IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

Most of us are potentially both users and suppliers of resources. With
networked communications we can access and use everything from a car
to a portable drill, only when we need it. As noted in chapter 1, the average
power drill is used for ten minutes in its entire life. Most cars stand idle 90
percent of the time. The principle of ‘‘use, not own’’ can apply to all kinds
of hardware: buildings, roads, vehicles, offices. For more or less anything
heavy and fixed, we don’t have to own it—just know how and where to
find it when we need it. Imagine there’s a kind of slider on your phone.
You set it to ‘‘sandwich’’ and ‘‘within five minutes’ walk,’’ and you use
those search parameters (ideally including a real-time customer rating system)
to grab a bite to eat. You don’t need to go far to get fed; you just
need to know how to find what you want to eat.
If the postspectacular city is to be well endowed with social capital, then
the most useful use of location-aware communication devices is probably
to enable person-to-person encounters. Marko Ahtisaari, a future-gazer
at Nokia, says that enabling proximity—getting people together in real
space—is a strategic focus for his company. ‘‘Mobile telephony might
seem very much to do with being apart, but proximity is one of the killer
applications of wireless communications,’’ he says. 36
Public Space
Locality 87
Could mobile phones do for cities now what parks used to do and re-create
a sense of shared space? It looks as if the two could help each other. When
a group called New York Wireless identified more than twelve thousand
wireless-access hotspots (zones in which one can access the Internet wirelessly
from one computer) in Manhattan alone and put their locations on
a website, the result was a new layer of infrastructure, says cofounder
Anthony Townsend of New York University’s Taub Urban Research Center.
‘‘But no streets were torn up. No laws were passed. This network has been
made possible by the proliferation of ever more affordable wireless routers
and networking devices.’’ 37 A ‘‘wireless park’’ soon followed. Bryant Park
became the first park to install a dedicated system that provides coverage
throughout its entire footprint.
This period in the history of infrastructure resembles the time, at the end
of the nineteenth century, when electricity was the great new technology
of the moment. Then, too, the private sector electrified major population