Salon on wifi and cities

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Robert Bryce <robert () robertbryce com>
Date: November 30, 2004 11:13:54 AM EST
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Salon on wifi and cities

Hi Dave,
For IP, if you like.
best
rb


Urban renewal, the wireless way
Thanks to Wi-Fi networks, cellphones and global positioning locators, 
there's a new sense of place in the city.

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By Linda Baker

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Nov. 29, 2004  |   In November 2003, New Yorker architecture critic  
Paul Goldberger penned a diatribe in Metropolis magazine against the  
isolation and dissolution of place wrought by the pervasive use of  
cellphones on city streets. "The mobile phone renders a public place  
less public," he wrote. "It turns the boulevardier into a sequestered  
individual, the flâneur into a figure of privacy. And suddenly the  
meaning of the street as a public place has been hugely diminished."


 Goldberger's critique of mobile communications technology capped over  
a decade of analysis revolving around the ability of global  
communications networks -- for better and for worse -- to release  
people from the constraints of time and place. "The post-information  
age will remove the limitations of geography," wrote Nicholas  
Negroponte in "Being Digital." "Digital living will depend less and  
less on being in a specific place at a specific time." In  
"Pandemonium," Lars Lerup, dean of the architecture school at Rice  
University, proclaimed: "The bandwidth has replaced the boulevard."

 Actually, it didn't. Virtual reality as a substitute for reality? That  
kind of thinking is, well, so very yesterday. With a new generation of  
wireless devices, GPS (global positioning system) locators and  
ubiquitous networking, future gazers claim, digital space will simply  
add another dimension to physical space, especially as technology  
continues to penetrate what sociologist Ray Oldenberg has famously  
described as "third places": the communal public spaces where people  
interact with friends or strangers.

 So-called "urban computing" means much more than bringing your  
Centrino laptop to Starbucks and logging on to Amazon.com. Instead,  
cutting-edge mobile and wireless services emphasize proximity over  
connectivity, the local over the global and the here and now rather  
than anytime, anywhere. Computer geeks suddenly turned urban theorists,  
many of today's technologists harbor even loftier goals for mobile  
research agendas: to enhance the image of the city itself -- the  
patterns, the complexities and, above all, the sheer serendipity of the  
urban landscape.

 "People talk about mobile computing as now you'll be able to leave  
your home and go to a cafe or park and maybe go online and check  
e-mail," says Eric Paulos, lead researcher at Intel's Urban Atmospheres  
project in Berkeley, Calif., a program designed to explore technology's  
potential to augment and enhance the urban experience. "But we're  
interested in something much bigger than that. We're interested in the  
social cues that people already perform in urban spaces, in the  
artifacts that already exist, like trash cans, park benches, and how  
they will be mapped or reappropriated into a playful network of digital  
life on the streets."

<snip>

http://salon.com/tech/feature/2004/11/29/digital_metropolis/ 
index_np.html

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About the writer
Linda Baker is a journalist in Portland, Ore.

Robert Bryce
2006 Homedale Dr.
Austin, TX 78704
p: 512-445-5097
cell: 512-589-8235
www.robertbryce.com

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