Could a change in mobile-phone technology be signaling a change in our cities?

By Andrew Blum
The Metropolis Observed
October 2001

We may be long past the point of mobile phones as novelties, but we are not yet near an understanding of them as the harbinger of a new paradigm of place. In 2000 more than 20 million Americans signed up for cell phones, bringing the total number of subscribers past the 100 million mark. Today well over 50 percent of American households have at least one. Yet beyond the superficialities of antennae-tower NIMBY-ism and restaurant rudeness, there are very few critics of the technology--especially among architects and planners. But with the arrival of a new location-tracing technology this fall, the way mobile phones shape where we are may become too substantial to ignore.

In recent months, cell-phone companies have begun the long and expensive project of upgrading all their cell sites to comply with the FCC's E911 mandate, which beginning in October 2001 requires all wireless carriers to provide a caller's location to 911 operators. With one in three 911 calls now made from cell phones, public safety groups like the National Emergency Number Association have been demanding these capabilities for years. When they are fully operational, emergency personnel will be able to trace the location of a 911 call made from a mobile phone to within as little as 50 yards. A cell phone (and the global network it's connected to) will know exactly where you are.

Offsite:
Read the fine print on the FCC's E911 mandate in the comprehensive official fact sheet at www.fcc.gov/e911/ factsheet_requirements_012001.txt.
At the same time, the system's capabilities have the rapidly growing "location industry" drooling over the possibilities, beginning with life-enhancing features such as on-demand maps, restaurant and movie information, location-based dating services, and Happy Meal coupons ringing on your phone as you drive by a McDonald's. John Jimison, executive director and general counsel for the Wireless Location Industry Association, believes these services will offer "safer, more convenient, more knowledge-rich lives," because, as he explains, "[their users] will always have available to them a complete overlay of information based on where they are."

However, there remains the possibility that location technology will not only provide movie listings and better emergency service--it may also change the way we think about cell phones. Until now they have been considered tools of communication, freeing us from the constraints of place and allowing us to receive a call--as the futurists promised--anywhere. Where we are doesn't matter, and that's the point. But with location technology, where we are becomes exactly the point; place will become as vital a part of a cell phone's raison d'être as its traditional phone-ness. The term "mobile phone," we might soon recognize, is as incomplete at explaining this new technology as "horseless carriage" was in defining the car. Yet few seem ready to deal with the fact that the new technology could profoundly change the way we move about our environment. Fewer still have ventured to predict what those changes might be.

Anthony Townsend, a research scientist at the Taub Urban Research Center at New York University, believes that location technology--combined with the increased use of mobile telephones in general--could transform cities in ways we have yet to consider. "Architects and planners have completely underestimated the impact that mobile communications will have on cities," he stresses. Cell-phone users, he explains, react to the city in "real time," exchanging the old idea of a schedule for a "constant stream of negotiations, reconfigurations, and rescheduling." The result is a population increasingly, inconsistently, on the move--and utilizing that movement in new ways. If, Townsend wonders, being stuck in traffic becomes a productive use of time, what will that do to the roads? This new pattern of movement is ripe for urban analysis of the kind done by Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, and Kevin Lynch.

Wireless movie listings may not be the sign of a new world, but cell phones are certainly changing how, when, and why we move about the city. During the next several years, mobile phones may drag us toward a further disconnection from the life of the street--as more and more of us walk around talking maniacally into dangling microphones--or elevate our appreciation for the utility of public space--as the street, in its inherent connectedness, begins to feel more like home. But either way, the cell phone--reacknowledged as a spatial technology--could cut to the core of city life.


© Bellerophon Publications, Inc. 2007, All rights reserved.
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