Montreal’s Ile Sans Fil is a volunteer group dedicated to expanding internet access in public spaces. Their activities demonstrate some of the paradoxes inherent in using grassroots commuity organizing to distribute cutting-edge technology.
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Wireless Internet and The Politics of Places
It is not as if ICTs are somehow external to cities or divorced from their politics. At individual city levels as well as at global levels, the presence of ICT networks and infrastructures is part of the politics of places. Although the forces of capital fixity and hypermobility operate to consolidate wealth and power, ICT networks are often used to work against these privatizing and marginalizing forces. In the next sections I look at how Montreal’s community wireless group Ile Sans Fil negotiates with various types of visibility in the very particular social context in Montreal.
A wireless antenna almost invisibly graces a storefront
The Shapes of Spaces — Physical Traces
Other physical changes shape cities as new ICT industries emerge. ICT infrastructure leaves physical marks on urban space, which make visible the often tenuous power relationships underpinning them. All of the complex data-processing and multimedia processing facilities upon which technopoles depend are supported by other infrastructures, such as the telephone network, the electrical grid, and fresh- and waste-water services.
The Shapes of Spaces — Gentrification
The introduction of ICT-linked capital, among other things, may be a catalyst for the physical and economic transformation of urban spaces. Here, Montreal’s Plateau Mont-Royal displays some of the physical traits of gentrification.
The Shapes of Spaces — Technopoles
Like the industrial revolution, the economic revolution connected to advances in ICTs has had major impacts on urban areas. Physical reconfigurations, as well as economic shifts related to shifts in capital, have marked cities all over the world.
Montreal’s Cite Multimedia, seen from above
The Economics of Infrastructure
Where are the most well-developed ICT infrastructures located? What does this have to do with the development and maintenance of high-tech capital? Saskia Sassen helps us understand capital fixity and hypermobility.
Revealing Infrastructure — The Spaces of Flows
Envisioning the banal, through image or theory, means paying attention to what is normally ignored, hidden or concealed. For North American urban dwellers, some of the most privileged citizens in the world, much upon which we depend is concealed from sight: we don’t tend to think about how it functions until it fails to deliver to us what we have come to expect. The failure of the electricity grid in Toronto and New York in the summer of 2003 has become a cultural point of reference because of the sudden visibility of so many of the normally hidden elements of urban life: suddenly lights, heat, and cell phone conversations were no longer taken for granted. However, these infrastructures connect us not only to one another, but also to larger forces that extend across the globe through the ties of ownership and the movement of capital. This section presents some theories of global and local urban inequality: Castells’ “spaces of flows” and Graham and Marvin’s “splintering urbanism”
The View From Here – Introductions and Surveying the Terrain
ICT infrastructures are banal and uninteresting – but this also means that they are powerful. This introductory section establishes reasons for focusing on often invisible or ignored technical systems, and outlines the paper’s two main sections: a theoretical reflection on visualizing inequalities, and a more focused look at wireless internet’s “invisible” transmission infrastructure
Abstract
This paper uses the organizing concept of “visibility” to investigate how information anc communication technology (ICT) infrastructures have shifted, transformed, and consolidated economic and social power in Western (particularly North American) cities. After surveying the global impacts of IT infrastructures in urban areas, the paper focuses specifically a local example of how wireless internet infrastructure is developed and used in Montreal. Using photographs of telecommunications infrastructure in its everyday viewed context as organizing features, the paper exposes how ICT infrastructure’s banality conceals its important implication in both global and local shifts in economic power, social relationships, and the use of urban space. This “glance over” the economic, social, and physical influence of the internet on urban space concludes with a closer look at the politics of wireless signal provision in Montreal, where a community group has reappropriated ICT infrastruture and competes with leading telecommunication providers for better “visibility” of their wireless signals in politically and socially important areas. The paper is presented in chapters that are intended to stand alone, but which can also be read as sections of a larger work.