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.

The Empire of the In-Between

Amtrak's Acela train passes through West Philadelphia. Photo taken by Alan Wiig, looking south from Woodland Cemetery. In the distance is the Grays Ferry neighborhood and a closed Dupont paint factory.

Stopping for a time in the Empire of the In-Between: Pieter Hugo’s photographs with an accompanying essay by Adam Davidson in the November 4 2012 New York Times Sunday Magazine look at how the Mid-Atlantic corridor between New York City and Washington DC has become such a devastated landscape. The images Hugo made during two weeks this fall explore the neighborhoods directly adjacent to the Amtrak railroad corridor connecting New York and DC and survey the “heroic wreckage” (p. 26) of the terrain with a sympathetic eye that also does not gloss over the desperation of the neighborhoods. Hugo’s eye hones in on scenes in a way that he has developed photographing strange, unique corners of Africa, such as hyena men in Nigeria or a computer waste dump in Ghana. The continuity of these African images with what was found in the Mid-Atlantic  indicate how removed these US communities are, even as they sit just outside the window of Amtrak’s Acela trains. By creating portraits of the corridor’s residents, and by visualizing the track-side landscape with a similarly vivid intimacy, Hugo’s images show the people and places that are more often sped past from on high, sitting in Amtrak’s air-conditioned rail cars. Even though, as Davidson points out, “for most of the 180 or so years of the train line’s existence, the endpoints of this journey—New York and D.C.—were subordinate to the roaring engines of productivity in between” (p. 26), today the in-between exists too often just as a backdrop. What is most compelling about Davidson’s essay is his discussion of  the recent history of the service-industry economy in the North-East United States and how it has affected a particular part of the region: the corridor of the Mid-Atlantic that borders the train that the Orgmen of the new economy take between New York and DC, a corridor that was built around the rail line but for an earlier, industrial economy that no longer has a part in the region, even as the formerly industrial cities and their citizens are still present, figuratively and literally watching the trains roll past. Davidson explains the situation in this corridor in as concise a manner as I’ve come across, writing:

...the train passes directly through or near 8 of the 10 richest counties in the United States, but all of this wealth is concentrated near the endpoints of the journey: Manhattan’s sattellites in northern New Jersey and the towns where lobbyists and government contractors live in suburban Virginia and Maryland. This is a geographic representation of a telling contradiction. For the past 30-plus years, through Republican and Democratic administrations, there has been much lip service paid to the idea that the era of big government is over. Long live free enterprise. And yet in the case of those areas surrounding the capital, wealth has gravitated to the exact spot where government regulation is created. Why? Because many businesses discovered that renegotiating the terms between government and the private sector can be extraordinarily lucrative. A few remarkable books by professors at NYU’s Stern School of Business argue that a primary source of profit for Wall Street over the past 15 to 20 years could be what I call the Acela Strategy: making money by exploiting regulation rather than by creating more effective ways to finance the rest of the economy. (p. 29)

Davidson’s argument succeeds because it does not single out one political party or another for failing to support the region, nor does the argument push ephemeral, intangible ideas such as outsourcing, the global economy, neo-liberalism or other similar policy decisions as the problem. These concepts and their underlying logic are complicit in the crumbling neighborhoods and empty factories, but blaming the situation on one or many issues would create a simple conclusion that does little justice to the corridor itself. Davidson identifies the places that today are successful economic zones, and those that are not, and makes clear that spatial proximity no longer leads to a distribution of jobs and a ‘trickle-down’ of profits. The present realities do not reflect a positive outlook for the near future. As Davidson continues, “calling for a return to the days when everybody who was willing could make a good living at the factory is a fantasy, maybe a lie and certainly an implicit acknowledgement that nobody has any idea what to do with the underemployed in the slums of Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Southeast DC” (p. 35).

For the passengers on Amtrak’s Acela trains what matters is moving quickly between Penn Station in New York and Union Station in DC, then heading to offices on either end. For these passengers and the economy they work in, to quote the sociologist Bruno Latour: “between the lines of the network there is, strictly speaking, nothing at all” (from We Have Never Been Modern, 1993 p. 118). Yet there is plenty between the lines, places physically close but in reality very far from Amtrak’s rail network and the service economy it supports. This reportage shows what is present between the end-points of the rail network; it shows what exists today in these cities built for industries that no longer function, with road grids and housing and even citizens cut off from the dominant economic activities of the region, disconnected from political agency in DC and the economic action in New York City.
The success of this essay is that it locates the new economy not solely in its shiny new offices but in its opposite, in the places that have been left far, far behind even though they are in-between the two endpoints and for much of the nation’s history were a driver of the economy itself. The successful economy in the Mid-Atlantic corridor is now suburban, found in the bland single story machine shops and exurban office centers that line the freeway corridors, sitting outside of the cities that originally organized the growth and development of the region. The new economy is also embodied in the rail line itself, and just like the other businesses of the service industry, Amtrak requires relatively few employees to maintain these trains and the tracks themselves. If this were the whole of Hugo and Davidson’s work, it would sit as an interesting piece of quality journalism. But the work pushes further by considering the rail network as an active agent in the story itself. Davidson locates the problem in economic and policy decisions made in DC and New York, decisions made possible on and through the Acela trains as they rumble past these places that have been effectively abandoned.

Underlying this argument about the spatial outcomes of this political-economic muddle is the North-East railroad corridor itself, this transportion infrastructure that also play an active part of the photo-essay. The smooth movement between DC and Wall Street relies on the railroad. Davidson’s work ties closely with Keller Easterling’s analysis of what she has termed the extrastatecraft of the contemporary moment, where politics have become tightly intertwined with infrastructure and urbanism, where statecraft and economic activities are different from past formations; consequently these extra-ordinary new relationships rely directly on things like this rail corridor and the trains that travel it. Understanding the everyday poverty of the cities’ residents and the continued decay of the urban landscape cannot be separated from the Acela trains that pass through the corridor, this network that enables a contradictory set of political and economic relationships between DC and New York City that benefit the two cities and their associated economic services, but leave what is in-between to fall further and further apart. Telling a story of the blighted, post-industrial cities of Mid-Atlantic via slowly exploring the rail corridor that once served these cities but now facilitates their continued decay is a creative, honest, and bleak but needed story of the North-East United States today. 

pathholes and other hazards of walking

Looking down the top section of the Loma Linda path, at Queens Road.

The Berkeley Hills just northeast of the UC Berkeley campus have a number of short, often steep walking paths stitching between the more circuitous roads through the area. While the streets that automobiles drive on in the Hills are narrow, difficult to navigate, and a spaghetti-mess of more-or-less intact asphalt, the paths cut alongside seasonal creeks, at fence-lines and under bay laurel, oaks, and redwoods. Often the paths cut straight down toward the lower neighborhoods, eventually depositing the walker on Euclid or another main road that funnels traffic toward to the university campus, or drops further, toward the Shattuck Avenue commercial corridor and the Gourmet Ghetto.

In August I was in Berkeley for a day and was able to explore the La Loma Path, which is on an existing but newly opened section of public right of way. The paths are built, restored, maintained, and advocated for by a local group called the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association, but a situation has emerged common to the NIMBYism (not in my backyard) often found in cities like Berkeley--especially in the very wealthy areas such as the Berkeley Hills--where this new path on public land has become a contested element of the landscape. The property owners adjacent to the path seem to feel that the occasional walker is a nuisance and a danger, as indicated in the hand drawn, chalk signs depicted below. Regardless, the trail is an excellent addition to the neighborhood and I encourage those readers in the Bay Area who have not yet explored the trails to do so. A map of Berkeley's Pathways is available at many bookstores as well as at the Path Wanderers website.

What follows is a short photo-essay of the walk, with some commentary in the captions.

A path-side fence note, indicating where either humans or perhaps dogs should shit.

More fence notes written in chalk on the newly opened pedestrian right of way, noting: "GO HOME PATHHOLES!!! WE WANT QUIET!!!" as well as "EMERGENCY + 12 kV [electrical power] lines = French Fried Path Critters! Yummy!". Electrical lines pass by overhead; the neighbors are either worried for people walking on the path, or threatening that walking the path could lead to death. But then wouldn't living next to the path also be dangerous?

Where the path cuts across Campus Drive there is a campaign asking people to "Join the Kindness [R]Evolution Today!" The smaller sign to the right implores  "Neighbors please be civilized and considerate: Dear Berkeley,
Please help our music teacher regain her essential privacy and safety in her own home and use the easliy available alternative walkway on Glendale Ave just across the Glendale - La Loma intersection (at the bottom) an only 3 houses north (at the top). She needs to have peace and no more disturbance (after 10 months of horrors) in order to recover from injuries of a car accident caused by a drunk driver and more recent police brutality during her unfair arrestes in her own home. May G-d (sic) allow you to fill your heart with the compassion to the suffering of those you meet on your path!" There is a link to the Kindness Revolution website as well. While it is unfortunate that the resident is suffering from many injuries of various natures, I wonder if directing anger and frustration about these issues is best done in through a sign that reflects more-so frustrations that what was considered a private part of one person's backyard is not part of the Berkeley's foot-based transportation network.

The path alongside the music teacher's house.

A dragonfly waiting on a not-quite-ripe blackberry for the August fog to burn off and the air to warm. The blackberries were not quite ripe.

As a perk for winning a Nobel Prize, UC Berkeley faculty are given access to the areas where parking is restricted only to Nobel Laureates. I'm guessing the house in the background here is the residence of an emeritus faculty member who took his or her sign with them upon retirement.

Bamboo acting to fence a property in, with a redwood in the background, banana trees and a palm of some variety in the middle ground.

Figs and apples ripening together, overhead. Berkeley and the Bay Area in general are such a mixture of ecosystems, including, in this case two fairly different types of fruit.

and the airports

Looking north at Philadelphia International Airport, from Hog Island Road. October 2012.

The very sites they were most drawn to--the business centres, the shopping plazas, the franchise restaurants, the tourist spots and the airports--would appear slightly illusory, never really experienced in spite of the photographs taken, the souvenirs bought and the money spent. -- from The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India by Siddhartha Deb (p. 52)

municipal adaptations, by humans and by vegetation

The sidewalk ends but a path continues. South Broad Street, far south Philadelphia. October 2012.

One of the more enjoyable Internet-based finds I've made over the last year has been the work of Chris Berthelsen and his Tokyo-based urban lab, a-small-lab. His weekend explorations to the metropolitan fringes of Tokyo, walking around and exploring for the tiny disruptions of gardens in the concrete and asphalt landscape of urban Japan, or the  creativity of Tokyo's residents to improve upon or fix small elements of their day-to-day lives is a window into the small details of living in a city and a country that has, for me at least, remained foreign aside from the writings of Haruki Murakami, the films of Hayao Miyazaki, and assorted articles about Japan's place global economy or awesome espresso. And perhaps Murakami, films, and articles all conspire to keeping Japan foreign. But Berthelsen's work opens up the urban fabric of Tokyo, the little pocket gardens along a sidewalk or the place of semi-mythological feral raccoon-dogs in the nighttime streets and back alleys is an enjoyable, informative, and highly insightful diversion from my scholarly research on and daily life in cities in the United States.

In the spirit of Berthelsen's work, I've attempted over the past month to first 'see' and then to document similarly unique and/or strange but normal elements of Philadelphia. In the photo above is a local adaptation of an poorly-thought out sidewalk situation. The road on the right merges into Broad Street on the left, the main north-south artery through central Philadelphia. Rather than continue the sidewalk to cross to its continuation, the planners just ended the concrete, leaving residents to continue the path themselves. The three photos below, while perhaps not fitting with the DIY impulse that a-small-lab seeks out, document vegetation overtaking views in Fairmount Park. The benches at one point presented a view of the Schuylkill River, along with the Delaware River on the eastern side of the city, one of the two rivers that define central Philadelphia's boundaries. The park's gardeners come through and mow the grass regularly, but the fringe of shrubbery and trees has completely overtaken any view, leaving the benches to present a scene of urban nature likely not intended by the landscape architects who located the benches where they are. The three benches are ordered with the first one furthest downstream and consequently closest to the city itself, and the other two progressing out and upstream toward the city's edge.

Bench 1 in Fairmount Park along West River Drive. At one point this bench overlooked the Schuylkill River, but the riot of growth now interrupts the view.

Bench 2, also not overlooking the Schuylkill River.

...and Bench 3, looking out at trees instead of the river. These three photos from mid-September 2012.