districts, whose boards of governors represent the interests of local businesses, appear to be growing in power and influence, especially in cities where capital moves into certain areas. Like other symptoms of splintering, the increasing importance of BIDs in managing public space and civic services risks undermining established universal service infrastructures. However, because local politics determine the priorities of BIDs, their activities cannot necessarily be universally dismissed as problematic. Recently, some BIDs have begun providing wireless internet connectivity, a development that will be more closely considered in the chapter on Community Wireless.

The Shapes of Spaces -- Technopoles

Like the industrial revolution, the economic revolution connected to advances in ICTs has had major impacts on urban areas. Physical reconfigurations, as well as economic shifts related to shifts in capital, have marked cities all over the world.

Montreal's Cite Multimedia, seen from above

During the dot-com boom, the prefix “cyber” became synonymous with instant capital (Mosco, 2004). In the past twenty years, the global cities described by Sassen (2001) have received an influx of techno-capital, and “technopoles” have emerged, shaped by the enormous capital that was (and still is) attached to the development of internet networks and content. Silicon Valley in California, Silicon North in Ottawa, India’s Bangalore/Hyperabad region emerged as powers specifically because of their high-tech industries, while New York’s Silicon Alley and the Soho region of London augmented their traditional power through a new association with ICT-related capital, labour, and infrastructure. Whether centred in new or old technopoles, the infrastructure developed and extended in that period has had lasting effects. Zook (2001) describes how the development of North American technopoles can be measured by the number of domain names registered in each location: New York, Silicon Valley, and the Los Angeles areas had the highest concentration of domain names, in line with their burgeoning technology and entertainment industries. These locations, where specialized human resources combined with high levels of infrastructure development, have “fixed” large amounts of dot-com capital.

However, capital fixity has not just meant consolidation in global cities but also attempts by second- and third-tier cities to attract cyber-capital. Sometimes this has taken the form of developing ‘cyber’ identities for these regions. The Siliconia Website lists 105 locations with appellations including Silicon Swamp (two different cities in Florida) Silicon Plain (Bangalore) and Silicon Parkway (both the Garden State Parkway and an area in Connecticut). The competition for these monikers points out the importance of the “cyber” association for local governments hoping to cash in on the rush of digital capital in the 1990s. However, successfully attracting and retaining that capital requires significant investment by municipalities, and as explored above, most second-tier cities lack the influential social networks to really profit from their dot-com connections. Despite this, many cities, even second-tier ones, have experienced changes related to the presence and increasing influence of ICT-linked capital and infrastructure.

The Economics of Infrastructure

Where are the most well-developed ICT infrastructures located? What does this have to do with the development and maintenance of high-tech capital? Saskia Sassen helps us understand capital fixity and hypermobility.

The increasing participation of elites in the global “space of flows” might seem to indicate that locality matters little in a world where ICT infrastructures permit mobility of people and capital. However, this is not fully the case. Significantly, most of the economic relationships underlying infrastructure placement point to the continued, if altered, importance of local places, especially cities. Sassen points out that despite the networked distribution of ICTs, global financial centres are even more consolidated today than they have been in the past. She writes, “while the new telecommunications technologies do indeed facilitate geographic dispersal of economic activities without losing system integration, they have also had the effect of strengthening the importance of central coordination and control functions for firms and, even, markets” (Sassen, 2000 p.308). Sassen calls this consolidation of capital in central areas ‘capital fixity’ and places it in contrast with the ‘hypermobility’ of these firms’ products. The products of global industry are increasingly constructed and assembled in a variety of separate global locations, making them ‘hypermobile.” Furthermore, information has increasingly become the product produced by many global firms, creating even more hypermobility. According to Sassen, though, there is a major disconnect between the hypermobility of the products of digital capitalism, and the location of most of the world’s capital has not fundamentally shifted despite the worldwide availability of ICT networks.

One would imagine that these networks, which theoretically provide information to any location equipped with an internet connection, would facilitate the distribution of capital and power. In fact, certain factors keep capital fixed in global centres such as New York, London, and Tokyo. One of them is access to human capital: global cities require the right mix of infrastructure and information. This information is not the data that is available anywhere through technical networks, but the sensitive interpretations provided by a deep understanding of and connection to social networks. In other words, it is not enough merely to retrieve data; it is also important to be able to interpret it well. Connection to relevant infrastructure networks is valuable, but not as valuable as a connection to social networks that contextualize and interpret the data distributed through technical networks. lnterpreting such information well requires human as well as economic capital, and it is often financially beneficial for large firms to centralize important divisions, such as risk management. Despite the hypermobility of products facilitated by ICT infrastructure and networks, capital is still firmly fixed in locations of power and influence where there are often also high levels of ICT infrastructure development. However, elite corporations and their high-level employees are also becoming increasingly untethered from nations – suggesting that processes of splintering that move individuals from the space of places to the space of flows also operate at the global and organization level as well as at the individual level. The high-level “knowledge workers” who are educated, economically elite and therefore mobile, represent human capital that can be integrated into the space of flows. At the same time, though, the service workers and less well-educated employees who support global companies (and who are often female) are tethered to the space of places. Therefore, on a global level, the key combination of the information infrastructure, financial and human capital in specific ‘global cities’ make visible the continuing importance of place: only certain local places can afford to consolidate the necessary infrastructure and human capital (both of knowledge and service workers) required for continued dominance.

Revealing Infrastructure -- The Spaces of Flows

Envisioning the banal, through image or theory, means paying attention to what is normally ignored, hidden or concealed. For North American urban dwellers, some of the most privileged citizens in the world, much upon which we depend is concealed from sight: we don’t tend to think about how it functions until it fails to deliver to us what we have come to expect. The failure of the electricity grid in Toronto and New York in the summer of 2003 has become a cultural point of reference because of the sudden visibility of so many of the normally hidden elements of urban life: suddenly lights, heat, and cell phone conversations were no longer taken for granted. However, these infrastructures connect us not only to one another, but also to larger forces that extend across the globe through the ties of ownership and the movement of capital. This section presents some theories of global and local urban inequality: Castells’ “spaces of flows” and Graham and Marvin’s “splintering urbanism”

Manuel Castells describes contemporary urban life as an enfolding of the “space of flows” into the “space of places” (Castells, 2004). For Castells, the local and experienced is always part of the global and spatial, and as he writes elsewhere, “flows define the spatial form and processes. Within each city, within each area, processes of segregation and segmentation take place in a pattern of endless variation. But such segmented diversity is dependent upon a functional unity marked by gigantic, technology-intensive infrastructures” (Castells, 1996 p. 406). This insight describes the extent to which the sublime visions users have for ICTs depend upon the banal infrastructure that connects cities and regions to one another. For instance, leaving aside my ability to pay for computer hardware, software, and peripherals, using my wireless internet connection in Montreal depends upon the investment by incumbent cable companies in fibre-optic lines, and upon a cheap and reliable source of electricity, as well as the labour of workers across the world who produce cheap routers and computers. The influence of these webs of dependence will be discussed in the following sections. However, Castells also points out that members of urban society do not experience space and place in the same way. He writes, “people do still live in places. But because function and power in our societies are organized in the space of flows, the structural domination of its logic essentially alters the meaning and dynamic of places. Experience, by being related to places, becomes abstracted from power” (Castells, 1996 p.426). In other words, individuals are to varying extents (depending upon their economic and social capital) made distant from the wider circulations of power. The cosmopolitan elite move in what Castells would call the “space of flows,” engaging with one another in a fluid network of relationships, while the poor and disenfranchised live in places bounded by space and capital. ICTs can therefore facilitate a world of fluid networks and seamless moblility, but only for a few. Access to the weighty infrastructures that permit such mobility is limited to those who already possess adequate capital. For example, the cosmopolitan elite may flexibly work with colleagues the world over, relying on transportation infrastructures, cellular phone systems, and well-developed internet infrastructures. Those without the material resources to access these infrastructures live in a local, not a global world.

Focusing specifically on urban contexts, Graham and Marvin express the same sentiment more precisely as a process of “splintering.” They argue that all kinds of infrastructures, but particularly ICT infrastructures are helping to partition urban life and experience into separate areas reflective of social and economic status. Despite the fact that the rich and poor are living closer together geographically than ever before, many formerly universal services are being “redlined” out of areas deemed unprofitable, while premium services are offered to affluent neighbourhoods. For example, “gated community” subdivisions often create proprietory sewer and transportation grids, as well as other kinds of “closed networks” like the well-known local broadband network in Ontario’s “Netville” (Hampton, 2001). A key aspect of splintering is the migration of services away from universal accessibility and towards an unequal balance of services where high-end services are provided to ‘cherry-picked’ customers while poorer customers are left without even basic services. The economic rationale behind this type of splintering is clear: it is economically advantageous for companies to target a smaller group of lucrative customers than a larger group of marginally profitable customers. Graham and Marvin provide numerous illustrations of these economics at work, including the tactics of telephone companies, who increasingly target the wealthy consumers that Schiller (1999) calls “power users . . . high value residential customers who spend lavishly on a basket of telecommunications and information services including, on an annualized basis, $650 on cellular, $500 on local wireline telephone; $400 on long-distance telephony; $375 on cable, pay-per-view, and video-on demand” (cited in Graham and Marvin, 2001 p. 236). The social effects of splintering are to marginalize those who are already poor by separating them from even more infrastructures and services.

Graham and Marvin describe the network space that elites inhabit as being not just “different” but “indifferent” to the real inequalities that have begun to characterize urban spaces. However, often elites are not even aware of these inequalities. Since the deregulation of telecommunications services, governments have provided only very limited support for universal telecommunications access. Provision of service has moved from a presumption of universality towards a pay-for-service model where telecommunications providers compete for clients (Bodnar, 2004). To maintain their profit margins, many providers target the elite, ensuring that their systems are not only maintained but enhanced, and leave aside the poor. Because their service is rarely worsened by deregulation, elites are not necessarily aware of the deepening gap that this change has engendered. A gap in perception, as well as a gap in service, widen. This development has created a “disembedding of elite groups from whole systems of public service provision, public space and national consciousness” (Graham & Marvin 2001 p.147). Such a disembedding impacts not merely at the local level but also at the global: elites who are increasingly separated from their local areas form relationships with other global elites, bypassing the disempowered local place and living more and more of their lives in Castell’s “space of flows”. However, this local disembedding does not necessarily mean that ICT networks have obliterated time and space. On the contrary, they have reinforced certain aspects of them. As Graham (1997) argues, “Place-based and place-bound ways of living, and the social, economic, institutional, and cultural dynamics that can arise when urban propinquity does matter are still critically important in shaping how cities and localities are woven into global lattices of mobility and flow” (p.117). The theory of “splintering” and that of the space of flows thus provide ways of visualizing the tangled consequences of ICTs on everyday lives in urban context.

The View From Here - Introductions and Surveying the Terrain

ICT infrastructures are banal and uninteresting – but this also means that they are powerful. This introductory section establishes reasons for focusing on often invisible or ignored technical systems, and outlines the paper’s two main sections: a theoretical reflection on visualizing inequalities, and a more focused look at wireless internet’s “invisible” transmission infrastructure

From the window where I write this, I see the side of Mount Royal. The hillside's famous metal cross is accompanied by two gigantic communication towers, which I had never noticed until now. Like waste water disposal systems and electrical connections, the infrastructures that provide us with the ICT connections that we, as urban dwellers, come to depend on, are intensely unremarkable. Misshapen towers bristle with antennas and dishes, while grey plastic parabolas disfigure heritage buildings. Increasingly, our cities are being imagined as “digital,” their inhabitants “mobile” and “networked.” This mobility and networking is perceived as characteristic of our contemporary society, the most rapidly urbanizing of any society in history (Graham, 2004). This purported characteristic has inspired researchers, designers, and academics to investigate the changing textures of everyday life that result from the introduction of portable computing devices and mobile telephones into many urban homes. This set of investigations helps us to reflect on the role of new technologies in our lives, but also tends to draw on what Mosco calls (after Leo Marx) “the rhetoric of the technological sublime [which] involves hymns to progress that rise ‘like froth on a tide of exuberant self-regard sweeping over all misgivings, problems, and contradictions’” (Marx, cited in Mosco 2004 p.22-23). As generative as examinations of the daily changes wrought by ICTs can be, they often focus primarily on the sublime aspect of new technology – that is, its new and potentially transformative potential. Part of this focus on the sublime has been the creation of a dichotomy between the “real” material aspects of life, and the “virtual” aspects of life “on the screen” (Turkle, 1995). The sublime internet, especially, has been considered as something other than “real,” something that creates its own reality for its end user as soon as it arrives.

However, by focusing exclusively on what ICTs enable for the end user, researchers risk participating in a willful negligence of the banal – the ordinary, unremarkable state in which we take things for granted. These studies also risk neglecting some of the very “real” ways in which the internet’s infrastructure and delivery systems impact not just the end user (in her sublime online state) but other people as well. As Mosco warns, this negligence means ignoring the state in which technologies hold the most power (2004). Previously sublime technologies provide useful examples of the power inherent in the banal. Despite the initial excitement about electricity during its early development (Marvin, 1988), the electric light, now firmly “in the woodwork” has fundamentally shifted ways of working, moving, waking and sleeping. These effects were created not merely by individual electrical appliances but also by the supporting, and increasingly ubiquitous, electrical infrastructure. Large-scale infrastructural systems are tremendously important as situated elements of our experiences of technologies in our everyday lives. Therefore, without completely leaving aside the sublime way that the use and practice of ICTs can transform individuals’ experiences of their everyday lives, what follows will consider ICT infrastructure primarily as banal artifact, one that embeds our sublime myths of progress. Such myths include the notion that changes in technology will always and inevitably be positive, and the belief that technology is a neutral force.

Rob Shields writes, “it is almost a truism to say that urban environments are made selectively visible as ‘cities’ through representation . . . it is easy to forget that the visibility of the city is always an incomplete cipher for, or part of, the tactility of concrete, everyday life” (2003 p. 18). By engaging with the elements of ICT infrastructure that are invisible and ignored, I hope to think differently about the banal aspects of this infrastructure, and begin to understand something more about “concrete, everyday life.” This will reveal the extent to which everyday life as many North American urban dwellers experience it is impacted by deeply embedded power structures. Examining the structures and infrastructures around which power forms makes these power relationships visible for critique. To promote this visibility, the next three chapters: 1: introduce theoretical frameworks for discussing ICTs and urbanity (Revealing Infrastructure); 2: consider the political-economic, social, and physical implications of ICT infrastructure at the global and local levels, especially the forces of capital fixity and capital mobility, which reinforce the political and economic dominance of “global cities” while producing social and political effects in local areas (The Economics of Infrastructure); and an investigation of the physical impacts of ICTs on local neighbourhoods (The Shapes of Spaces). In th Community WiFi: Seeing the Invisible, I look more closely at the marking of wireless space. Wireless internet technology (known commercially as WiFi) is a technology that is new enough to still bear some of the trappings of the sublime. As it becomes banal, melting into the invisible airspace of urban areas (except for its subtly visible antennas and routers), WiFi companies, and non-profits, are marking their spaces virtually using a variety of tactics, in order to gain the attention of a limited pool of influential consumers or supporters. A case study focusing on a Montreal non-profit and its choice of tactics permits a clearer understanding of underlying power structures. The following chapters each provide a different way of considering the power play between the banal and sublime.

Abstract

This paper uses the organizing concept of “visibility” to investigate how information anc communication technology (ICT) infrastructures have shifted, transformed, and consolidated economic and social power in Western (particularly North American) cities. After surveying the global impacts of IT infrastructures in urban areas, the paper focuses specifically a local example of how wireless internet infrastructure is developed and used in Montreal. Using photographs of telecommunications infrastructure in its everyday viewed context as organizing features, the paper exposes how ICT infrastructure’s banality conceals its important implication in both global and local shifts in economic power, social relationships, and the use of urban space. This “glance over” the economic, social, and physical influence of the internet on urban space concludes with a closer look at the politics of wireless signal provision in Montreal, where a community group has reappropriated ICT infrastruture and competes with leading telecommunication providers for better “visibility” of their wireless signals in politically and socially important areas. The paper is presented in chapters that are intended to stand alone, but which can also be read as sections of a larger work.

To my gentle readers . . .

. . if there are more than three of you. Yes, this blog is backwards. I began it as a place to publish the working paper you can read below, by chapter. But like most blogs it took on a life of its own. So, until the ever-patient and frighteningly talented flink reverses it, you will have to scroll to the bottom to read the new bits. That's what you get when the luddite builds the blog . . .