Fiber and the city : internet infrastructure in the context of urban form and planning

Abstract

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has become an integral part of today's cities. It is not only incorporated into but shapes the built environment, it sustains and supports other critical infrastructure, and it has become one of the main methods for citizens to interact with the cities they live in. However, research into the complex interrelations between the urban fabric and ICT has not kept up with the rising influence and integration of ICT into cities - which is shown to be mainly attributable to a number of structural impediments. In this work I will try to discern the influence ICT has on our cities and its citizens by focusing on the macro-, meso-, and micro-level respectively. First, I employ a quantitative analysis of data and physical inter-city traffic between major European urban centers to showcase the rising importance of ICT in a global information exchange. Second, I concentrate on the district-level and qualitatively investigate three greenfield smart city projects and their implementation of ICT. Last, on the smallest scale I take a socio-political look at the interaction of citizens with ICT - prioritizing questions of access and availability; and large-scale data management, protection, and ownership. The city of Vienna and its policies will serve as a frame of reference throughout this work to effectively compare the obtained results and put them into context. I will show that despite the manifold effects of increasing ICT implementation, many cities and urban developments have yet to catch up and explicitly address this issue. Additionally, further research into this area from an urban-planning point of view is urgently needed to counteract a very deterministic, technology-fixated narrative dominated by large corporations.