1. Multispeed Cities:
The Logistics of Living in an
Information Age

2. Introduction
The project examines
how landline
telephones, mobile
telephones and the
Internet influence daily
life for a relatively
privileged and a
relatively
disadvantaged
neighbourhood within
Newcastle upon Tyne.

3. Focus and Findings
• The focus of the study is on how ICTs are (or
are not) being incorporated into key areas of
everyday life i.e. financial management, food
shopping, training and employment, and local
collective action.
• The findings of this project will offer new
insights into the effects of the ‘digital divide’
on the life chances of communities and
neighbourhoods within urban Britain

4. The aims of the project
• To investigate how ICTs affect social
inclusion and exclusion
• To assess the effect of combinations of
multiple information technologies on social
polarisation
• Less a divide of PC ownership than divisive PC
ownership
• To understand how ICTs interconnect with
time-space routines in the city
• To explore whether information rich
communities are enabled to compress more
activities into their time while information poor
ones are made to expend more time in
accomplishing the same tasks

5. Logistics of daily life
• Temporality of everyday life
• Felski – invoked as ‘grounding reality’
• ‘Real city’, ‘real lives’
• Cyclical repetitive
• Not just city of acceleration but routine
• Liveability – small things making
differences
• Bus scheduling
• Synchronise and synchronise activities

6. • ‘We need to rise up from the flat map with its static
patterns and think in terms of a world on the move,
a world of incessant permutations’ (Hägerstrand
1982:323).

7. Chronopolitics
• Virilio - ‘chronological topographies’ disaggregating a
formerly unified spatial terrains and radical
redeployment of time (2000) - where ‘ubiquity,
instantaneity and the populating of time supplants the
populating of space’ (1998:58).
• Time squeeze
• Christine Boyer (1996) min-max pattern
• on the one hand ‘a society of cocoons ... where people
hide away at home, linked into communication networks’
that allow, and increasingly compel, a frenetic globally
connected lifestyle
• opt out of the rest of the city through a ‘spatial
closure’ (Burrows 1997:38)
• On the other: Virilio ‘local time’ actively ‘slowed down’
as conventional facilities are removed or replaced.

8. Timescape
Temporality
Time frame
Time point
Tempo
Timing
TIMESCAPE = TIME, SPACE & MATTER
Past
Duration ⇔ Instantaneity
Present
Sequence ⇔ Simultaneity
Future
Repetition ⇔ Rhythm ⇔ Beat
Cause ⇔ Effect ⇔Time lag
Reason ⇔ Action ⇔ Symptom
(Adam 2002)
• Space-time metaphor
• Added sense of timing
• Rhythm, repetition and acceleration

9. Implicit – deficit and acceleration
model
• Lack of ICTs assumed to be deficit of
cash, knowledge and produce deficit

10. • UNDP :
“creating parallel communications systems:
one for those with income, education and literally - connections, giving plentiful
information at low costs and high speed ; the
other for those without connections, blocked
by high barriers of time, cost and uncertainty
and dependent on out-dated information.
With people in these two systems living
and competing side-by-side, the
advantages of connection are
overpowering” (1999, 62).

11. Implicit – deficit and acceleration
model
• Lack of ICTs assumed to be deficit of
cash, knowledge and produce deficit
• Access barriers assumed to be only
obstacle
• Kiosks, terminals, training

12. ‘E-Government for Newcastle - A
Vision for March 2004’
• ‘Social inclusion will be
maintained by the provision of
computer facilities in libraries and
other public buildings, where
staff will be trained to help people
use them. On-street kiosks, some
with cashpoint machines, will
bring information and transaction
systems to every community’.

13. Implicit – deficit and acceleration
model
• Lack of ICTs assumed
to be deficit of cash,
knowledge and produce
deficit
• Access barriers
assumed to be only
obstacle
• Kiosks, terminals,
training
• ? mapping a direct
transfer of ‘social
networks’ into
‘electronic networks’

14. Spatial distantiation
•
Online facilities – delocalised networks of friends and
services
• ‘end of tyranny of geography’
• Increase spatial extensibility
• Real time(-ish) action at a distance
•
Impact on local social networks and services
• Bank withdrawal, preferential online rates, etc
• ‘The resulting urban tissues will be characterized by live/work
dwellings, twenty four-hour neighbourhoods, loose-knit, far-flung
configurations of electronically mediated meeting places..’ Bill
Mitchell 1999: 7
• ‘locational freedom does not mean locational indifference’ p76
positive travel correlation not substitution
•
? Extent of delocalisation of outcome
• Where are services and people?
• Where is communicating done
• Revisiting Kilburn High street
• The Wired bus stop

15. Telepresence and time-geography
•
Increased ability to do
more than one thing at a
time
• Interweaving tasks
•
Movement between points
in e-space consumes little
time
• Prisms of opportunity
shifted
•
•
•
•
•
•
Only in one place at a
time?
task duration – shortened?
Co-presence not for
everything – but for some
Packing constraint?
Bandwidth
‘presence’ becomes
insecure
Time poor connectivity
rich?
• Always connected

16. Consequential effects
• Not just up take of technology
• Movement from novelty to necessity
• Effect on non-adopters
• Differential pricing
• Removal of services
• Effect of adopters
• Dial-up hogging
• Educational justification -Recreational
sidelines
• Effect across technologies
• Cable TV to broadband

17. Case Studies
• The research compares Jesmond and
Blakelaw wards in Newcastle-upon-Tyne the
latter being among the 20% most deprived
wards in England and the former being
among the most affluent 20%.
• Super-included and cut off ?
• They are located less than one mile apart
separated by rough parkland – and a dual
carriageway

18. Methods of data collection
• Baseline survey on multiple media
• Interviews
•
•
•
•
Type of use
Reason for use
Reason for non use
effects
• Time diaries
• Problematic response rate

19. In Conclusion
•
•
•
•
Temporal intensification
Spatial extensification
Two-speed ?
Externalities and consequences rather
than access
• Multiple technologies interacting