ABSTRACT
The use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) was once limited to particular places. Phone calls were made from home, the office, or from phone booths. Access to the internet was first introduced in the office and then entered the home during the 1990s with the marketing of the personal computer and online services. Technologies were bound to places and bridged the distances between them. For the individual ICT user, two places, the home and office, were the two main poles of technology use. With the rapid proliferation of mobile technologies at the beginning of the twenty-first century, ICTs no longer connect places, but individuals (Wellman 2002). Portable devices and the increasing ubiquity of telecommunications and wireless internet (WiFi) networks allow (and sometimes pressure) individuals to conduct a greater number of activities in a variety of places. The home and office are losing their status as the preeminent locations of mediated information access and communication. The observation of several parallel trends both raised concern and inspired celebration about a cyberspace deemed separate from the physical places of the city. On the one hand, the globalization of the flows of capital and labor were declared to have disconnected social and economic production processes from space and time (Sennett 2005). ICTs were blamed for having homogenized the experience of place (Meyrowitz 1985), evacuated third-places of their social importance (Oldenburg 1989) and increased social isolation (Putnam 2000). On the other hand, portable computers and videoconferencing were thought to have rendered face-to-face exchanges a thing of the past (Amin and Thrift 2002; Graham and Marvin 1996), liberating the individual from spatial and temporal constraints (Benkler 2006). ICTs were praised for their ability to “reactivate” public spaces as places of work and leisure (Mitchell 2003). Neither extreme has come to pass. What we are left with is an emerging understanding of places as composed of varying degrees of materiality and immateriality. They are neither entirely private, nor entirely public, but somewhere in between (Sheller and Urry 2003). They are inseparable from the people who visit them (Sheller and Urry 2006). With the rise of location-based media, this information may be connecting them more with their immediate
environment, than taking them away from it (Gordon and de Souza e Silva 2011). Evidence suggests that internet users are even more likely to visit public places than non-users (Hampton et al. 2009). Whether they are mobile by choice or obligation, mobile individuals look for places to go. Where they end up may depend as much on the physical qualities of the place as on the number of friends who have checked in there. The growing emphasis placed on location by ICT use has done little to raise a debate among architects and urban planners about the implications that emerging spatial and technological practices may have for their role in a network society (Castells 2000). The ability to conduct an activity either at home, at an office, on a park bench or at a café questions the urban and architectural tradition of assigning predetermined activities to spaces. Rather than ignorance, this may be due to a certain level of ambivalence: Both the dystopian and utopian technological discourses imagine a future where, for better or for worse, physical place is of little importance. Furthermore, the material reality of mobilities, which is situated somewhere between the rationalization of movement flows and the localized tactics of the average urban pedestrian, is not yet properly seen as having design potential (Jensen 2013). This chapter takes a novel look at place-making through ICTs by examining the places of the city where mobile technology users come to rest. First, I discuss the influence of mobile technology on travel and on the importance of context. Then I present a study conducted from 2008 to 2010 in Québec City, Canada, of WiFi users and hotspots in collaboration with a local network provider, ZAP Québec, looking to better understand its clientele. Québec City is an interesting case because the expansion of the WiFi network has received city government and citizen support since its inception in 2006 (Therrien 2009), and was even part of the Liberal Party election platform at the launch of this study in 2008 (Élections Québec 2008). The results suggest that, although WiFi users do not fit a single profile, the public places where WiFi use is most frequent share certain urban and spatial qualities. In the conclusion I discuss the relevance of these findings for architecture and urban planning in a mobile world.
