New York as Venice

While researching my book on omnitopia, I came across The Building of the City, a volume of the 1931 Regional Plan of New York, which describes a plan of elevated walkways designed to allow pedestrians and motorists to occupy separate spheres:

We see a city with sidewalks, arcaded within the building lines, and one story above the present street grade. We see bridges at all corners, the width of the arcades and with solid railings. We see the smaller parks of the city . . . raised to this same sidewalk-arcade level . . . and the whole aspect becomes that of a very modernized Venice, a city of arcades, plazas and bridges, with canals for streets, only the canal will not be filled with water but with freely flowing motor traffic, the sun glittering on the black tops of the cars and the buildings reflecting in this waving flood of rapidly rolling vehicles.

When I can, I'll post an image of that quasi-utopian vision of metropolis.

Placeless Enclaves

These days, it's hard to visualize a world without mobile communication. Where I work, San José State University, I notice everyday how countless students pour out of their classrooms with mobile phones glued to their ears. When I wait to take my bus home, I see person after person walking along the sidewalk, looking straight ahead while chatting into their hands. And I can hardly imagine the Highway 17 bus ride without hearing at least one passenger engrossing us with his timely communiqués. With our mobile phones, the notion of being "here" seems less meaningful than it once was, or so I suspect. Writing this now, flying across an overpass while onboard the bus, I try to remember a time when making a phone call required an attachment to place.

Think back to the age when telephone booths seemed as ubiquitous as Starbucks coffee shops. You may flash upon that 1967 movie The President's Analyst when James Coburn was captured by spies after entering a phone booth, or you may remember further back to that crazy fad in which college kids would try to pack as many of their buddies into one of those tiny rooms as drunkenly possible. We recognize the oddity of such an era when we think about the so-called "loneliest phone booth," located on Highway 50 in Nevada, a testimony to the ways in which mundane technologies become exotic with the passing of time. In those seemingly ancient days, you could not carry your network world with you. You needed to enter a physical enclave, a place set apart, the phone booth. This was an important place.

Today, in contrast, we carry placeless enclaves, our mobile phones, melding them upon our bodies in almost borg-like fashion. Frequently I'll spot a Bluetooth device hugging the ear of a person who drifts like vapor from place to place, lost in the reverie of some distant dialogue. The creepiest part of the scene is that occasional blue-white flash of the device, blinking with no apparent purpose except to signal to others, "now this is a talker." More frequently I notice folks bolting mobile phones to their pants or coats, demonstrating a perpetual preparation for important calls. And though I want to ask these people, "do you really want to be so obviously tethered to these devices?" I hush my queries. Surely some people need such connectivity, just as I need to mind my own business. And that's entirely the point.

Still, I can almost remember earlier days when we somehow managed to pass through our lives without this kind of connectivity. I look through old college yearbooks that are filled with an endless array of dances, teas, picnics, games, formals, and other forms of place-based interaction. I cannot imagine the students of that age descending the stairs from their classrooms only to open a phone. Surely, even without mobile phones, it must have been loud, a buzzing cacophony of greeting, argument, announcement, and farewell. Today's mobile conversations are loud, no doubt, but they are generally enclosed, a moving cone of personal space that just happens to overlap with hundreds of nearby enclaves. Such is the nature of public life in so many places today.

More and more people talk, alone.

(Photo by Andrew Wood)

Photography and the blurring of public/private spaces

In June, Marc Fisher wrote an article about the privatization of seemingly public spaces, in this case: the Washington D.C. suburb of Silver Spring. The article focuses on a developer's policy that restricts the rights of photographers to take pictures of the outdoor built environment, even from a street. An excerpt:

[The developer] insists on treating downtown Silver Spring as if it were an indoor mall. They set and enforce rules that would never pass legal muster on a public street. Political candidates have been stopped from handing out fliers. And photographers such as Py are regularly stopped and told to move along. (para 9)

As a number of images intended for my forthcoming book on omnitopia will depict that blurred relationship of public and private spaces, I will follow stories such as these quite closely.

Learn More: Fisher, M. (2007, June 21). Public or Private Space? Line Blurs in Silver Spring. Washington Post, B01.

A Man For All Seasons

When I teach a course entitled Rhetoric and Public Life, I assign Thomas More's Utopia as a central reading. While discussing that text in class, I also show the final three scenes from the 1966 film A Man For All Seasons. Here is a particularly thought-provoking excerpt from Robert Bolt's play that inspired that film. In this scene, Thomas More responds to his daughter's entreaties that he accept the King's supremacy over the Pope and be thereafter freed from imprisonment in the Tower of London.

More: When a man takes an oath, Meg, he's holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then -- he needn't hope to find himself again. Some men aren't capable of this, but I'd be loathe to think your father one of them.

Margaret: In a State that was half good, you would be raised up high, not here, for what you've done already. It's not your fault the State's three-quarters bad. Then if you elect to suffer for it, you elect yourself a hero.

More: That's very neat. But look now … If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all … why then perhaps we must stand fast a little--even at the risk of being heroes.

Margaret: But in reason! Haven't you done as much as God can reasonably want?

More: Well . . . finally . . . it isn't a matter of reason; finally it's a matter of love. (ellipses and emphasis in original; pp. 140-141)

I've often wondered whether that phrase, "Some men aren't capable of this, but I'd be loathe to think your father one of them," is a typo. But I imagine that Bolt refers to the larger notion of being capable of keeping an oath. Regardless, the sentiment bares careful consideration in any season.

Bolt, R. (1990). A Man For All Seasons. New York: Vintage International.

August Surprises

What is it with August and resignations? Why did this month inspire three high level Bush administration figures, Karl Rove, Tony Snow, and (today) Alberto Gonzales, to resign from the White House? I ask this question facetiously, recognizing that August is a time-honored month for government officials to suddenly discover that they want to "spend more time with their families." Even former House Speaker Dennis Hastert waited until this month to announce that he will resign from Congress rather than stay through his term. How sad.

Supposedly Americans are too busy with summer travel, back-to-school preparations, and other personal pursuits to notice when politicians decide to cash in their chips. I've always found this kind of calculus to be frustrating. One must possess a certain cynicism about the electorate to figure that quitting the White House or other high office -- after spending months defending one's role amid numerous scandals and failures -- will somehow slide past the public consciousness without much recognition, so long as the announcement emerges before Labor Day.

It's sad to imagine that a number of politicians think that way. It's sadder to recognize that they're probably right.

Mrs. Miniver

I was thinking about President Bush's recent efforts to compare the Global War on Terrorism with previous American struggles in Vietnam and, of course, World War II. In that spirit, I recently rented Mrs. Miniver (1942). Given my nostalgic penchant for "homefront" movies like The Best Years of Our Lives, it's a little surprising that I waited so long to finally see this movie that helped solidify American resolve during our early involvement in the Second World War (Spoilers, as you might imagine, follow). I had visions of "chip, chip, cheerio" and "stiff upper lips," and consequently I wasn't sure I could take this movie seriously. And it's true that Mrs. Miniver's English villagers are relentlessly cheerful in the face of German bombs. Thus, when the head of the Miniver household finds his home almost destroyed after an air raid, he remarks that he'd wanted to redo the dining room anyway. Precious. Nonetheless, the film's basic humanity and optimism warrants some appreciation.

An underlying theme of Mrs. Miniver is how England's prewar class rigidity gives way to a more genuinely democratic spirit once the "people's war" brings death, destruction, and even German airmen to the tree-lined community. An upper middle class scion promptly joins the RAF and the crusty dowager yields first prize in a rose-breeding contest to the humble train stationmaster. At night, bombs pulverize the ancient village, and all the people, wealthy and poor, huddle in their air raid shelters. You know that some of these folks will perish by film's end, though I was genuinely surprised at one particular fatality. Mrs. Miniver concludes with a rousing chorus of "Onward Christian Soldiers," and audience members were surely reminded to buy war bonds as they left the theater. Beyond class, beyond self-interest, Mrs. Miniver calls forth a kind of patriotism that's hard to imagine today.

Given that we currently face a war that seems to have no end, struggling with a seemingly implacable enemy who possesses remarkable cruelty, I cannot help but compare our state to that of the Minivers in the early 1940s. If we are indeed caught up in a global struggle against tyranny, it's hard to spot any signs of this war along my own tree-lined road. After 9/11, we all stuck American flags upon our cars and continued supporting oil regimes that help contribute to our miseries. And today, brave volunteers join the ranks of our armed forces, even as thousands of their brothers and sisters have been cut down by bombs and snipers. Yet no one seriously talks of a draft or rationing or any of the other kinds of sacrifice that a real war demands. Watching a movie like Mrs. Miniver reminds me of how hollow the rhetoric of "war" has become.

Perhaps an insufficient number of Americans are willing to buy what the Bush administration is selling. When we hear of no-bid and cost-plus contracts that seem designed to ensure that war profiteers will make their millions despite our losses on the battlefield, and when we see an administration that seems hell-bent on viewing a complex world though a dusty prism of American good confronting non-American evil, many observers can be forgiven for not cheerfully joining the march this time. Even patriots today cannot help but wonder: What kind of war is this?

Omnitopia Book

I am delighted to announce that I've signed a contract with Hampton Press to publish my book on Omnitopia. The tentative title: Omnitopia: Architecture, Travel, and Communication in the Age of Ubiquity. The book will be part of the Press's Urban Communication series, edited by Gary Gumpert.

I've been working on this book in journal article form and straight-to-manuscript form since 2002, and I'm delighted to bring the omnitopia project to this point. At present I anticipate Hampton Press publishing the book in 2008.

I plan to continue blogging as frequently as possible. Indeed, an increasing number of my posts may relate to the forthcoming book.

If you'd like to learn more about omnitopia, visit my Center for Omnitopia Research.