Part one of a four-part series
The connected city—it’s a vision
with buzzy new tools like Wifi and iPhones leveraged for civic engagement. Yet thinking about the role of communication
technology in urban planning should go deeper than a downloadable app. It is time to recognize these communications
technologies as the infrastructure they really are, with their potential to
spur innovation, business, and jobs. These
technologies are not a panacea--there is no new tool that will solve
long standing social problems, but they do have the power to radically reshape communities
if access to these tools is rethought. When
Aristotle asserts that man is a political animal, what he fundamentally means is that
human beings cannot help but connect and communicate, and it is these
interactions that give rise to the communities in which we live. It is time to recognize the role that the network
can and will play in creating a social fabric that can sustain us.
Urban planners have long recognized
the ways in which the built environment can create a space for people and
activity. Store fronts and shopping
districts can be optimized for commerce, sidewalks can be built to speed along
walkers or encourage someone to linger. Christopher Alexander recognized the ability
of built space to bring people into contact with one another, and the value to society
of “…the people around us, and the most common ways we have of meeting them, or
being with them.” The ability of infrastructure in the form of buildings to
shape these interactions and provide a space for interaction served as a form
of “pattern language.”
Communication technologies
represent a new type of pattern, with the ability to order and sustain our
lives in important ways, but one that planners haven’t yet addressed in an
integral way. Just like space can
support patterns of action, so can technology.
All of this suggests that we need to more closely examine the ways in
which communication technologies can structure the physical as well as the
communication space of the modern city.
The public sphere is no longer limited to its physical space.
For this reason, there needs to be
more cross pollination between urban planning and communication studies. Just as smart growth proponents have
recognized the civic importance of connecting people to community assets such
as grocery stores, employment, business and medical services closer to home via
policy initiatives like complete streets, we need to recognize the other great
infrastructure needs that the next generation cities will find equally
important. Communication technology needs to be addressed
at the level of municipal and state level planning.
Some organizations are already
doing this. New America Foundation and
Code for America both recognize the importance of civic innovation projects. Google addresses the demand for communication
infrastructure for business and innovation through their Google Fiber project,
which attempts to spur the type of network growth that the next generation of
applications will require and tired monopolistic providers have failed to supply. Of course, those same businesses also
recognize the need for state and local level consideration of communication
technology infrastructure, but rather than address it they have sought to block
its development by pushing bills at the state level that block municipal wifi efforts. Currently, AT&T
is pushing SB1161 in California, which makes the legislature and the federal
government the sole sources of
authority. The fact is that SB1161 is
overly broad, and makes it so that local elected officials can’t have any say regarding provisions of access as part of
their investment in local infrastructure. This is a pattern that clearly needs to change.
