blue windows, a water tower, and cellular antenna

Creative re-use of a water tower as a mount for cellular antenna on Fairmount Ave. between 4th St. and 5th St. in North Philadelphia. February 2012.

The use of existing structures such as water towers and smokestacks as high-points to mount cellular antenna is common in Philadelphia. The post-industrial urban landscape is littered with sites such as the above one, a boarded up factory site advertizing its current tenant the 'Trans-Atlantic Co.' which according to their website is an importer of security and shelving equipment. Even if the water tower is still in use, which is unlikely, the Trans-Atlantic Company apparently has no need for windows, having boarded up and painted bright blue  every window in the building. What was likely a factory with natural lighting through these now-boarded windows has turned into a warehouse where windows are not needed, the lighting provided by electricity.

The building now provides a high point from which the ethereal, wireless connectivity is broadcast throughout the neighborhood, but, seen in the photograph below, the building's presence on the street is closed off, a canvas for a lovelorn graffiti artist to bemoan his or her love, apparently named Snicks, leaving Philadelphia. This site provides an example of b how the ubiquity of wireless communication is actually produced. Those signal bars on the iPhone come from somewhere, places like the antenna atop this building in North Philadelphia.

A frontal view of the Trans-Atlantic Company's warehouse, with graffiti atop blue-painted boarded up windows.

infrastructure of mobile telephony and the physicality of the Internet

An AT&T cellular tower sits between the playground for the Hawthorne Cultural Center and a block of two-story, brick row-homes at the intersection of Carpenter Street and South 13th Street in South Philadelphia. A flock of birds settled on the top of the tower just as the picture was taken. January 2012.

A key, ubiquitous communication node in a networked city like Philadelphia is the cellular antenna and cellular tower. In addition to connecting mobile phone calls, these cellular antenna create the ethereal link between an individual’s smartphone and the Internet. To check an email, find directions with Google Maps, interact with social media, or to access any number of other uses of the mobile Internet requires these ubiquitous, monotone rectangular boxes to be mounted atop high places throughout the landscape. The ‘always-on’ nature of mobile connectivity is created through the maintenance of these cellular networks. The individual device, such as an Apple iPhone, may fit in a pocket, but the background network is immense. Data centers house the servers which contain our digital footprint and a vast array of fiber-optic cabling transmits this information, and the final connection to the user is made through cellular antenna. While the design and utility of that iPhone is of particular concern to the user and to Apple, the design of the infrastructural support to that device often looks like a haphazard afterthought.
In a city such as Philadelphia, these antenna are typically situated three ways. Antenna can be mounted atop commercial or residential buildings, often on former industrial structures such as water towers or smokestacks. They can be located at the top of electrical transmission towers, or they can occupy freestanding towers dedicated specifically to providing mobile connectivity. Freestanding cellular sites in Philadelphia often occupy the interstitial margins of the city, wedged into an empty lot alongside a major roadway or towering over a residential neighborhood. The infrastructural aesthetic for cellular equipment seems to focus on presumptions of anonyminity as well as functional concerns placed before formal design. Muted colors such as whites and greys dominate, with little attention paid to the impact on connecting the design of the structure with the adjacent neighborhood. At the street-level, these towers and their attendant ground-level equipment are typically surrounded by a chain link fence displaying some information about who owns and operates the tower, such as AT&T, as well as one or more ‘No Trespassing’ signs. While these ‘No Trespassing’ signs are a legal necessity for practical reasons as well as safety reasons, it is worth considering how mobile communication, this system that provides connection to each other and to the Internet occurs through spaces that are separated from the urban landscape itself, sequestered behind fences while at the same time towering over the surrounding area.

As the individual device in the hand of the user becomes a normalized element in everyday life, the impact of mobile communication infrastructure in the landscape itself is overlooked. The hyper-designed object of an iPhone cannot function without the connective background provided by cellular antenna. While the utility of mobile telephony is contained on the screen of that iPhone, the impact of the network on the landscape itself is distinctively physical and visible, located in equipment like these cellular towers.

Everyday Structures at the 2012 AAG conference in New York City

Just south of the South Street Bridge, a quonset hut houses the Springfield Beer Distributors, soon to be relocated due to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia's push across the Schuylkill River, with a single mast cellular tower in the background.

The Association of American Geographers annual conference is in New York City this year. On Saturday 25 February, at the early hour of 8am, I will be presenting research drawn from fieldwork in the Philadelphia region over the last year or so. Attending the conference requires a paid registration, but if anyone readers out there can make it, please say hello afterward.

Here is a description of the session, Geographies of the Internet: Situating information and communication technologies in the urban landscape

As ubiquitous computing, broadband Internet, mobile communication, and the related information and communication technologies become more and more embedded in our daily lives, there is a need to examine the spaces of connection and dis-connection through many analytic lenses. This session will utilize qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches to studying the geographies of the network society, from examining the spaces of mobile communication infrastructure in the metropolitan landscape to mapping the accessibility of broadband Internet. The goal of this session is to critically interrogate the places produced by and through the "Net": these ephemeral and often obscured systems that are at the core of our daily lives as scholars and citizens.

And here is the abstract for my paper presentation, Producing mobile communication: situating digital infrastructure in the urban landscape:

Contemporary urban life is closely linked to the digital telecommunication connection provided by mobile connectivity. While the ethereal presence of the telecommunication networks is visible in the signal bars on a mobile phone, the less-visible physical presence of this digital infrastructure is creating a new utility within the urban landscape that needs to be considered as a component of contemporary urban life. This presentation interrogates one of the primary components of ubiquitous computing: the digital infrastructure of cellular antenna and the like that produces mobile connectivity; this presentation also  examines the communication infrastructure's relationship to the street itself. Using the case of Philadelphia, I address how connecting individuals occurs in spaces disconnected from the street and urban public space in general. I will discuss how to apply a methodological framework from brought out of critical urban studies can be combined with concepts from science and technology studies such as boundary objects to consider the co-production of the urban today through the built landscape of the city itself as well as the ethereal spaces of mobile communication. I argue that spatializing the infrastructure of mobile connectivity and is an important and undervalued component of understanding the twenty-first century urban landscape.

flyover

Looking towards East Falls, below the Lincoln Highway/Roosevelt Expressway. Philadelphia. The modernist freeway project clashes quite strongly with the early industrial neighborhood it passes through and over.

the visual impact of cellular sites in Philadelphia

Broad and Washington, looking east. South Philadelphia

Two photographs today, taken in the last few weeks. The first, above, is an AT&T cellular site that stands much taller than the surrounding neighborhood. While these towers rarely blend into the landscape, it is striking to see one in a residential area that sits this high above the buildings. For context, the row homes directly in front of the tower are two stories high.

The Schuylkill River looking west from Kelly Drive, Philadelphia. 

 

This second photo is a traditional Pennsylvania winter view, water, leafless trees, washed out, cold blue sky, a view that has not changed much for the last few hundred years, except for the cellular site on the left. The tall, narrow and pointy structure that sits above the treeline on the horizon is another element in the infrastructure that produces mobile communication, this one alongside the I-76 corridor heading north out of Philadelphia.

These two images offer examples of how the changes mobile connectivity brings to individual users are reflected in the landscape. Neither of these cellular sites have particularly large impact on Philadelphia's landscape, but they are one of the more visible elements of network equipment, broadcasting the ethereal radio signals that connect mobile phone calls, that bring up Internet-based information on the touchscreen of that iPhone.

lost fire hydrant

A fire hydrant in the woods somewhere near Philadelphia. These sort of scenes are a reminder of all the pipes, tubes, wires, and the like that are buried underground. Just because we cannot see the water line running to this hydrant, it is there. The roots of all these trees are intertwined with the water line, the forest and the city, nature and culture are all mixed together.

telecom signage from throughout the United States

A collection of WARNING, DO NOT DIG or general private property signage from telecommunications equipment. Locations: California--Sonora, Point Reyes, Mono Lake, Manzanar, Redondo Beach. Kentucky--Shelbyville, Finchville, Louisville. Pennsylvania--Philadelphia, Norristown. This signage is the most visible element of our communication networks, indicating the presence of the fiber-optic or copper cables that carry landline and mobile phone conversations as well as the Internet. The different designs and font choices over the years, as well as the weathering of the signs is indicative of the evolution of the systems and the telecom providers. Some of the signs are for companies that no longer exist, such as Pacific Bell. Since PacBell became AT&T, changing the signage has apparently not been a priority.

agricultural landscape with warning sign

A 'Warning: Do Not Dig' sign indicating the presence of a buried fiber-optic cable. Outside Eureka, Illinois.

penstocks and powerlines

in the Sierra Nevada foothills, Northern California. January 2010.

space age to networked age

The signage from the apparently out-of-business Astro Motel mimics the cellular antenna in the background. Space age 1950s aesthetic looking to the sky meets 21st century non-aesthetic of telecom infrastructure looking down to the mobile phones in cars zooming by on the freeway in California's Central Valley. The flatness of the landscape makes the verticality of the structures even more distinct. Summer 2010. (I forget if this is Interstate 5 or Highway 99, but it is one of the two, somewhere between Merced and Bakersfield.)