Recently in cities Category

Greetings from lovely San Jose and the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference! I'm here for the first time since 2004. The talks have been terrific. I had the opportunity to give an Ignite talk (5 minutes! 20 slides!) on pneumatic tubes.

I'm giving a talk today called "Shared and Sometimes Stealthy: India's Mobile Phone"-- it's the result of a study I did at Microsoft Research India in 2006. If you're interested in the topic, there are two chapters that I've published about it. I wrote "Beyond the Personal and Private: Modes of Mobile Phone Sharing in Urban India" with Jonathan Donner of Microsoft Research India. It will be published later this month in The Reconstruction of Space and Time: Mobile Communication Practices (edited by Rich Ling and Scott Campbell). And with Jonathan Donner, Nimmi Rangaswamy, and Carolyn Wei, we wrote "'Express Yourself' and 'Stay Together: The Indian Middle Class Family" in the Handbook on Mobile Communication Studies, edited by James Katz. It discusses of the effect of the mobile phone on several domestic situations: home finances, romance and the domestic boundary.

At South by Southwest, Francesca Birks and I organized a panel called Tangible Interactions in Urban Spaces, where we'll be joined by Ben Cerveny and Mouna Andraos. We're on deck on Sunday at 10 a.m. (early! but very cool!).

Do come to see us -- and if any of these subjects interest you, please follow up with me. I have more material to offer.

I'm in the midst of a bunch of intense writing on the origins of the pneumatic tube network. It's not done yet, but I'll share more here given the recent interest (thanks, Bruce, for the link!).

Introduced to combat the shortcomings of the telegraphic network in Paris, the subterranean Poste Pneumatique (Pneumatic Post) moved written telegraph messages from 1866 until 1984. The pneumatic tube network relieved the saturated telegraph network, delivering physical messages across the city and to the suburbs faster and more reliably than the telegraph. What first began as a one-kilometer line connecting Paris's stock exchange and central telegraph office opened to the public service in 1879, and by 1910 reached all arrondissements and nearby suburbs, contained 210 kilometers of underground tubes, and handled approximately nine million postal telegrams a year. By 1953 at its height, it was 450 km long--the largest in the world--processing more than 11 million pieces a year.

Why did it make sense to send a telegram via pneumatic tube? It was a set of factors related to urban conditions in the 19th century. Cities with high population, heavy commerce and finance and urban congestion made good candidates for pneumatic tube networks. Moreover, in Europe, the pneumatic tube mostly relieved a communication boom caused by inexpensive telegraphy and saturated telegraph networks. Devised as an auxiliary to the telegraph, a medium that could only transmit 40-50 messages of 20 words per hour in 1860, the pneumatic tube network addressed the issue of rapid, reliable communication within the city (though telegraphy still made sense for messages sent over longer distances).

Poste Pneumatique was under the operation of the telegraph office within the postal service, although it only moved physical, written cards and not electric messages. It offered Parisians a quick and reliable method of sending messages across their congested city--something that could not happen with overburdened telegraph lines or on urban streets. To send a "petit bleu," (the one on the right from this collection) as pneumatic messages were known, the sender composed a written message on a card and delivered it to a special Poste Pneumatique mailbox or the nearest post office. There, the postal telegraph desk delivered it via pneumatic tube receptacle to the addressee's closest post office, where a messenger (bicycle or later, motorcycle) would deliver it to the recipient--usually within two hours of its inscription.

By 1870, Paris also had an extensive network of vaulted sewers, built by Baron Haussmann during the Second Empire. The sewers were a natural conduit for other types of infrastructure (potable water, telegraph lines, and eventually electricity), making it easier to install pneumatic tube and compressed air lines and to access them in case of error.

Paris's pneumatic tube network was not the first--that was London, started in 1853) and by no means was it the only one. Urban tube systems existed all over the world, in Europe, North and South America, and Australia. London invented its pneumatic post in 1853. Berlin began its Rohrpost in 1865 and Vienna in 1878 Philadelphia followed suit for first class post in 1893 and New York in 1897. The technology transferred readily and with less competition than might have been expected (Austrian, German and French engineers shared technological improvements).

Urban tube networks existed for a surprisingly long time, remaining in operation until 1953 in New York, 1984 in Paris and 2002 in Prague (where it was only taken out of service by a flood that destroyed much of the tube infrastructure). They fell out of favor for different factors: in the US, the invention of the gasoline-powered truck in 1912 proved competitive; elsewhere, reliable telephone, and later fax service obviated the need for the networks. But still, telecommunication contends with issues of last mile delivery and economies of scale. And as interest in embedded computing grows, of objects imbued with interactivity, there's something extremely attractive about a physical system that shoots a physical message to its addressee.

(Update: if you're interested in pneumatic tubes, I've written more here.)

My big project -- possibly undergirding my dissertation in a year: Postal services and pneumatic tube systems in the late 19th and early 20th century, especially in Paris. I'm reading these services in terms of their urban interfaces, their material qualities and the interest in the 1870s-1890s of physical networks across cities. Paris is interesting because of an explosion of postal and telegraph products and services, the response to the siege of the city (Balloon Post!), and the shift from electric to material form to someone's doorstep in terms of message delivery. The Hôtel des Postes fascinates because of its ingenious interfaces within the building and its processing capability; the pneumatic tubes are fascinating because they make manifest the force of air and use it to literally propel information across a building or a city.

During the same four-year period when the word "interface" was first used, in which the notion of networks proliferated, Julien Guadet (1834-1908) designed the Hôtel des Postes (1880- 1884) in Paris, the central office for the French postal network. An enormous civic architectural undertaking, the Hôtel des Postes sorted, moved, marked, placed in sacks, audited, loaded and transported letters, periodicals and packets at high speeds, before sending them out again to their destinations. For Guadet and bureaucratic chronicler of Paris Maxime Du Camp, La Poste represented a living system that they described in anthropomorphic terms. Guadet described the postal system as epileptically fast; du Camp compared it to a heart that "draws in its correspondence and forces it back out to distribute in every direction." Beyond these biological comparisons, however, Guadet designed the Hôtel des Postes to operate as an ordinateur--a computer processor--atop the postal network. The Hôtel des Postes represents a nascent, modern approach to designing buildings, one that translated organizational, functional requirements into form.


Fueling communication through pipes that ran under cities at speeds of up to 50 km per hour, the pneumatic post served as an urban subterranean communication network from the 1850s into the early 21st century, first in Europe, then the United States, and by the early 20th century, South America and Australia. Depending on the city, pneumatic tubes shuttled telegrams or letters and packages, both commercial and personal, as an antidote to increasing urban congestion and traffic on the streets above. Messages delivered by pneumatic dispatch surfaced in post offices and train stations, where messengers carried them by bicycle (or later, motorcycle or truck) from the post or telegraph branch to their final destinations.   For commercial buildings, pneumatic tubes offered ready communication systems between and within any enterprises that required the movement of receipts and paper. At once buried and tangled, emerging into the interiors of buildings and offering varied interfaces for its users, the pneumatic tube presents an enigmatic image of modernity--the merger of construction and communication.

Pneumatic networks preceded electrification, first powered by steam and only by electricity in the early 20th century. They enjoyed a long lifespan. Implemented first in London in 1853 as an information conduit between the London Stock Exchange and the Central Post Office, the technology quickly transferred to other cities. Berlin began its Rohrpost in 1865; Paris built its first pneumatic networks in 1866 and began public Poste Pneumatique in 1879; Philadelphia followed suit for first class post in 1893 and New York in 1897. Urban tube networks existed for a surprisingly long time, remaining in operation until 1953 in New York, 1984 in Paris and 2002 in Prague (where it was only taken out of service by a flood that destroyed much of the tube infrastructure).

I must admit, I'm surprised to find myself heading toward a 19th century dissertation topic, and at that, one that deals with France. But working on tubes and postal services lets me explore the things that I love about tangible networks and interfaces. They make me realize just how much we have to learn from these old and often forgotten modes of transmission.

It was time for a change in scenery. I've decamped to Berlin, where I'm based for much of the summer. This is an opportunity to relax, enjoy the city and do some research at the Bauhaus and Luftwaffe archives. This base of operations enables side trips: to Reboot in Copenhagen last week (more on that and my talk soon), to my adopted sister's wedding at Schloß Moyland, to my German host family's apartment in Düsseldorf -- and also, to Paris and Hamburg for research and pleasure. Berlin isn't foreign to me, as most people know. I speak German fluently and have been in Berlin at least every year since 1990 (excepting 1992 and 1995), but never for more than a week or two at a time. This is a chance to live here for a little bit, just to see what it's like.

The weather in Berlin is warm and sunny, the city's full of crazy little bars, cafes and galleries that take advantage of the cheap rent and copious space. It's a place where things happen and converge, where people develop something wonderful in industrial place, only to have it be developed in glass and concrete by developers (whereupon they often go broke and don't complete the projects). So the cycles begin again. Berlin makes things feel possible -- it's like a platform for cool stuff. Consider the Investorenjubeln that happened yesterday: Bar25, one of the awesome urban, industrial beach bars decided to greet its latest crowd of developers this afternoon with a raucous beach party.

One of the things I love about Berlin is the fantastic network of people. My experiences with it started more than 10 years ago, when I came to know the MetaDesign Berlin office. I became friends with Vicky Tiegelkamp and Sabine Fischer, both of whom ran a pop culture feminist webzine not unlike Maxi, the one I had cofounded in 1997 with three other women. I am living with Vicky, who for 8 years has run Playframe with her partner, Patrick. My first love, Martin Nachbar, lives here this summer and may actually be in town: as a dancer and choreographer of note, he's usually on the go. Another friend, Lulu LaMer (a games producer) is based here for the summer; my dear friend David Hudson has lived here for decades. And there's the latest happy technology success story, Felix Petersen. He founded Plazes, newly acquired by Nokia.

Other people are attracted to it as a place to make things happen. Some examples: Constantin Peyfuss and Florian Weber are two of the founders of Unlike, a beautiful and very hip guide to the city (with a particularly nice iPhone interface).  Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlfross founded Soundcloud, a platform that professional musicians can use to share music. I've also just met the founders of Program, an architecture gallery that confronts that very notion. Its founders, Carson Chan and Fontini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, graduated from Harvard's Graduate School of Design in 2005 and opened their gallery here in 2006. Next month, they'll be offering a residence to my dear friend Bryan Boyer. Perhaps I'll be here to see the fruits of the collaboration he's doing with his cousin.

On my leisure map: sunsets (at 10 p.m.!) at Kiki Blofeld, my favorite industrial beach bar, hipster free wifi and latte macchiato at Sankt Oberholz, the spiffy late night bars on my street in Prenzlauer Berg, my continued interrogations of the Palast der Republik, and time with the people I've mentioned, friendly visitors, and people I've not yet met. Oh yeah -- and expanding my knowledge of minimal techno: Anita says it encompasses everything. This should be easy enough. There's a party tomorrow, after a barbecue and an opening, and another party Friday.


Palast der Republik, masquerading as the Fun Palace

In the time that I've written this, Florian and Carson have each happened into Sankt Oberholz. This place is more connective than even San Francisco's Ritual! Berlin: a fine summer nexus.