IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

cess to open spectrum is important. Citizens need to understand that the
network exists and how to get access. 41
When the Internet and wireless communications first made the news,
some architects and urbanists wildly overreacted. ‘‘Bandwidth has replaced
the boulevard: five blocks west has given way to the mouse click,’’ gushed
Lars Lerup, dean of the architecture school at Rice University. ‘‘After thousands
of years of bricks held together by mortar, the new metropolis is
toggled together by attention spans. To understand the city, we must see
it as a volatile gas and no longer as an inert solid.’’ 42 After that initial exuberance,
it’s now clear that wireless communication networks are an additional
layer of infrastructure—not a replacement of the physical city.
A wireless infrastructure, unlike hard and heavy roads and buildings and
bridges, is malleable. Jo Reid, who is involved in a project called Mobile
Bristol in the United Kingdom, talks about ‘‘drag-and-drop mediascapes.’’ 43
In Britain, more mobile phones are used among homeless people than
among the general population, 44 and Bristol Wireless is the initiative of
a group of underemployed information technology professionals loosely
based in Bristol, England, who proposed the idea of a wireless community
local area network. 45 They had determined that rapidly emerging wireless
technologies meant that even the most deprived communities would be
able to create cheap wireless infrastructures that they could use. Ad hoc
networks and reconfigurable radio networks provide a digital canvas over a
whole city, a tapestry into which rich situated experiences can be painted
and in which new commercial ventures explored. As you walk through
the city, a diverse range of digital experiences such as soundscapes, games,
and other interactive media bring the city alive in new ways. Researchers at
Trinity College Dublin have developed an ad hoc wireless network called
DAWN (the Dublin Ad Hoc Wireless Network) that supports instant messaging,
Web and phone applications, e-mail image attachments, and more.
Project leader Linda Doyle talks of ‘‘a network that comes into being on an
as-needed basis. It grows, shrinks and fragments as nodes join and leave, or
move in and out.’’ 46
Rural Locality
Locality 89
In rural areas, the hope for services enabled by wireless networks is that
they will slow down urbanization by improving the living standards of
people on the land. Already in industrialized agriculture, farmers have