The Digital Invisibility of Broadband and its Representation in the Modern City

Abstract

City managers in several cities have tried to market their city related to information technology; i.e. Osaka as a city of intelligence, Barcelona as a city of telematics, Amsterdam as a city of information, Manchester as a wired city (Hepworth, 1990:550ff), and more recently, Stockholm as the mobile valley or internet bay. These attempts mirror the emergence of a space of flows which replaces the notion of the space of places. It poses a challenge for cities to construct new productive infrastructures, thereby turning cities and regions into critical agents of economic development by introducing informational city concepts like the technopoles or technoburbs. This paper takes a close look at the human and non-human hubs of the digital network for broadband access to the Internet. It shows how an abstract and material notion of a digital broadband net is represented in concrete and socially infused, indeed personalized, ways. The aim is to discuss the dialectics between abstract invisibility and concrete visibility and how each is represented.