urban network-images and the embodiment of wireless infrastructures

Stars, meshes, grids: urban network-images and the embodiment of wireless infrastructures

Adrian Mackenzie

Institute for Cultural Research

County South College

Lancaster University, LA1 4YD, UK

[email protected]

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/mackenza

Modern cities are full of representation experiments and inventions, from the many children of

Surrealism through to the recent work by numerous teenagers on the social possibilities of wireless

communication, which are attempts to sense the city in different ways. (Amin and Thrift 2002, 158)

Introduction

In late 2004, Taipei announced that it had installed a citywide wireless information

network (Wi-Fi) grid (Mo, 2006) The history of urban forms tells of many grids (Kostof

1992). Street grids orient and control movement in numerous cities. Taipei's wireless grid

proved to be one in a series of networks that have appeared in Asia, North America,

Europe and parts of the Middle East and South America, growing strongly in cities such as

Philadelphia, Bangalore, San Francisco, New Orleans, Glasgow, and London. Different

interests develop these wireless grids, also called 'clouds' or 'meshes.' They are sometimes

municipal government projects (Hellweg 2005), sometimes the products of

telecommunication enterprises (Tropos Networks 2006b), sometimes driven by alliances of

community groups, political activists, artists and technologists and sometimes, an

accidental by-product of thousands of private wireless networks adjacent to each other.

No single actor such as the State, business, popular culture or individual drives network

growth. They combine market and political dynamics. Very often, the same city will have

more than one wireless grid overlaid on it, in the same way that it might have more than

one cellular phone network (but rarely more than one sewerage or electricity system). The

question addressed in this chapter concern how such grids come into existence, how they

relate to each other and in particular, how they combine movements and images.

The wireless networks pose some challenges to standard ways of thinking of images as

representations in/of cities (Hall and Hubbard 1998) (Hall and Hubbard 1998). They also,

perhaps, solicit new ways of thinking about the generation of urban forms and

infrastructures. The relationships between images and urban spaces have undergone

extensive analysis, particularly in relation to the ‘selling of places’ (Kearns and Philo 1993).

Some work identifies space and urban forms as types of image. Phil Hubbard writes that

‘the physical spaces of the city can be considered as belonging to the same set of cultural

forms (brochures, videos, guidebooks, advertisements) which promote a partial and

selective view of the essence of the city’ (Hall and Hubbard 1998, 200). Accounts that

equate image and place do not fit wireless networks. Like many images of cities displayed

in promotional materials, the wireless networks function as symbols of place. Their

presence signals the convenience, proximity, openness, and technological acumen of a city.

They signal a place equipped for the lives of ‘knowledge workers’, netizens, hackers or an

e-shoppers. Unlike many of the urban images, forms and spaces analysed in literature on

the branding and marketing of city-images, people inhabiting wireless networks do work

on spaces and forms.

For all the frequent announcements of their presence in cities, and their extremely rapid

adoption, wireless networks have no single, stable visible form. They come into existence

and sometimes compete with each other. This is because a network-image of urban

wirelessness meshes different patterns of perception and action, relationality,

consumption, forms of governance, architecture and infrastructure together. Images of

wireless networks emerge from experiments, festivals, hacks, events, partnerships,

Adrian Mackenzie, Lancaster University 3

alliances, artworks and advertisements. Technical and economic forces affect the network-

image. Primarily, however, the network-image stems from the perceptions and actions, the

sensations and movements of city dwellers. Their embodied ‘image-repertoires’ generate

the network-image, and the infrastructures that materialize out of it. The network-image

precipitates, sometimes unstably, different network topologies of communication and

flows of information. Importantly, it displays different orientations to markets and

transactions. These range from outright resistance to any market mechanisms through to

thoroughgoing entrepreneurial-brand-driven consumption of network connectivity. The

network-image also propagates ideas of sociality, public participation and citizenship. The

figures of ‘consumer’ and ‘citizen’, normally assumed to exist in separate spaces,’

(Couldry 2004, 21) come together in it. Because no single force (government, business,

community, private) controls wireless networks, entrepreneurial initiatives struggle to

harness them. Alliances between municipal governments and telecommunications

enterprise spring up at the same time as new forms of communicative collectivity.

The network-image and the informatic forms of a city

A post-representational treatment of images underpins my understanding of the urban

network-image of the wireless city. We can explain the difference between conventional

accounts of images as representations or pictures and this account of images as

embodiments in performance by starting from the forms of cities. The forms of a city,

according to Richard Sennett, arise from bodily experience. In Flesh and Stone, he writes

that '[urban] spaces take form largely from the ways people experience their own bodies'

(Sennett 1994, 370). Sennett describes how people's experiences of their own body

organises not only the form of cities (layouts, plans, designs, spaces, etc) but the

physicality of the city, the material textures and concreteness, sensed as light, sound,

smell, and movement. That is, the 'stones' of a city attest to a certain singular and specific

embodiment or 'flesh' of its inhabitants.

People's experience of their own bodies in cities cannot be disentangled from what they

see, hear and touch, and as (Pile 2005) argues, dream. Images of many kinds intensively

organise what they experience. This is nothing new. Today, images in/of cities so much

concern information. This is newer. In recent urban forms and materials, embodied

experiences of information perform important functions (Mitchell 2003; Thrift 2004b).

Information and communication technology participate intimately in the embodiment of

urban life. Whereas by work such as (Hansen 2004; Hayles 1999; Lash 2002) has theorised

the general embodiment of information, the embodiment of information in urban forms

poses specific problems in several respects. Daily people see many images of information

and communication technologies (billboards and large screens advertising phones and

other gadgets, shop display-windows, internet cafés and wireless hotspots, etc).

Information systems extensively image/imagine cities at various scales (huge volume of

city-related web-content, streams of digital city images, tens of millions of city-directed or

located webcams, geographic information systems as navigational and administrative

aids, GoogleEarth as platform for locational experimentations with data). Information and

communication systems use and produce images to record, guide and channel movement

of people and things in the city (information display screens, traffic and cctv video

systems). Images track and attract modifications and movements of bodies inform

information.

We usually think of images as drawn or projected on surfaces such as hoardings or

display screens. However, images trace embodiments. They do not simply picture some

aspect of a city. They create or alter viewers, spectators, and observers. They demarcate

past or potential modifications of perception and movement. Images make those

modifications perceptible. There are two ways of framing this point for the purposes of my

argument. Drawing on Roland Barthes' notion of 'image repertoire', Sennett argues that in

modern cities, embodied images enable people to sedate themselves against stimulation

triggered by movement and encounter with many different human bodies. City dwellers


develop image repertoires as internal psychosocial constructs or maps that allow them to

associate with or accommodate diverse others by quickly filtering them according to

categories. Typically, an image repertoire helps an individual city dweller walking down a

crowded street to know who to steer clear of, who to smile at (if anyone) and who to push

past. Image repertoires picture nothing. They process relations. They collectively contract

perception and trigger movements, gestures and feelings.

The image repertoire, a core element of the way people experience their own bodies as

urban, includes non-human components or fragments. The figural, gestural, perceptive,

motor and emotional schemas of the image repertoire come together more explicitly in

some recent new media theory. Seeking to understand how information is embodied

rather than disembodied in digital imaging techniques, Mark Hansen concludes:

In sum, the image can no longer be restricted to the level of surface appearance, but must be

extended to include the entire process by which information is made perceivable through embodied

experience. (Hansen 2004, 9)

Hansen mainly has in mind the experience of digital interactive media here, but his

conclusion complements Sennett's idea of how an image repertoire shapes the embodied

experience of city dwellers. The combination of Hansen’s embodied information image

with Sennett-Barthes image-repertoire of urban form could help link individual and

collective dimensions, citizen and consumer experiences of wireless networks. The

analysis of embodied experience of city wireless grids in the discussion below will seek to

move from image repertoire to the expanded, network-image.

Image repertoire and the formation of the wireless infrastructures

In what ways does information become perceivable in embodied experience and in

experience of one's own body in wireless cities? Wireless networks directly connect

movement, imagining, consumption and citizenship. In advertising their grid or 'matrix',

CambridgeMatrix, a commercial wireless network provider based near London, UK,

connects the freedom of movement associated with internet access to being present in a

public space:

Imagine being able to sit on Midsummer Common with your Wi-Fi mobile phone, laptop or PDA

and have high-speed Broadband Internet access. From the office, home or out and about round town

CambridgeMatrix offers always on fast Internet access across the city. This "Internet anywhere"

service is possible because of 802.11 or "Wi-Fi" mesh networking technology, and gives the same

freedom of movement you would expect from your mobile phone. The technology allows us to link

multiple locations creating a community wireless network with free access to local content and a low

cost subscription for Internet access. (CambridgeMatrix 2006)

Several different repertoires of movement mingle here. The unwired, mobile monad surfs

flows of information in a bubble that floats between office, home and ‘about and about.’

The bubble, however, also opens to others: ‘a community wireless network’ with ‘free

access to local content’ suggests a different connectivity. Community, local content and

free access represent the values of public sphere participation, as does the imagined place,

the Midsummer Common.

Actually, CambridgeMatrix imagines wireless network connectivity relatively

conservatively. Enterprises such as FON aim to globalise the vision:

FON is a WiFi revolution. Our objective: to build a WiFi world. Our method: to permit all users to

synchronize their access points into one: FON. Pay for connection at home; connect anywhere. Join

the FON movement! (FON 2006)

In the FON project, a ‘Wifi world’ grows from ‘all users’ connecting their domestic


wireless equipment to FON’s databases. It creates a network without passing through

local communities or public places.

Both cases exemplify the unfolding of urban forms from flesh or embodied experience.

Sennett and Barthes' concept of the urban image repertoire describes an embodied relation

to others in the city. What image repertoire, what modality of embodiment, takes shape

when a city wireless grid or Wi-Fi mesh is mapped on a world scale? In contemporary

cities, the synthesis between bodies and urban forms is convoluted and intricate.

Movement, sensation and images bear historically-laden forms and concepts such as

'community', 'public', ‘market’, 'home' and 'local.' These forms and concepts act on the

'scene of collectivization' (Blum 2003, 3) present in the city. People move and feel as both

consumers and citizens. Their image repertoires encompass movements mediated by

electronic communication media, and by the panoply of devices (phone, PDA, laptop) and

systems that communicate, calculate, record and control movements; see (Thrift 2004a).

Image repertoires structure, obliquely perhaps, the relatively invisible, technical forms of

urban life in cases such as FON. They enable the formation of infrastructures. The

infrastructure of an information network is an urban form. It derives from certain intense

zones of activity in the image repertoire, zones in which others are experienced as Other.

Wi-Fi wireless networks date from 1999. They have a highly fluid infrastructure build

from prosaic commodity computer equipment originally designed for domestic and office

spaces. IEEE 802.11b/g or Wi-Fi™ access points allow people to connect to information

networks such as the internet without plugging into a network or telephone socket.i A

very large population of objects are associated with wireless networks. As one handbook

of wireless networking enthuses,

With so many people using and experimenting with it, 802.11b is arguably the most hackable (and

customizable) wireless protocol on the planet (Flickenger 2003, 5).

Wi-Fi equipment has been extremely popular in houses and apartments. It has been

modified and installed in many portable computing devices (laptop computers, PDAs,

increasingly in mobile phones, and camera) in recent years. Infrastructural components

such as access points and routers (key elements of the network topology discussed below)

have become very cheap (starting at $10), especially in the form of now slightly older,

slower equipment. Municipal governments and business can now imagine metropolitan

wireless grids, meshes or clouds that blanket the whole city because wireless connectivity

has entered into the image repertoire of individuals at a smaller scale. Some of these

arrangements suggest that embodied image repertoires of contemporary city life do not

just include images of others in the city, but forms of co-ordination, connection, interaction

and transaction with others attached to information networks. Such image repertoires,

when they become components of a collective experience of bodies generate

infrastructures.

From network resource to network-image

This way of understanding the formation of infrastructures out of embodiment contrasts

with their typical framing as resource. For instance, in an account that concentrates on

convincing readers of the radical novelty of wireless technologies, (Mitchell 2003) writes:

Skeptics about wireless networks like to emphasize that wireless merely provides the last link in a

telecommunication infrastructure that is, in fact, mostly wired. Furthermore, it is a relatively

unreliable and inefficient link. They are right, but they completely miss the point. As these examples

illustrate, for good or ill, continuous fields of presence provided by wireless networks can

fundamentally alter patterns of resource availability and space use (147).

The fundamental alteration Mitchell refers to as 'patterns of resource availability and space

use' remains too abstract if we are to understand how contemporary experiences of bodies

inform urban forms, and how the same city can precipitate different grids overlapping


each other. 'Resource availability' and 'space use' in cities are certainly changing in concert

with wireless technologies. The avalanche of recent announcements of municipal wireless

networks in cities such as London, New York, Philadelphia, Taipei, Copenhagen, etc.,

suggests that movements of information are intensifying in certain ways. Municipal

wireless networks seek to change the availability of information resources for their own

workers in carrying out their administrative duties, for citizens and for visitors such as

tourists and business travellers. They alter ways in which spaces are monitored and

maintained. The use of wireless networks, for instance, to connect digital video cameras is

already radically changing the topology of CCTV networks. In the same way that

webcams inject live-updated images of particular places into the WWW, CCTV cameras

become just another peripheral device on municipal information networks.

Any treatment of wireless networks solely in terms of resource availability or space use is

not only highly de-contextualised, as (Latham and Sassen 2005), following earlier

criticisms of virtuality and cyberspace (Slater 2002), argue. It cannot account for the

embodied action of people in creating, selecting and informing information, in contesting

what a resource is or how a space is inhabited. The mixing of information with other

practices, forms, organisations and mediating practices (Latham and Sassen 2005, 18-19)

must also be taken into account. Graham and Marvin acknowledged this when they wrote:

[I]nfrastructure networks, and the sociotechnical processes that surround them, are strongly

involved in structuring and delineating the experiences of urban culture and what Raymond

Williams (1973) termed the 'structures of feeling' of modern urban life. (Graham and Marvin 2001,

10)

They suggest attending to 'how the wires, ducts, tunnels, conduits, streets, highways and

technical networks that interlace and infuse cities are constructed and used' (8).The

general implication is that the embodied image repertoire as experience of urban culture

somehow encompasses in some form the city's infrastructures, including information

infrastructure that very markedly takes form as a network. Contemporary city image

repertoires incorporate what we might call for this and several other reasons a network-

image. This concept of the network-image refers to the fact that images are themselves

increasing networked in cities (as described above), and that images of networked

processes enter deeply into the comportment of urban dwellers.

Image repertoire and the problem of separation

Wireless networks cut architectural space, and in particular, affect the maintenance of

differences between inside and outside, an elementary facet of any experience of one's

own body in a city. Wireless networks make the difference between inside and outside

increasingly independent of distance or metrics. The mainly Euclidean geometries of

separation and distance designed in European and North American cities over the last few

centuries rely on an infrastructure of ducts, vents, windows, pipes, and conduits through

which flows of water, air, light, and heat pass. Separation between inside and outside also

depends increasingly on bundles of wires and antennae through which messages and

media (images, sounds, text and control signals) pass. The reorganisations of domestic,

commercial and public architecture around these flows have been profound. Experiences

of one's own body draw on and attach to these flows and reorganisations. These

infrastructures condition embodiments of comfort, solitude, sociality, separateness and

rest in cities. Withdrawal and separation are the very possibility of comfortable life in

cities, especially global and multi-cultural cities.

In wireless networks, withdrawal and separation encounter new topological twists. The

very term 'wireless' highlights the prevalence of wires as constraints, tethers or even

entanglement in built environments. On the one hand, wireless networks contribute and

intensify the possibility of withdrawal from others. They are experienced as connecting

people to digital network infrastructures with less effort, complication or entanglements.


They free people to move around in built environments and to change where they sit.

Much of the imagery associated with wireless networking advertising in particular makes

much of the potential of Wi-Fi to simplify everyday life, and to afford new individual

freedoms and mobilities within separated places of urban environments. Images show

people using a laptop on the balcony, on a sofa, in the garden or in the kitchen. On the

other hand, wireless signals propagate through or around most building partitions so that

they can be received outside the building or in adjacent buildings. There is still a

separation associated with Wi-Fi networks. The signal does not propagate everywhere. Yet

indistinct zones of overlapping signals produce overflows and leakages between

architecturally separated spaces.

This leakage soon became evident in domestic settings. As people started installing

wireless networks in their apartments, neighbours often accidentally discovered they

could connect to them. The ethics and legality of 'sharing' or 'leeching' signals in the

neighbourhood were widely discussed, especially in the post-September 2001 anxieties

over the security of information infrastructures in the USA. When telecommunications

and internet service providers attempted to control access to domestic wireless networks,

strange complications arose. People found themselves suddenly blocked out from

networks they had shared with their neighbours without any problems previously (Napoli

2004). While all Wi-Fi equipment has encryption capabilities that can restrict access, these

capabilities are often not switched on. As a result, many wireless nodes remain

deliberately or accidentally 'unsecured' (Joel 2004).

The very experience of separation, a key feature of city life deeply inscribed in city image

repertoires, intensifies and dissipates at the same time in wireless networks. This

ambiguity has consequences for people's experience of their own bodies. When Sennett

writes '[t]he trajectory of designed pleasure led the human body to an ever more solitary

rest' (375), he points to one aspect of this intensification. We aspire to live in more or less

sealed architectural environments. We experience buildings and rooms as separate from

the life of the city. In private spaces such as houses, apartments, and various commercial

spaces such as bars, cafés, restaurants, cinemas and some shops, this separation affords

people's sense of comfort, rest and withdrawal from the stimulation and movement of city

life (Sennett 1994). Some public buildings modulate this separation, but they are

exceptions. By definition, public buildings such as a transport terminus, a hall, places of

worship, an arena, stadium or other large public institution expose people to others, albeit

in regulated ways. The wireless networking of apartments, offices, shops, houses and even

vehicles in cities reinforces a certain solitary separation, but one that also relies on form of

sociality and overflow. In 2005, certain wireless hotspots cafés in Seattle USA were

reported as having shut down their wireless networks on weekends. They were

attempting to liberate conversation and atmosphere of the cafe from the intent silence of

customers hunched over laptops for hours on end (Fleischman 2005). Wireless networks

are difficult to link to either private pleasure or its opposite public life. Rather than simply

intensifying private pleasures (in the form of web-surfing, game-playing, emailing or

downloading music or video files), wireless networks contribute to the mobilisation of

private pleasure and encapsulation of private media consumption in public locations.

Network-image as shifting, nebulous, topological form

In the light of this complication, what happens to the image repertoire? It shows

instabilities. It flickers and wavers. The network-image is not always easy to visualise. At a

technical level, as (Flickenger 2003) writes, '[p]erhaps the most difficult task in wireless

networking is trying to visualize what is really going on' (43). Various attempts have been

made to provide citywide images of the 802.11 networks: “in April 2004, Humphrey

Cheung and some colleagues flew two single-engine airplanes over metropolitan Los

Angeles with two wireless laptops. The project logged more than 4,500 wireless networks”

(Marriot 2006). It is strikingly difficult to measure the scale of the wireless networks of a

city, to find where they are located and who is connected to them. In contrast to the


centrally planned, diagrammed and managed infrastructures of telephones, electricity,

water and sewerage, wireless networks operate on many different scales, ranging

outwards from domestic interiors, through neighbourhoods, suburbs or town centres, city-

wide meshes or networks, and occasionally across wide geographical distances (up to

hundreds of miles in experimental setups). The same technology, which was originally

envisaged as a way of networking offices and houses, can also now be found in many odd

locations, in trains, vineyards, cattle ranches (Biever 2004), wild-life reserves (Cohn 2004)

mountaineer base camps as well as cafés, hotels, libraries, airports and living rooms

(Mackenzie 2005). At a hotspot, travelling business people doing email or neighbourhood

residents sitting in cafés may connect to the same access point (AP). In short, wireless

networks occupy many different positions, including some that range outside and

between cities. They often represent ways of overcoming some gap or difference between

life in the city and life outside it (for instance, in the many wireless community projects

found in smaller towns and villages).

This difficulty in describing the scale and placement of wireless networks shows

particularly clearly in the citywide wireless networks. Here, mapping network topology is

a key issue and a matter of contestation between business, State, citizens, activists,

consumers and so on. Network topology is a technical term used to describe how

networks connect computers. From a sociotechnical standpoint, different network

topologies are never trivial or neutral. Different flows of information and distributions of

agency attach to them (Galloway 2004). Sometimes topologies are fully planned,

centralised systems of control (especially in organization and institutional settings such as

businesses and public institutions). At other times, they grow contingently, over time,

through the successive addition of new nodes and sub-networks to an existing network.

In the first few years of wireless networking, the potential for existing network topologies

to change very quickly and fluidly figured strongly in the network-image is. Network

designers could dispense with the ducting, cabling and other built infrastructure needed

for previous networking technologies such as Ethernet. This sense of plasticity of network

topology was immediately evident in the many free wireless network projects that sprang

up in almost every developed and developing city. Announcements, websites, wireless

festivals and reports appeared at a high rate in the years 2001-2004. Already at this time,

free networking had been organised through many voluntary projects. However, just as

many commercial hotspot projects sprang up between 2001 and 2005 in city cafés, fast-

food outlets, transport hubs and bars, and as many people installed wireless equipment in

their apartments and houses, zones in the city quickly became encrusted with network

connectivity or wireless 'clouds.'

For many reasons, these networks need to become perceptible, even immediately visible.

Often driven by competition between telephone companies and internet service providers

(Borland 2003), commercial hotspots, increasingly widely available in many urban settings

such as cafés, bars, service stations, train stations and hotels, symbolised their presence

differently to the war-chalkers (Abreu 2003). Sometimes they put small signs or stickers on

the window. Occasionally large billboards appeared. Images of connecting to a wireless

network in the city were extensively scattered through print and broadcast media and

billboards. More comprehensively and perhaps interestingly, many commercial and non-

commercial websites sprung up that mapped available network connectivity in specific

cities, or occasionally, as in the case of several global Wi-Fi access finders, globally. Some

of these websites solicited war-driving contributions (the practice of driving around city

streets with a laptop or wireless access point finder, logging all the networks encountered)

from many individuals and collated them in databases linked to spatial representations of

cities (WiGLE 2006). Sometimes, these websites were the product of commercial

enterprises and represented an attempt to federate the many thousands of hotspots into

'global roaming' services for itinerant laptop users. Such sites provided dynamically

updated maps of cities, particularly in North America, Europe and South-east Asia with


the precise locations of Wi-Fi nodes, and sometimes details of how to connect to them (for

instance, the 'Zone Finder' site sponsored by an industry alliance of wireless hardware and

software producers (Wi-Fi Alliance 2003)). In the form of stickers, signs and websites, the

initial wireless network topology of central node (itself connected to the internet via some

other communication infrastructure such as broadband cable or modem itself subject to its

own specific imaginings and materialisations).

In wireless networks, people have different, sometimes very uncertain senses of the

network topology. Sometimes, for good reason, they do not know to what network they

are connected. Wireless networks in urban precincts unpredictably appear and disappear

as unknown neighbours reconfigure or switch their access points on and off, as radio

interference arises or diminishes, as the sun heats antennae and roof. People also often do

not know who is connected to the network they have set up. They might have an obscure

perception of the presence of others when the network slows down (Marriot 2006). Their

senses of how they are connected come from practical images and symbols. For instance,

people see small icons showing in the corner of the screen on most computers and mobile

devices equipped with wireless network capability. The icons are a sensible image of

connection to wireless networks, but they give little sense of the precise topology or

relation to others. Computer shops sell small hand-held gadgets known as Wi-Fi access

point finders as essential accessories for travellers. Wherever they are, they can see the

connectivity available to them. Finally, bodily movement in the city offers an important

affordance. People learn to turn their computer around in a different direction, to squat

down in a doorway to check their email, and to sit at tables in the café or bar that have

good signal strength. Network topologies in the technical sense are figures that begin to

affect the embodiment of information flows in built spaces.

Collective scenes of connection

Wireless networks have been often imagined as offering inhabitants of the city the chance

to occupy privileged informatic capsules, elevated above or protected from the tides of

people and things moving around them in the city, as if there a truer self could be found.

Selfhood in the city comes from rising and falling patterns of association with others.

Because of the way they embody images, people's bodies form associations with others,

sometimes almost inadvertently. Affects arise from these associations:

Emotions cluster around images - traces of previous bodily modifications. The power of these

images is strengthened or diminished by dynamic social collectivities formed or disrupted by the

associations our bodies form with others. (Gatens and Lloyd 1999, 40)

What associations do bodies form with others in wireless networks? As the star topology

organised home/office networks and commercial hotspots and permeated people's

experience of their own bodies in relation to others, radically different topologies

competed with them, and responded to their presence. Hence, in these same years (2002-

5), the network-image was difficult to visualise because it contained many overlapping

networks. Alternate network topologies emerged and transformed the hotspot or 'star'

topology in various urban settings. These other topologies were again diverse, mutable

and somewhat precarious, but characteristically, they were citywide rather than precinct

or zone based. Community or free wireless networks appeared in very many places. In

London, Consume was a particularly prominent example. As Priest writes:

The original idea of Consume was to create a metropolitan meshed network that would link users at

the edge of the network together into a coherent local infrastructure. This connection would allow

collective bargaining for back haul bandwidth, and a free local infrastructure that could support

local content and an autonomous media.(Priest 2005)

The possibilities of sharing networks between neighbours in apartments and more densely

built-up areas multiplied. Sometimes shared networks were explicitly organised in the


form of community wireless projects that sought to enhance access to the internet for parts

of the city that weren't so well connected to the internet (for instance, east London).

Community Wi-Fi networks and Wi-Fi user groups could be found in very many smaller

towns for this reason. The topology of these networks was different in several ways. As

Priest writes of the hopes of Consume, 'this meshed-edge network would provide a

challenge to existing telecoms providers by being able to escape from the star topology

and its built-in control points. Using an agreement between local network neighbours, the

plan was to encourage a systemic de-centralisation and distribution of network ownership

and operation' (Priest 2005). They entailed a different sociality since they were often put

together and maintained by groups of volunteers who helped their neighbours join or

access a wireless node that itself was connected to a commercial broadband internet

connection. These attempts to build suburb, town or citywide infrastructures were fragile,

sometimes temporary accomplishments. In order to get information to flow across the

network along many different paths, rather than just to from periphery to centre,

community wireless groups experimented with different topologies such as meshes and

grids. Free networks envisaged a different topology because they sought to do more than

connect people to the internet.

Although they had mixed and partial success, the local, online and print media visibility

of the community projects made a difference. Their visibility allowed free networking

groups to change what they hoped to do. As Julian Priest writes,

the Freenetworking Movement has begun to coalesce around new concerns, with recent discourses

putting freenetworks and ownership and control of media infrastructure in a freedom of expression

context. Control of a network means ultimate control over network traffic (Priest 2005).

As movements, they have been concerned to activate different kinds of political space

through wireless networks. Treating information infrastructures themselves as a key

political stake, free networking diverges from alternative media or independent media

with its focus on independent content or opinion. However, in taking infrastructure as a

key site of contestation, these movements have had to engage in engage in activities that

themselves are rarely seen as political.

Community wireless networks are not simple or mono-dimensional associations between

individuals centred on wireless network access. The case of Wireless London offers an

example of the kinds of complicated social organization of wireless networks. The website

for Wireless London claims 'Wireless London addresses the creative possibilities, policies,

practicalities and potential of Wireless London' (Wireless London 2006). The website

presents Wireless London as a cluster of network topologies informed by many different

uses, ideas, alliances and connections with other organizations. Many of these

organizations, such as Freifunk.net, informal.org, CRIT Mumbai (Collective Research),

Arts Council England, and hivenetworks, themselves are not strictly speaking part of

London. It would be possible to go through each of these partners and trace how its role in

Wireless London is defined and understood. The range of interests is very broad. For

instance, Hive Networks 'research and develop hiveware for embedded devices and

ubiquitous networked computers - tools that enable users to manage space, time and the

boundaries around the self in new and previously unthinkable ways' (HiveNetworks

2006). Life in the contemporary wireless cities is complicated by the fact that many

competing associations shape how information moves through cities.

From premium zone to critical service

How do these competing network topologies, with their different connectivities and urban

metrics, participate in an experience of the body and urban forms? For most people, they

only indirectly affect the topological grounding of bodily experience. Their image

repertoire gradually incorporates facets of the network-image as dimly felt possibilities of

connection or 'association' to wireless infrastructures. Unlike the cellphone, whose affect


on image repertoire is directly visible in the way people walk a street, the network-image

does not clearly figure relations to others. Perhaps this will change as municipal or local

governments adopt the some of the same topologies and associations developed several

years earlier by community and free wireless networks, and combine them with service

provision. For instance, in 2004 Westminster City Council in London announced its

'Wireless City' project in terms of social inclusiveness combined with 'realtime' social

services. In the same parts of the city as the free-networker's Wireless London, the City

Council project has slightly different aims:

The concept of the Wireless City is potentially one of the most exciting developments in

Westminster's history. It will allow us to offer opportunity to our residents through community

education schemes on our housing estates and integrated social service provision across the city. We

will be better able to reduce the threat and the fear of crime through a flexible approach to

community safety, cleansing and CCTV - reacting to events and developments as they happen. It

will also help us maintain low taxes through the savings that the scheme can offer. (Westminster

City Council 2004)

The mixture of uses here goes well beyond the forms of access to the internet envisaged in

the hotspot model or the alternative infrastructures envisaged in free networking. At the

launch event in 2004, the dotted-pointed visual presentation by city information services

management focused very directly on city administration:

Order, Opportunity & Low Taxation

• Reduce Fixed Cost Base

• Reduce cost of CCTV extensions

• Reduce installation costs of CCTV and noise monitoring

• Reduce the cost of parking meter management

(Snellgrove and Hearn 2004)

Here, the control systems through which the city manages street life appear at the centre

of the network-image. A year later, in 2005, as the network starts to materialize, its

framing directly links entrepreneurial acumen with changes in the administrative control

of city life. It has now become the Wireless City Partnership. Announcing its partnership

with a telecommunications business, BT, Westminster Council claims:

This is the first deal of its kind in the UK and will establish Westminster City Council as a world

leader for technology and innovation. The Wireless City will benefit those who live and work in

Westminster by improving the street environment through reducing crime and disorder, improving

the delivery and effectiveness of council services and enabling us to maintain low tax through

delivering significant cost savings. BT is the ideal partner for us, combining in-depth

communications expertise with a strong experience of working with other local authorities to

provide wireless technology." (Westminster City Council 2006)

The network-image expands here to include the arrangements and 'partnerships' between

telecommunications businesses and the local governments. It also begins to encompass a

set of relationships between different entities in the city. For instance, Tropos Networks, a

North-American supplier of wireless networks promotes and hopes for expansion in the

scope of Wi-Fi:

Wi-Fi’s explosive proliferation gives consumers, businesses and governments a vast and ever-

growing range of fast, easy-to-use and low-cost Wi-Fi-enabled devices. With more than 120 million

units shipped, Wi-Fi isn’t just for laptops anymore. It’s also for phones, PDAs, gaming devices,

video cameras, parking meters, utility meters and sensors that detect biological, chemical and

radioactive hazards (Tropos Networks 2006a).

Product manufacturers seeking to supply 'metro-scale' networks to municipal or city


government emphasise the heterogeneity of the network. The product announcements go

on to describe how the management of city infrastructures can change by virtue of all the

different things, places, and processes that could be interfaced to the networks:

Utility meters, SCADA devices, and parking meters have one thing in common – they need to be

read regularly. This is normally a manually intensive process. Fortunately the convergence of

intelligent, digital meters with networking technology means they can often now be read from a

distance, saving human effort, time and cost. When coupled with a city-wide MetroMesh network,

these devices can now be read totally automatically, with no human intervention, from one side of

the city to the other. (Tropos Networks 2006a).

Here the network-image of the wireless city affects other infrastructures. City utility

providers such as energy companies suddenly have an interest in becoming wireless

network service providers. For instance, in early 2006 the main electricity supplier to the

city of Toronto, Toronto Hydro Corporation, began installing a citywide municipal

wireless network (Tyler Hamilton 2006). This was not so much because wants to compete

with telecommunications companies as such but because 'smart meters' help automate

meter reading and billing for the electricity infrastructure.

City administrations often see wireless networks as self-organizing and self-administering.

The briefing for Wireless Philadelphia claims '[o]nce the Wi-Fi units have been installed,

they create a self-organizing and self-healing wireless mesh. While some of the units will

require a high capacity connection to the Internet, most units will only require access to a

power source that can be readily obtained from the existing street or traffic light' (Wireless

Philadelphia Executive Committee 2006). The idea of the mesh network as 'self-organizing

and self-healing' is an important development in the network-image. It promises to reduce

the technical work needed to keep the city running. Finally, 'the people of the city' become

part of the network-image. For instance, the Executive Committee of Wireless

Philadelphia, a municipal wireless project uses a version of the digital divide to help

justify becoming a wireless network provider:

A wireless city will be a strategic investment in the people of the city. It will provide an

infrastructure that can assist in bridging the digital divide that now exists and prevents many

individuals and families from obtaining the full measure of the opportunities generated by the

Internet because they can’t afford the cost of wired broadband Internet access. (Wireless

Philadelphia Executive Committee 2006)

Perhaps more an afterthought or retrospective justification that capitalises on the visibility

of free and community access wireless networking, the municipal networks incorporate

the 'digital divide' into the network-image. The experiments and inventions associated

with the latter wireless networking projects have given a visibility to Wi-Fi that

commercial product releases cannot achieve without significant cost. Just as information

networks allow important changes in the control, security and administration systems of

the city (Harvey 1989), so too the wireless network allows cities to make themselves visible

as centres of innovation and creativity in which infrastructures, work and lifestyle are

closely linked:

Providing wireless accessibility will be as important in the future as traditional utilities. Providing

an environment that attracts and keeps the knowledge workers who drive the economy of today is

all-important. The economic development benefits of this strategy are clear and compelling. Not

only will it make Philadelphia a better choice for firms to do business, but it will enhance the

desirability of the city’s neighborhoods as a place to live (Wireless Philadelphia Executive

Committee 2006).

The network-image becomes a metasymbol of the city, 'enhancing the desirability of the

city's neighbourhoods.' The network-image includes the flow of images, texts, voices,

transactions, and media content of many different types through the neighbourhoods

where 'knowledge workers' live.


Conclusion

The structures of urban feeling embodied in the wireless network-image do not settle or

resolve. They dynamically adapt to complex interplays of personal and impersonal forces

in cities. The network-image of wireless information incorporates competing network

topologies that have arisen around Wi-Fi networks in the last 5-6 years. The network

topologies are not fixed. Wireless infrastructures generate diffuse or cloud-like

connections. Star, grid and even mesh architectures have shifted and mixed constantly in

cities. Networks have stretched, expanded, concentrated, folded, overlapped and 'healed'

constantly over the last five years. Different topologies coalesce and dissolve.

The concept of image used here differs from representational understandings of images as

pictures in the world perceived by a viewer. We could imagine the network-image as a

shifting mosaic of differently scaled and connected network topologies enacted in

individual and collective bodies. Some aspects of the network-image undergo

visualisation. The many mapping and locating projects generate diagrams and maps.

Some visual fragments – signs, beacons, signals, chalk-marks, indicators or icons attached

to the network – go out into the city and signal the proximity of a network. Other aspects

of the image flow deeply into corporeal habits. People experience their embodied

connection to network topologies as open-ended or even novel in some respects. Bodies, in

conjunction with media and technical apparatuses, select and arrange information. Finally,

the network-image plays out in the wireless infrastructures that invite or compel people to

move more, to find and send information anywhere, or to withdraw or to cocoon

themselves in solitary rest. The network-image comprises motion vectors, predictions and

indications of potential movements in the city of people, messages, and things.

Contra Sennett and Barthes, image-repertoires are not just acted out by individuals, as

technologies of self-orientation in the wireless city. The network-image repertoire

synthesises very different political, economic, and social interests. The municipal

networks, in the ways they concentrate and superimpose surveillance, access,

administration, control and service currently mesmerise this imagining. Yet the network-

image overflows the metro-nets. The network-image aggregates different sensings of

information in the city. It is not the property or attribute of individual citizens or

consumers. It forms sociality on the fly (Knorr-Cetina and Bruegger 2000), adding to and

subtracted from relations. The network-image also is not something through which cities,

enterprises, or social groups merely symbolise their technical, economic or political value.

Rather, through it, realities propagate into each other. It couples regulation of

electromagnetic fields, freedom, place, others, universality and value.

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i Other wireless networks include cellular phone systems (GSM, 3G, etc) as well as proprietary or special purpose networks communications protocols such as DSRC, Bluetooth, RFID, IrDA that connect various gadgets and machines together at short range.

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urban network-images and the embodiment of wireless infrastructures