Local controversies around particular proposals from Mayor Bloomberg’s new long-term plan for New York City have emerged recently, ranging from congestion pricing to zoning, and others. These proposals would entail immediate local repercussions if enacted and, therefore, should obviously be of concern to residents and other local stakeholders. However, what I think has been missing from the debate is the following: how does New York’s long-term development affects its standing as a significant node in the network of global cities? Should the global economy be concerned about the specifics of New York’s development?

Particular constellations of cultural, transportation, educational, and other infrastructures in New York attract and sustain the global components within the city that connect directly to global flows; examples of those global components being the finance industry, corporate headquarters, and such. In other words, many of the individuals who have chosen to live in New York in order to work in Wall Street do so in large part because of the cultural vibrancy, excellent transit options, and related amenities the city offers, and, in the same token, many of the institutions headquartered in Wall Street have done so in large part because of the communications and transportation infrastructures, and the cadre of highly educated individuals concentrated in the city. In recognition of this point, Hong Kong’s chief executive said recently of New York and London:

“It’s not only merchant bankers and the Financial Times. You need art, you need the West End, you need Wimbledon. They all need the Yankee Stadium and Broadway – that’s all in the make-up of a good city.”

The policy decisions that made possible these city amenities, like “the Yankee Stadium and Broadway,” were taken at the local level, yet their implications have outgrown the local and national scale to become enmeshed in a global scale. The growing significance in global affairs of cities has entailed the increasing globalization of urban policy, as urban policy has global repercussions and global trends influence the direction of urban policy. So, debates surrounding congestion pricing in Lower Manhattan should matter not only to New Yorkers, but to all concerned about the global economy.

Via The End of Cyberspace:

Nigel Thrift, “Movement-space: the changing domain of thinking resulting from the development of new kinds of spatial awareness,” Economy and Society 33:4 (November 2004): 582-604. [pdf]

Thrift:

… in recent years the activity of calculation has become so ubiquitous that it has entered a new space, which I call ‘qualculation’, an activity arising out of the construction of new generative microworlds which allow many millions of calculations to be made in the background of any encounter.

Last week’s The Economist had an excellent article offering a bird’s-eye view of current development trends in Kenya. Among these trends, I wanted to emphasize two of them here.

First, the growing pervasiveness of mobile phones in Kenya, how this is helping the efficiency of local farmers, and how this is occurring largely despite of, rather than supported by, government-sponsored communication infrastructure:

In 2000 some 300,000 people used mobile phones; now, in a country of 35m-plus, nearly 9m do. As a result, the lives of millions, especially the poor rural majority, have been sharply improved, because they can get round many of the obstacles posed by the decrepitude of the state-run infrastructure: of the 300,000-odd land-lines in the country, probably two-thirds are usually on the blink.

[. . .]

Poor Kenyan peasants wondering whether it is worth spending a day taking a bus to market to sell a sack of onions can find out the prices with just one call. Anyone with cash to transfer across the country can do so by text message [. . .]

Second, the rapid urbanization in Kenya, especially the emergence of large slums around Nairobi:

Equally striking is the new urban sprawl—and the spread of slums. Nairobi is one of the world’s fastest-growing cities: at independence it embraced a little over 500,000 people; now it may have more than 6m, three-quarters of whom are reckoned to be squashed into about 2% of its metropolitan area.

Kenya serves as an interesting test case to observe the interplay between mobile communications and urbanizing dynamics, currently showing that growing use of ICTs does not necessarily lead to the thinning of highly compact cities.

Finally, the BBC’s Paul Mason did an excellent two-part article and video report on the growing use of mobile phones in Kenya which I highly recommend reading/watching.

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Links:

Kenya: Going up or down, The Economist
From Matatu to the Masai via mobile, BBC [Part 1], [Part 2], [Video]

Last Sunday I attended a panel titled ‘Navigating Urban Flows’ at Cooper Union, part of a weekend conference organized by Creative Time and inSite. My main reason for attending was to hear Saskia Sassen, one of my favorite authors on the research frontiers of globalization, digital networks, and urban theory.

Among other things, Professor Sassen spoke on how the urban condition facilitates a kind of complex powerlessness for the immobile class, therefore allowing them to partake also on globality. Shuddhabrapta Sengupta, another panelist and co-founder of Sarai, mentioned how the elite in Delhi tend to shelter themselves from the democratizing dynamics of digital networks by emphasizing face-to-face networking.

comScore posted a press release today claiming that mobile Internet user numbers are already at one-fifth of PC-based users in the UK and US. The specific numbers for the UK are 5.7 million mobile web users compared to 30 million PC-based users; in the US, 30 million mobile web users compared to 159 million PC-based users. Obviously, this is further evidence of the growing splintering of digital network use from stationary devices (PCs) to mobile ones. The future implications for the territorial dynamics of information flows are bound to be very interesting.

A comScore director writes:

The Mobile Web is at an early state of development, but we expect Mobile Web usage to grow as phone performance improves, sites optimise their content for the small screen and operators fine tune their tariffs, enabling consumers to take full advantage of mobile phone capabilities, content and convenience.

[photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/njberry/172026421/]

Last Monday I attended a lecture by Everyware author Adam Greenfield on the social implications of the growing dissolving of networked computing into the urban landscape and the individual; some people are calling this ‘ubiquitous computing’, ‘ambient informatics’, and other terms.

I find this whole field of ubiquitous computing extremely interesting and hearing Greenfield’s lecture reacquainted me with the subject in a way that transformed my current view on the dynamics between global governance and digital networks. Thinking about my own research, I understood that:

Cyberspace as a separate entity is dying. The personal computer has stopped being the end-point of where networked computing interfaces with the individual. Mobile networked computing has made the individual another node. Networked computing devices are now also becoming integrated in the urban landscape, surrounding the individual with digital interface points in physical space. Before, governance issues of digital space were technically limited to the personal computer; the network undergridding digital space was self-contained. Now, as physical space and the individual become platforms for networked computing, these digital space governance issues just become issues of governance as the digital and physical cease being distinct.

[photo: http://flickr.com/photos/cpalmieri/190063469/]

Scanning through material for a conference paper proposal I came across a paper by Saskia Sassen on The Impact of the Internet on Sovereignty: Unfounded and Real Worries.

Sassen argues that digital space is actually composed of both private and public digital networks, the latter then encompassing what we know as the Internet. Contrary to popular expectations, it is private digital networks which present significant tendencies toward a devaluing of state sovereignty, according to Sassen. Particularly, the “speed, simultaneity, and interconnectivity” of electronic networks has allowed financial electronic markets to have the most severe impact on state sovereignty, eventually becoming endowed with “the power to discipline national governments” (Sassen cites the 1994-5 Mexico and 1997-8 Asian Crises as examples).

[photo: http://flickr.com/photos/mikek/212374650/]

For a course last semester I wrote a (very) brief paper on DRM technologies and what I perceive as the emergence of technology-enabled private authority (TEPA) in cyberspace of a simultaneously multi and non-territorial character.

Regarding DRM, I write:

“From the publishers of digital intellectual property has risen a new need for the protection of their rights which the state cannot effectively satisfy. Therefore, temporary and micro spheres of authority are constituted in each interactive moment when a user complies with the technology-enabled restrictions directly embedded in a digital object by its publisher. Although temporary and ‘micro’, the spatial character of digital networks allows TEPA to be endowed with a multi and non-territorial character to their enforcement measures. Through DRM technologies a copyright-holder can force an end-user to comply with his or her intellectual property rights irrespective of the location of either; also, the DRM technology can be adapted to the particular intellectual property laws governing the multiple locations of end-users. Nevertheless, [...] the physicality of digital networks can easily cross over to the virtual realm with significant implications.”

The paper in its entirety is available here. I am still uneasy about some of the concepts developed there, especially considering that I wrote this in about three hours or less.

[photo: http://flickr.com/photos/bcatch/164397198/]

So, I came home to sunny, beach-infected Puerto Rico for a few days and what better to do here than stay cocooned reading Lawrence Lessig’s Code 2.0. His main argument seems to be that regulation depends on the specific configuration of codes underlying the varying architectures in cyberspace or, as a co-founder of the EFF’s says, “architecture is politics” in cyberspace.

The last section of the book, Part IV on competing sovereigns, seems quite on-topic for the kind of research I want to focus on. I am looking forward to it and, of course, will be posting any observations here.

[photo: http://flickr.com/photos/tomypelluz/26545740/]

I am a doctoral student of Global Affairs at Rutgers University. The graduate program is highly interdisciplinary and inviting of new subject-areas which affect or are affected by world social dynamics. While my fellow students focus on sexuality, environmental politics, economic development in Africa, and other issues, I am slowly developing a keen interest for technology-related issues, particularly those regarding cyberspace. Why? I guess that anything seemingly amorphous, overlapping, and malleable instinctively sparks my research interest. That is the official, academic answer. The more personal answer involves having Nintendo as a toy, creating websites at 15, writing computer music through my college years, and generally liking futuristic artwork, all of which makes anything computer-related fascinating to me (although it remains to be seen for how much longer will computers be regarded as ‘futuristic’ items).

Returning to academia, I need to write a dissertation, and soon. Like seeing fish swimming in murky waters, I can partially discern the general subject area for my dissertation: something regarding the interaction between territorially-based authority and cyberspace, the fragmenting of state authority into digital “spheres of authority“, national identity and virtual identity, national security and cyberwarfare, and the like; the dialectic interplay between physical territory and digital territory. Through this blog I want to slowly focus my eclectic interests into a dissertation-appropriate topic, to clear the waters so I can see better the fish swimming in it.

OK, enough metaphors for now, down to business. The posts here will be short(er) and straightforward, your comments are more than welcomed, and, in general, I hope this becomes a fun and interesting experiment.