1. Physical and Virtual Mobilities
Prof. Stephen Graham
Newcastle University

2. Structure
1. Dreams of Substitution of Physical by Electronic
Communication
2. Critique of Substitutionist Perspectives
3. Virtual and Physical Mobilities as CoConstitutive
4. Conclusions: Understanding Mobilities

3. 1. Dreams of Substitution:
The Anything-Anywhere-Anytime Dream
• Michael Benedikt (1991) future "with the
ballast of materiality cast away"
• Purity of software-constructed 'virtual'
reality replacing perceived
contamination of 'real', cities
• Two completely separate realms.
• Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin: 'theology'
of cyberspace. Information moves “from
something separate and contained
within computers to a space we can
inhabit" (2000).

4. Utopian Ideologies:
Transcendence, Redemption, Dematerialisation
• ICTs will work through "decontaminating the natural and urban
landscapes, redeeming them, saving them from the chain-dragging
bulldozers of the paper industry, from the diesel smoke of courier and
post-office trucks, from jet fuel flames and clogged airports, from
billboards, trashy and pretentious architecture, hour-long freeway
communities, ticket lines, choked subways... from all the inefficiencies,
pollution (chemical and informational), and corruptions attendant to
moving information attached to things across, over and under the vast
and bumpy surface of the earth rather than letting it fly free in the soft
hail of electrons that is cyberspace"
(Michael Benedikt, Cyberspace: First Steps, 1991).

5. • E.g.s 1995 - Nicholas Negroponte, Director of MIT's Media Lab: "digital living will
include less and less dependence upon being in a specific place at a specific time, and
the transmission of place itself will start to become possible" From Boston will "see the
Alps, hear the cowbells, and smell the (digital) manure in summer".
• 1996 - The architect Shafraaz Kaba: "Why would you want to drive for an hour, get
stuck in traffic, and be scolded by your boss, when work is a few keystrokes away from
the comfort of your home-office?"
• 1997 - Uk architect critic Martin Pawley: "in urban terms, once time has become
instantaneous, space becomes unnecessary. In a spaceless city, the whole population
might require no more than the 30 atom diameter light beam of an optical computer
system."
• 1999 – The US Romm report, on links between the Internet and global warming.
Internet has “the ability to turn retail buildings into web sites and to turn warehouses
into better supply chain software, to dematerialize paper and CDs into electrons and
trucks into fibre”.
• From Stephen Graham, Cybercities Reader, Introduction

6. Examples…
• Telecommute instead of
commute
• Virtual travel and tourism
instead of travel and tourism
• Virtual communities and
entertainment
• Cities, paper, physical
infrastructure, corporeality,
meeting spaces rendered
increasingly redundant
• Online music consumption
• Call centres; online banking

7. • To sum up, as Anthropologist
Caren Kaplan has argued:
"the rhetoric of cyberspace and information technologies
relies heavily on a hyperbole of unlimited power through
disembodied mobility. References to boundless space,
unfettered mobility, and speedy transfers abound. [...].
More and more in this context, the concept of a person
or of human beings appears to depend on the
attenuated possibilities of cyberspace" (2002).

8. 2. Critique of Substitutionist Perspectives:
• Simply, empirically, wrong!
• Ideologically loaded: neoliberal ‘friction-free’ capitalism (Bill
Gates)
• Technologically determinist: ‘impacts’ of technology ‘onto’
society read directly from purported function/effects
• Ignore complex materialities of ICTs
• Overgeneralised and ahistorical : all cities and all effects
assumed to be same. No analysis of historical or social
evidence on complex co-evolution of ICTs and transport
• “Transmission-oriented account” (Sawhney): overemphasise
ICTs; underemphasise place

9. (i) Simply, empirically, wrong!
(e.g. parallel, log -- i.e. exponential -- growth of
transport and e-communications in France,
1800-2000)

10. (ii) Ideologically
loaded:
neoliberal
dream of a
‘friction-free’
capitalism
(Bill Gates)

11. (iii) Technologically determinist:
• Read-off alleged or predicted ‘impacts’ of ICTs on
society through imposing their supposed time-space logic
universally

12. (iv) Ignore complex materialities of ICTs
e.g. COLT’s city of London fibre network

13. (v) Overgeneralised and ahistorical
• ”Perhaps the Japanese will construct cyberspace as an
extension of their dense urban corridors. On the other hand,
people can live in the suburbs and participate in cyberspace
from their homes, as many Americans do now. Or, as
Americans do, they can commute between one cyberspace
location in the workplace (a corporate communications
system) and another in their homes (American Online). Thus
cyberspace can be a reflection of the American suburbs and
exurbs, the Japanese megacities, or the European
combination of large and medium-sized cities. Cyberspace
need not be the uniform entity suggested by the current
metaphor popular in the United States the information
superhighway" (Bolter, 1995)

14. (vi) Overly “Transmission-Oriented” (Sawhney):
overemphasise ICTs; underemphasise place/materiality/
corporeality
• Assume that greater bandwidth
necessarily leads to greater
levels of meaningful
communication & substitution
• Neglects continued importance
of “face to face co-present
interaction,” and the transport
infrastructures and cities
necessary to sustain this
• Miss the “compulsion of
proximity”

15. 3. Virtual and Physical
Mobilities are Co-Constitutive
Typology of Relationships 1: Bill Mitchell

16. Typology of Relationships II:
Graham and Marvin 1996

17. (i) Physical and Developmental Synergies
• Electronically and
physically (dis)connected
places one and the same
Follow same conduits,
pathways, demand
corridors and geographies
• Increasingly packaged
and developed together

18. (ii) Substitution Effects
• ICT-based interactions
replace physical travel, face
to face interactions, and built
space
• EG telebanking
• Online movies/ music
• But: Sometimes generate
new and hidden material
flows, geographies and
places as ‘back office’ or
logistics complexes
• E.g. iTunes (right)

19. (iii) Generation Effects
• Use of ICTs to generate
new physical movement,
face to face contact, and
built space
• E.g. web-based booking
systems, tourist TV

20. (iv) Enhancement Effects
• Use of ICTs to squeeze more
and more physical traffic within
existing infrastructure systems,
or at least make congestion
more tolerable
• E.g. air traffic control, Just in
Time logistics chains, High tech
ports, mobiles on tube or roads,
‘cybercars’

22. SatNav and SemiAutomatic Navigation

23. Experiments with Fully
Autonomous Vehicles eg DARPA
Urban Challenge 2007 see http://
www.darpa.mil/GRANDCHALLENGE/

24. (4) Conclusions:
Understanding Mobilities
• Increasingly, ICTs ordinary and taken for granted technologies which are
infused into the background of urban life, continuously orchestrating
complex combinations of electronic and physical mobilities across multiple
scales simultaneously
• Electronic and physical mobilities mutually constitutive and inseparably
related
• Enrolled, in parallel, into orchestrations and constructions of capitalist
divisions of labour, social communities, identities, and socialities, and
places, and material practices
• Need perspectives which, rather than assuming some binary virtual-real
world, takes this as starting point. Will address these next session.

25. • To sum up, rather than being somehow dematerialised and
disembodied, ICT-mediated mobilities are:
"as embedded in material relations as any other practices.
They require hard industries as well as light ones. In addition
to the bright and mobile world of designers and users,
human hands build the machines in factories that are
located in specific places that are regulated by particular
political and economic practices. Thus, in the production of
the machinery and materials of cyberspace, another form of
mobility can be discerned, that of labor in this moment of
globalisation” Caren Kaplan (2002, 34).

26. References
•
•
•
•
•
Benedikt M. (Ed) (1992) Cyberspace : First Steps, Cambridge, Ma: The MIT Press
Bolter, J. and Grusin, R. (1999) Remediation : Understanding New Media, Cambridge
Ma. : MIT Press.
Graham, S. and Marvin, S. (1996), Telecommunications and the City: Electronic
Spaces, Urban Places, London: Routledge.
Kaplan, C. (2002), "Transporting the subject: Technologies of mobility and location in
an era of globalization", PMLA, 117(1), 32-42.
Mitchell, W. (1995), The City of Bits, Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press.