Stephen Graham
Introduction: From Dreams of Transcendence to the “Remediation”
of Urban Place
As a foundation for developing integrated urban and ICT strategies there is clearly a desperate need, as sociologists Haythornthwaite and Wellman (2002:
4–5) suggest, to move beyond generalized and deterministic discourses about the “impacts” of “cyberspace” on society to look in rich empirical detail at the complex ways in which ICT technologies are being used in real ways in real places. As they suggest, “the reality of the Internet is more important than the dazzle” (ibid.). Indeed, some now argue that many ICT-related shifts in everyday urban life are actually more intriguing than could possible have been predicted in the generalized scenarios pumped out en masse between the 1960s and 1990s.
The architecture critic Keller Easterling (2003: 3), for example, argues that “the explosion of changes to the world’s markets, cities, and means of shipping and communication [are] far more strange and unpredictable than any of the swag- gering futurology scenarios.”
Manuel Castells (1996, 1997, 1998a) has done much to pave the way in analyzing these complex articulations between place-based and electronically mediated interactions as they unfold, often at great speed and with counter- intuitive logic. The important work of media theorists Bolter and Grusin (1999) also emphasizes that the whole raft of current ICT innovations is not being used in ways that are divorced from the use of existing media, means of communication, and material practices in places. Rather, they are allowing for the subtle “remediation” of TV, newspapers, magazines, radio, telephones, publishing, books, art, video, photography, face-to-face communication, and the social and anthropological experience, and construction of place. This is happening as established practices subtly combine with, rather than disappear through, socially constructed technological potentials.
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The starting point for this chapter, then, is that ICTs, far from being a complete and revolutionary break with the past, thus maintain many intimate connections with old media, old technologies, old practices, and old (electro- mechanical) infrastructures and spaces (telephone systems, broadcasting systems, electricity systems, highway systems, streets, airline systems, logistics systems). It follows that the so-called “information age” is best considered not as a revolution but as a complex and subtle amalgam of new technologies and media fused on to, and “remediating”, old ones (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 183).
There are a great many more continuities and synergies than many would have us believe. We are not experiencing some wholesale, discrete break with the urban past ushered in by the “impacts” of new technology. Rather, we are experi- encing a complex and infinitely diverse range of transformations where new and old practices and media technologies become mutually linked and fused in an ongoing blizzard of change. As Bolter and Grusin (1999: 183) suggest,
“cyberspace”:
is very much a part of our contemporary world and . . . it is constituted through a series of remediations. As a digital network, cyberspace reme- diates the electric communications networks of the past 150 years, the telegraph and the telephone; as virtual reality, it remediates the visual space of painting, film, and television; and as social space, it remedi- ates such historical places as cities and parks and such “nonplaces” as theme parks and shopping malls. Like other contemporary telemediated spaces, cyberspace refashions and extends earlier media, which are themselves embedded in material and social environments.
Unfortunately, however, prevailing discourses about cities and ICTs have often failed to come to terms with the subtleties of remediation. Very often, instead, they adopt simplistic and technologically determinist assumptions that ICTs will simply substitute for cities and urban life. This has resulted in six major analytical and policy problems which confront networked city strategies.
Understanding these will be the inevitable starting point of any sophisticated attempt to develop city-ICT strategies, which are the concern of the second part of this chapter. It is therefore worth briefly discussing each of these weaknesses in this first part of the chapter.
Ignoring Global Urbanization and Mobility Trends
The first problem is obvious: deterministic end of city accounts are simply, empirically wrong. These accounts fly in the face of a contemporary reality marked by the greatest processes of urbanization in human history. They fail to explain the rapid rates of economic, demographic, and physical growth not just of the “megacities” of the global South but of many high-tech and old industrial cities of the global North, many of which have experienced a star- tling economic renaissance in the last 20 years (at least in certain districts).
A few figures give a flavor of the scale of contemporary urbanization processes on our planet. Between 1900 and 2000 the world’s urban population Stephen Graham
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grew from 10 percent to 50 percent of the global population. Mumbai’s popu- lation has quadrupled in 30 years (1972–2002). In one hour 60 people move in to Manila, 47 move to Delhi, 21 to Lagos, 12 to London, 9 to New York and 2 to Paris. By 2025 there are likely to be 5 billion urban dwellers on Earth (two-thirds of whom will live in “developing” nations) (all figures from Koolhaas et al. 2001: 1–6).
End of city discourses studiously ignore the fact that urbanization and growing ICT use are actually going hand in hand. City spaces are dominant hubs which shape and configure all aspects of global ICT infrastructure invest- ment and global Internet and telephone traffic. Cities and urban regions are actually massively dominant in driving demand for land and mobile telephony, the Internet, and new media technologies. This dominance shows no sign whatsoever of slackening. Again, a few figures are salutary here. Eighty percent of telecommunications investment within France goes into Paris. In 1998, 25 percent of all of the UK’s international telecommunications traffic was funneled into a single optic fiber network in central London run by WorldCom that was only 230 kilometers long. Anthony Townsend (2003) reports that more optic fiber underlies the island of Manhattan than is threaded across the whole of Africa. And, in 2003, the Internet geographer Matthew Zook showed that only five metropolitan regions – New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and Washington DC – accounted for 17.7 per cent of the world’s total Internet domains. These are the familiar .coms, .nets, .orgs, etc., that are widely portrayed as being “placeless” and “without a geography” (see http://www.zookNIC.com/
Domains/index.html).
End of city perspectives also ignore the rapid rise in all forms of physical mobility at all geographical scales. These have actually grown in parallelwith the application of ICTs; they have not been replaced by ICTs. Evidence for this is difficult to avoid: the growing gridlock of city streets; the staggering rise of global automobile ownership; the exponential growth of airline travel; inten- sifying levels of consumer and business tourism; growing energy consumption;
and a general acceleration of flows of goods, commodities, and raw materials at all scales across the world.
Debunking the “Virtual” Myth: Ignoring the Material Bases of ICTs
The second problem with ICT-based end of city visions is that they ignore the very material realities that make the supposedly “virtual” realms of
“cyberspace” possible. “Cyberspaces” do not exist on their own; the many supposedly “virtual” domains and worlds are brought into existence, and con- stantly facilitated, by massive, globally extended sets of material systems and infrastructures. In their obsession with the ethereal worlds of cyberspace – with the blizzards of electrons, photons, and bits and bytes on screens – end of city commentators have consistently ignored the fact that it is real wires, real fibers, real ducts, real leeways, real satellite stations, real mobile towers, real web servers, and – not to be ignored – real electricity systems that make all of this possible. All these are physically embedded and located in real places.
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They are expensive. They are profoundly material. They sharply condition the functionality of digitally mediated encounters (contrast an always-on broadband Internet computer with the scratchy and slow service available by dialing up over a phone line). Finally, ICTs have very real geographies in the traditional sense (i.e., they are in some places and not in others).
Because the material bases for cyberspace are usually invisible they tend only to be noticed when they collapse or fail through wars, terrorist attack, natural disasters, or technical failure. Even when they are visible – as with mobile phone masts and telecom towers – they are often disguised so as not to be “ unsightly.” (In the UK many mobile towers are camouflaged as fake trees!) Thus, in contrast to the vast and land-hungry infrastructural edifices that sustain transport, electricity, and water flows, the myth that cyberspace is an ethereal and immaterial realm continues to retain power.
It is also now very clear that the geographical patterns of the material bases and investment patterns of cyberspace are not spreading across the world equally. They are extremely, perhaps increasingly, uneven. In a world of increasing economic and infrastructural liberalization, the giant transnational media and infrastructure firms that build and control the material bases for cyberspace tend to concentrate their investments where the main markets are – in major cities, urban regions, and metropolitan corridors. For example, even now, large swathes of the world’s poorest countries have little telecommunica- tions infrastructure to speak of. A third of the world’s population has yet to make a telephone call (let alone log on to the Internet). And, even in advanced industrial cities, the spaces where one is able to access the new premium ICT services – such as broadband, third generation mobile, or wireless Internet – are often still limited to the “premium bubbles” of connectivity located in down- town cores, affluent suburbs, airports, or university campuses.
Overgeneralization and the Weaknesses of “Impact” Metaphors
The third problem with the utopian and anti-urban predictions of end of city visionaries is that they massively over-generalize. They imply that all experi- ences are the same anywhere and that ICTs relate to all cities in the same way at all times. This ignores an increasingly sophisticated body of theoretical and empirical research which suggests that, while ICTs do have important implications for cities, the relationships are much more subtle, complex, and contingent than that endlessly repeated world of simple, deterministic, substi- tution, total dematerialization, and a wholesale stampede of urban life into the clean and infinitely extendable domains of “cyberspace.”
ICTs are helping to facilitate significant reconfigurations in the geography, mobility patterns, and social, economic, and cultural dynamics of cities, and in the ways in which urban life is represented, lived, and managed. But these changes are subtle. They are often counterintuitive. And they tend to involve many other processes of change.
In short, ICTs don’t have “impacts” on cities in and of themselves. Rather, complex social processes and practices occur that shape the nature, use, and Stephen Graham
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application of ICTs in urban (and non-urban) contexts in a wide variety of contingent ways. ICT use subtly combines with, rather than replaces, the traditional urban experience which centers on the placement and movement of the human body (or bodies) in the room, the building, the street, the transport network, the neighborhood, or the city.
The use and experience of ICTs is therefore associated with myriad urban changes in different spaces, times, and contexts. Indeed, one ICT artefact – say, an Internet computer – can, itself, be used to sustain a wide range of uses by a range of different people at different times of the day and in different phys- ical situations. Each may entail different relations between ICT-based exchange and the spaces, times, and social worlds of the places that provide the context for its use.
All this means that generalization about ICTs and cities is hazardous to say the least. The ways in which places become enmeshed into geographically and temporally stretched electronic networks such as the Internet is an extra- ordinarily diverse, contingent process. And, while there certainly are a growing range of transnational and even “global” interactions on the Internet, we must also remember that many such relationships are profoundly local.
Theoretical Laxity and the Dangers of Binary Thinking: Overemphasizing ICTs, Underemphasizing Place
The fourth problem with deterministic end of city predictions is that they tend to dramatically overestimate the capabilities of ICTs to mediate human rela- tionships. At the same time, they dramatically underestimate the complexity, richness, and the continuing anthropological and cultural power generated by co-present human bodies in places. The communications theorist Sawhney crit- icizes “the very transmission-oriented view of human communication” in ICT and city debates. Here “the purpose of human communication is reduced to transfer of information and the coordination of human activity. The ritual or the communal aspect of human communication is almost totally neglected”
(Sawhney 1996: 309).
In such transmission-oriented accounts more information or more band- width is always equated with more knowledge, more mutual understanding, and more wisdom. Squeezing more bits down a wire, or over a wireless system, is assumed to lead to deeper, more satisfying relationships. And the crucial differ- ence between formal knowledge – which tends to be more easily accessible through ICT networks – and tacit knowledge – which is often developed and divulged much more in trustful, face-to-face encounters – tends to be ignored or underplayed.
Above all, while there is no doubt that ICTs can act as “prostheses” to extend human actions, identities, and communities in time and space, it does not follow that the human self is “released from the fixed location of the body, built environment or nation.” Rather, “the self is always somewhere, always located in some sense in some place, and cannot be totally unhoused” (Kaplan 2002: 34).
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Technologically determinist commentators thus fail to appreciate the complex social, cultural, and economic ecologies, and the sheer resilience of the corporeal lives of people in places. They fail to see that many of these cannot be simply substituted by ICTs no matter how broadband, 3D, or immer- sive the substitutes: quite the reverse, in fact. For the social construction and experience of the body and space and place actually grounds and contextual- izes applications and uses of new technologies. “The urban world networked by [Bill] Gates technologies strung out on the wire,” suggests cultural geogra- pher Denis Cosgrove, “is not disconnected, abstract, inhuman; it is bound in the places and times of actual lives, into human existences that are as connected, sensuous and personal as they ever have been” (Cosgrove 1996: 1495).
In fact, as ICTs diffuse more widely and become more taken for granted and ubiquitous, it is increasingly apparent, at least in richer cities, that they are being used to subtly reconfigure the place-based worlds and mobilities of everyday urban life. ICT interactions have now moved from the status of novelty to rapidly diffuse in to all walks of life. In many contexts they are now increas- ingly ubiquitous – even banal. In a sense, then, ICTs have now “produced the ordinary” in the sense that they are woven so completely in to the fabric of everyday urban life that they become more and more ignored (Amin and Thrift 2002: 103, emphasis original).
Cities and ICTs are thus fused into “socio-technical” and “hybrid” com- plexes. Many examples are relevant here. Vast and unknowable domains of soft- ware now mediate an increasing proportion of people’s interactions with the city, with each other, and with all types of services. Internet sites called
“virtual cities” gather local services and information to help people articulate more effectively with the places in which they live. Tiny “smart” radio-linked microchips are now being integrated into even low value products as means of controlling logistics flows, supporting surveillance, and preventing shoplifting.
Countless millions of web-cams allow an extending galaxy of places to be repre- sented and “consumed” from afar at all geographical scales in (near) real time.
E-commerce sites, as well as “stretching” economic transactions to transnational scales, are being used to change the ways in which people shop for food and consume local products and services. (This reflects the fact that, even in the US – that most mobile of societies – urban economies are still overwhelmingly local and 80 percent of transactions still occur within 20 miles of people’s homes.)
In addition, ICTs are being used to reconfigure local public and private transport systems (as in the electronic road pricing of city centers). They are supporting a reconfiguration of automobiles and road systems. Mobile phones are being used to remodel users’ experiences of city services and urban public spaces. New third generation mobiles (or “3G”) even mean that users can receive running commentaries on local services and spaces, as they move around cities, through what are known as “Location Based Services” (clearly this also has the potential to clog the systems with masses of unwanted spam). Technologies such as Closed Circuit TV and local radio are allowing for subtle changes in the regulation and management of specific public spaces in cities. ICTs, Stephen Graham
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meanwhile, are facilitating radical changes in the delivery of local public services and in the organization of local democracy.
The “Dot-con”: Glossy Ideologies of the “Information Age” as a Camouflage for Neoliberalism and Uneven Development
The penultimate problem with end of the city scenarios is that they – at least in their utopian incarnations – tend to promote simplistic, biased, and glossy ideologies of the so-called “information age.” Many of these have been relent- lessly used to improve the public relations profiles of governments and digital media and telecommunications firms. Over the past three decades, upbeat depic- tions of ICTs have also been commonly used to generate public funding and subsidies for media transnationals. This has been done as local, national, and transnational policy makers struggle to make their jurisdictions “competitive”
and symbolically “high tech” in the “global information society.”
But such utopian ICT discourses now ring decidedly hollow. The collec- tive image of ICTs now appears ambivalent at best, and deeply problematic at worst. In the last decade the hyperbole has now been tarnished by a succession of major societal crises as ICT-mediated models of capitalist restructuring have led to severe problems. Consider the Asian financial crisis of 1998–1999 (partly induced by electronic currency speculations); the spectacular collapse of the dot-com stock market “bubble” between 2000 and 2002; the many fraud scan- dals that have bankrupted many of the supposed “stars” of the new telecom world since 2000; and the financial meltdown in Argentina in the same period.
From the perspective of the international recession that has afflicted large parts of the world since the dot-com crunch, it is increasingly clear that the late 1990s was a period within which ICT industries, with their carefully fueled utopian discourses, perpetuated little less than a giant “Dot.con” (see Cassidy 2002). The huge speculative bubble of 1997–2001 showed powerfully how deep the connections were between utopian ideologies of ICTs and the “information age” and the accelerating swings of speculation and depression in financial and neoliberal capitalism. As Steven Poole (2003: 18) wrote of the height of the boom:
how could priceline.com, a website that sold airline tickets, come to be valued more than the entire US airline industry? Why did people buy shares in webvan.com, an online grocery-delivery service that lost $35m on sales on $395,000 in its first six months?
This is a telling example of how, over the years, the endlessly repeated rose-tinted tales of the use of ICTs, to sublimely and unproblematically liberate us from all the ills of industrial and urban civilization, have done little but camouflage the social, political, environmental, or economic conflicts that continuously emerge at the interplay of cities and new media within capitalism.
John Cassidy (2002) argues that in the dot-com bubble of the 1990s techno- logical utopianism allowed corporate and finance capital to fleece investors, Strategies for Networked Cities
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