Research work by Aaron Antrim
Moving my body and mind from place to place by bicycle has given me a unique feel for the public road system and all that travels upon it. Road systems are designed primarily for use by motorists — cities and roads form without any fundamental design considerations for bicyclists . I am fascinated observing people and their system of transport based upon automobiles from the perspective I have seated on my bike.
A passion of mine, distinct from biking but related to transportation, is the exploration of technology that has incited a new way of thinking about information, space, and community. Digital communications technology enables the well-established frontier in this trend of transportation. Telecommunications, is, in every respect, a means of transport. Instead of transporting people, the locus of thought, telecommunications technologies free words from the speaker, and transport just these words and the thoughts they represent.2 My fascination with this new way of thinking encouraged my use of wireless telephones, the founding of my business, Humscape.com, and the readership of authors such as William Gibson and Neal Stephenson.
My personal distaste of the automobile’s role in transport and my fascination with advanced telecommunications combined to inspire this academic paper. I have attempted to philosophically define transport, and tell the story of its evolution.
[end preface.]
A tree lives in a constant state of place and being. It does not move about the Earth, actively choosing surroundings. It does not seek sustenance; roots anchor the tree and integrate it with nutrients in the soil. A tree constructs it’s own dwelling place simply by its presence. (Casey)
Humans dwell in an entirely different way than the tree. Our earliest human ancestors took advantage of a gift of evolution nearly all animal species require for survival: freedom of movement3. Nomadic humans were born into “smooth space.” According to Deleuze and Guttari, a nomad "distributes himself in a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space"4 (Casey 387). Communities of humans living and working together probably formed , but these communities remained nomadic. Communities dwelled temporarily, moving through spaces, but preserved relationships among individuals. Travel about the smooth space had little affect on community — beginning and ending points of nomadic journeys not only were insignificant (Casey 387), they were nonexistent.
Late in the history of human biological and behavioral evolution, technological and cultural development produced an entirely new practice of dwelling. Archaeologists excavate food-storage pottery as evidence of an era existing 9600 to 10500 years ago, when cultures of the near-east lived in the first permanent, humanly designed and built places (Gifford-Gonzalez) — in other words, a sedentary lifestyle had developed (Brisker). Unlike people of nomadic cultures, people of sedentary cultures created physical places by design and arbitrary practice according to the relationships that existed between people and communities, and the patterns of movement between places.
Philosophically, the difference between a settled community and a nomadic one is that the settled community manipulates the landscape they live in — moving it around them, to organize reinforce their geographically stationary cultural community. The nomadic community and individual impulsively choose the course of their journey through a space — they transported their bodies to food, places, and resources — instead of transporting or creating these things, as a settled community does.
Present-day archaeologists practice a method of thinking which explicates details of ancient cultural communities by studying ancient communities’ uncovered artifactual manifestations. Artifacts of ancient civilizations and empires are the product of specific patterns of movement, so archaeologists study in detail the historic movement of goods and crafts among nomadic and settled communities, because these patterns of movement correspond to the flow of culture and ideas. Our places of today — schools, businesses, buildings, cities, nations, and roads — and the communities and cultures that exist with them are also the products of historic relationships and patterns of movement. An archaeologists' employment is to study and analyze these relationships and patterns. A modern day architect's responsibility is to use historic knowledge in designing physical spaces — judging how and where these spaces should affect the way people, goods, and ideas are transported.
In A Pattern Language, patterns of human places and architecture are studied, ordered, and represented in words to form a recommendation for a common language that our culture shares not with our tongues, but with the creations of hands and tools. The focus of the opening of the book is on designing community and place: "The first 94 patterns deal with the large-scale structure of the environment: the growth of town and county, the layout of roads and paths, the relationship between work and family, the formation of suitable public institutions for a neighborhood, the kinds of public space required to support these institutions" (Alexander 3). Later pages of A Pattern Language sensitize the reader’s awareness of how the form of a humanly built place is a metaphor for the community that lives in that place. Structures profoundly affect travel habits of the people, which affect individual relationships among individuals of the community.
The first pattern proposes an ideal size, in terms of individuals, of democratic governments and communities:
“We believe the limits are reached when the population of a region reaches some 2 to 10 million. Beyond this size, people become remote from the large-scale processes of government. Our estimate may seem extraordinary in the light of modern history: nation-states have grown mightily and their governments hold power over tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions, of people. But these huge powers cannot claim to have a natural size. They cannot claim to have struck a balance between the needs of towns and communities, and the needs of the world community as a whole. Indeed, their tendency has been to override local needs and repress local culture, and at the same time aggrandize themselves to the point where they are out of reach, their power barely conceivable to the average citizen” (Alexander 13).Many of these statements are strongly atavistic — the authors are nostalgic for a time before modern capitalist transport implements, which they fairly repudiate, interrupted more “natural” human relationships. Disappointingly, the entire book chooses to ignore the important function of long-distance telecommunications networks in modern communities. In the past ages of history our ancestors, with only their own bodies and the bodies of their animals, could not overcome the vast geographic expanses separating people. The physical world most of our ancestors believed in was small — Europeans were late to consider the possible existence of the American continents, Native Americans generally knew just their neighboring tribes, and few people had visited fellow humans of a different race. Our Earth held a diverse collection of languages and cultures that were isolated from all but nearby groups. In modern times, bodies and presence can be delivered to places anywhere on the Earth, or sounds, images, and the written word can be delivered to another human, anywhere as electronic artifacts, released from the vessels of our bodies and minds. In 1993, There were one billion people whose first-learned language was Chinese, 350 million original English speakers, and 250 million people whose original language was Spanish (Crystal). It is momentarily startling to wonder how these languages and cultures are shared by vast numbers of individuals who are spatially distributed across several continents. These statistics are the result of history, and the evolution of communications and transportation technologies have resulted from a complex bond of societal movement and scientific development. This narrative of the growth of rails, autos, suburbia, and urban sprawl from Transportation contrasts with A Pattern Language’s idealized dream about community relationships and transportation5:
"Until the 19th century, the limitations of both local and regional transport placed a natural restriction on the size of cities. But the coming of the steam railways in the 19th century accelerated the pace of living—railway stations became growth centers for business and commerce—and, with the later introduction of underground railways and street tramways, the outlying urban areas increased in size and population density. In this present century the car has accelerated the sprawling growth of large cities, and destroyed the balance between transport and the living community. City populations have increased up to 30-fold during the last 150 years (see table on this page). These population trends have resulted from the ability of the city to feed itself with food transported from rural areas, along with a drift of workers from agricultural to urban areas" (Transportation 157).Rapid transit by tram and automobile in metropolitan regions was a new convenience of momentous implication, and shortly after introduction these two transport technologies were adopted by urban dwellers at a frenzied rate. Believing that geography is experienced as time (Cubitt), the attraction of the automobile and tramway lay in the possibility of compressing the space between points, due to a reduction of time required to make trips. Cubitt's description of experienced distances is simple and noticeable in how we think about distance. Thinking pragmatically, I am not separated from New York by physical distance, but by the great amount of time it would take to travel there by foot or mechanized form of travel. Integration of the distance and time concepts is poignantly exemplified in how we often describe distance — when asked about my home city, I reply that Eureka is about five hours north of San Francisco by car. In a mindset where geography is experienced as time, long-distance telephony is entirely bizarre, and wondrous — a call to the next-door neighbor is an identical experience as a call to an apartment in New York. This capability of the telephone to conquer distance revolutionized the human community structure’s connection with geographic place. Interestingly, the introduction of the telephone coincided with the introduction of the automobile, and these two separate technologies may have played symbiotic roles during one instant of the historical "time-space compression" (Brisker) trend :
“At the beginning of the century sociologists also studied the role of the telephone in urban areas. In an article in 1895 F.J. Kinsbury noted that relations between urban and rural areas were transformed by the arrival of the tramway, the bicycle and the telephone. These three new technologies made the development of the suburbs possible. In 1906 F. Rice concluded an article on the urbanization in New England by stating that the telephone was the main factor of urbanization (Moyer, 1977 : 364). Jay Allan Moyer, from whom I have borrowed these two references, analyzed the relationship between urban growth and development of the telephone in Boston. Contrary to Rice and Kingsbury’s conclusions, he found that the telephone did not play a key role in the decentralization of Boston. This decentralization had already started before its arrival and was mainly due to the development of public transport. The telephone merely accompanied and strengthened the city centre’s movement towards the outlying suburbs.” (Flichy 90)
An ingrained idea that motivates the language of the above passage is well articulated in an article from Wired Magazine: “‘First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us.’ That's Marshall McLuhan on how we converse with technology” (Kelly). This model of conversation with technology is exemplified by Flichy's use of the word transform — “Kinsbury noted that relations between urban and rural areas were transformed by the arrival of the tramway, the bicycle and the telephone.”
Also in the above passage, I discovered a dispute over what form of transportation most influenced of the dynamics of cities and society — whether it was the telephone, which transports words and thoughts instantly, or the tram and the automobile which rapidly bring people, the thinkers of thought, together, in direct earshot of each other. I hypothesize that neither the automobile or the telephone would have become as integrated in business and social practices as they are presently without the reinforcement of the other, complimentary technology. Various texts suggest society did not immediately need either the telephone or the automobile:
"A disheartening series of rebuffs slowly forced the truth in upon Sanders's mind that the business world refused to accept the telephone as an article of commerce. It was a toy, a plaything, a scientific wonder, but not a necessity to be bought and used for ordinary purposes by ordinary people. Capitalists treated it exactly as they treated the Atlantic Cable project when Cyrus Field visited Boston in 1862. They admired and marvelled; but not a man subscribed a dollar." (Casson)
“[In year 1900] Most Americans travel with help of horse and mules or by bicycles. According to one report, the automobile is ‘an expensive luxury item for the man who does not need one. It is well named the ‘devil wagon.’’” (Urdang 267)
I refer back to McLuhan's quote, "First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us," in order to make the point that instant telecom services and rapid transit had little use in a community that was not yet shaped by these tools. Since the telephone facilitated a reduction of face-to-face visits, it eased the maintenance of relationships spanning a larger geographic distance. When the choice is made to physically transport our bodies and minds to a common place, the automobile makes this more easily possible. The telephone and automobile both extend relationships and community geographically, reinforcing each other's use.
I believe internet, the telephone, the airliner, the automobile, the tram, the railways, the ship, and the riding animal all fuse into a perennial transportation trend which has been enacting itself for over two thousand years. Like in the examples given of the telephone and the automobile, every transport technology reinforces the need for other forms of fast, convenient, transportation.
This trend is perceived in the ancients' use of horses to meet people and be in places that were geographically remote. Horses are a frequently remembered tool of the ancient empires, used to spread information, contained in people, throughout the community of an Empire. Since horses command a greater travel radius than humans on foot, they shortened distances between places, distance as defined earlier: “geography was experienced as time” (Cubitt). The wide borders of the Roman Empire exhibit triumph over geography. Roman leaders sought to unify their subjects into a community with a common Latin language, later used by the Catholic church. They built a network of roads, sea-routes, and institutions to unify the empire — molding a common culture associated with an unprecedented large region, instead of a highly specific dwelling place.
In recent history, the development of transport technology for government unity has continued with exuberance, as people raced to delve into the delicious possibilities of instant long distance communication. Claude Chappe, an pioneer of telegraphy wrote to colleague Lakanal about a project's opponents at the end of the 18th century:
"How could they not have been struck by the ingenious idea which you developed yesterday at the Committee [of Public Education] and of which I had not thought? The establishment of the telegraph is, in effect, the best answer to those publicists who think that France is too spread out to form a republic. The telegraph shortens distances, uniting a huge nation on one single point" (Flichy 9).
Charles Lindbergh evidently believed that conflicts among nations were due to cultural prejudices, and that these cultural prejudices were caused by geographic distance. He faithfully believed in the airplane's capability to diminish geographic gaps between nations, and thereby remove obstacles to cultural understanding: "The thing that interests me now is breaking up the prejudices between nations, linking them up through aviation" (Berg 195). Airliners are intriguing transport machines, because they are designed to transport people directly between an origination point and a destination point, avoiding and ignoring the time-consuming and distracting places that fall between. An article in Wired Magazine, exploring next-generation air-cargo transport, demonstrates how nationalists love the same capabilities of aviation technology as Lindbergh loves, but love these capabilities for very different reasons: "A century back, von Zeppelin hoped airships 'would erase the advantages of geography' and bring Germany glory — lofty goals von Gablenz shares… The count [von Gablenz] wrote that he built his airships 'to erase the advantages or disadvantages of geographical location of nations" (Steere).
The historic trend I have noted to conquer and compress distance between places, exaulted by von Gablenz, is culminating today, in rapidly “maturing” transport networks. Our society has endeavored to bridge the isolating expanses of geography and experienced marvelous success. Today’s communications networks move information from point to point in real-time, inspiring the often used term “global community,” or “global village.”6
In a 1994 interview, William Gibson, the originator of the word “cyberspace” commented on this modern phenomenon of long-distance telephony: “cyberspace is the place where a long distance telephone call takes place” (Josefsson). In the same interview, Gibson defined the cyberspace more explicitly:
“Cyberspace is a metaphor that allows us to grasp this place where since about the time of the second world war we've increasingly done so many of the things that we think of as civilization. Cyberspace is where we do our banking, it's actually where the bank keeps your money these days because it's all direct electronic transfer. It's where the stock market actually takes place, it doesn't occur so much any more on the floor of the exchange but in the electronic communication between the worlds stock-exchanges” (Josefsson).
The design process of a physical place — the creation of architecture7 — involves considering the ways people will dwell in that created space — how dwellers will use the space as a tool to achieve or create, how dwellers will play and enjoy the experience of life. The design of a place must also converse with people, telling them how to interact with each other and the specific roles they should fill. The nature of the design process yet again reveals the truth of McLuhan’s statement: “First we shape our tools [or place-tools], thereafter they shape us” (Kelly). If places are designed to perform different functions, this must be why we travel from one place to another — to experience the functions of different places. A performer travels to the theater, the audience members travel to the seats, and each takes note of what the architects designed for; athletes play in the center of an arena watched by spectators from the stands; people travel to schools and libraries designed for learning; political candidates cross nations, listening to citizens and speaking in auditoriums; the President of the United States dwells at the seat of government, where his or her power is clearly communicated by the architects of the White House and the capital.
Much of the movement that occurs in society today, however, does not occur as migration between places that are purpose-designed, and clearly delineated. This transport phenomenon is not represented in the examples of place and travel listed above — it is not physically manifested. Individuals have always created an environment by arbitrary movement; today people travel between cyberplaces in the instantaneous and infinitely flexible realm of cyberspace.
Modern American homes are very regular in the diverse functions they are designed to facilitate — cooking, eating, bathing, entertaining, learning, and purchasing. Within a compact, private, elastic space, people choose among many streams of media transported to them. Television is a flexible transport architecture, delivering images to the home. It will constantly create a new place out of the space it affects — a sports arena, cinema, or political forum. In some ways, the television is a development in the story of sedentary lifestyle that first arose 9600 to 10500 years ago — people are stationary, manipulating the space they live in instead of travelling to another place.
Previous examples have shown how government and business institutions employed developments in transportation (roads, telegraphy, telephony). The uses discovered for and purpose assigned to these transport technologies is a different issue, however, from how technology affects the place-world, the realspace:
"No sooner is a new skyscraper walled and roofed, than the telephones are in place, at once putting the tenants in touch with the rest of the city and the greater part of the United States. In a single one of these monstrous buildings, the Hudson Terminal, there is a cable that runs from basement to roof and ravels out to reach three thousand desks. This mighty geyser of wires is fifty tons in weight and would, if straightened out into a single line, connect New York with Chicago. Yet it is as invisible as the nerves and muscles of a human body" (Casson).
Instant communications has eroded the need to design an employee's physical place in order to establish his or her relationship with the rest of the world. This idea is well developed in the following passage, from an article narrating the architectural philosophy of cutting-edge architect Rem Koolhaas:
“Microsoft people, the OMA architects noted, talk constantly about architecture, but they don't mess around with reinforced concrete. Even Microsoft's own campus has remained immune from the ambitious impulses that govern the company. ‘If Microsoft had become successful 50 years ago,’ Wood says, ‘it would have built a beautiful headquarters.’ But today, when a company can project its identity via a complex network of other symbols, many intangible, iconic buildings are less important. Investments go into organization rather than structure” (Wolf).
A corporation such as Microsoft, consisting of a networked group of people, patented intellectual property, and absolutely no meaningful physical assets — exists essentially in cyberspace. The leader of this organization has no reason to dwell in a place that is centralized, and surrounded by implements of power and communication. He or she may transport thoughts with community members in a realm disconnected with geography and structure — cyberspace. The telephone, and eMail may be manipulated with individual’s whims, creating a transportation network and a business community that is formed dynamically.
The ultimate tool disconnecting architecture from structure and homogenizing places is wireless communication:
"Wireless technology, by removing physical connections, erases one of the last signs that our communication technologies are material and not etheric. Though we "know" that electromagnetic modulations of the spectrum are no less material than waves of electrons cruising along a wire, wireless nonetheless amplifies the experiential sense that we live and move in a world of invisible intelligences, a magic world verging on telepathy. Simply put, the more the physical apparatus disappears, the more we are simply listening and responding to voices in our heads." (Davis)
Suddenly, wireless communication has provided a basis to change the way that business, cultural, and personal relationships occur. One important change is that public and private places have been undifferentiated:
"Mobile communication is the culminating point of a long transformation of the public and private spheres. The private sphere has become the main locus of entertainment, of consumption of music and shows. This area has itself broken up into several small juxtaposed cells. However, the withdrawal into the private sphere does not mean the disappearance of the public sphere. In the 1950s in the United States, open-air cinemas provided an interesting case of articulation between these two worlds. Teenagers took their dates to the drive-in movie in their first car. Without leaving their car, they passed from the sound bubble of the car radio to the visual bubble of the cinema. Today, the users of walkmans and cellular phones, like Baudelaire's stroller, transport their private sphere with them. They are in an anonymous crowd, listening to the music they like; they are absent from their home or office yet in potential telecommunication with the whole world. Message services also link the public and private spheres for the user is both at home and in a network of conversations without any geographical roots. The current social evolution is probably less that of the hypertrophy of the private sphere (split into individual micro-spheres) than the possible setting into motion of private spheres within a reorganized public sphere where the individual is constantly here and elsewhere; alone and linked to others. Edgar Allan Poe's man of the crowd was alone; the twentieth-century stroller with a walkman or cellular phone remains alone, communicating not with passers-by but with those to whom he or she is connected. We are witnessing the superposition of two types of sociability: one is immediate (often atrophied), the other is mediatized" (Flichy 168).
The two or more participants of a mobile phone conversation may be located anywhere geographically. Specific physical location is most often an unknown triviality of transactions that occur in “cyberspace,” because cyberspace is a new plane of reality, a copy without an original, one that now infiltrates and affects physical space through the mobile telephone vehicle: “Societies have increasingly come to define reality -- or, less philosophically, ‘the action’ — by media and information flows” (Davis). Amazingly, the force of the wireless communications network will affect the structure of physical places, just as the automobile and tramway facilitated the suburban outgrowth of the early twentieth century, even though the physical presence of the mobile phone is infinitesimal, almost invisible when compared to the presence of the automobile roads and highways. Already, urban planners and architects must think of the wireless communications network as part of the urban reality.
Donna Haraway, in her “Cyborg Manifesto,” writes about “the cyborg” and the cyborg’s “intelligence-command-control-communicate” system, of the post World War II era, the “integrated circuit” of politics, transport networks (media, fixed and mobile telephones, internet), and “the informatics of domination.” Donna is a transport critic and reserved idealist, recognizing, like bicycle activists, the profundity of transport and its role writing communities, politics, and economics. Transportation is the formal structure of our world: “Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. …Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings” (Haraway 164).
The beginning of my research work explored the dwelling places and transport habits of the nomad: “According to Deleuze and Guttari, a nomad ‘distributes himself in a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space’8 (Casey 387). Communities of humans living and working together probably formed , but these communities remained nomadic. Communities dwelled temporarily, moving through spaces, but preserved relationships among individuals. Travel about the smooth space had little affect on community…” Modern day architect Rem Koolhaas calls new nomads who travel the world but maintain an individual consistent cybernetic reality throughout all spaces the “kinetic elite.” These jet-lagged, mobile phone dependent business people, living in the frontier of modern transportation are conscious of their exploration of ways to dwell and be a member of businesses, networks, nations, states, communities.
Meditating the ominous and ecstatic dynamic of of cyberspace creation, I remember history and the power of transportation. I remember the pioneer of American radio Lee De Forest writing in his journal: “My present task (happy one) is to distribute sweet melody broadcast over the city and the sea so that in time even the mariner far out across the silent waves may hear the music of his homeland" (Flichy 107). I remember the first political debates broadcast on television. I remember the American trans-continental railroad and Route 66. I remember the first mariners, traders, and warriors. I remember the Roman empire and its networks of roads. I remember Henry Ford. I remember G_tenberg and his printing press and books and newspapers. I remember the first postal services and the telegraph. I imagine all their implications and effected changes, all the ways transportation has changed my world. Some remembrances I love, some I hate. I hope for what bike activism, urban planning, mass transit, and open-ended communications networks like mobile phones and the internet may make possible.
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