1. Temporal Aspects of
Splintering Urbanism
Stephen Graham
Newcastle University

2. I Starting Points: Cities, Networks, Timespace
• Both cities and networked technologies facilitate
timespace interaction and communication
• Cities overcome time constraints by minimising
space constraints
• Networked infrastructures and technologies overcome
space constraints by minimising time constraints
• Time/Space therefore socially constituted together
through constructions of urban everyday life which
necessarily involve both urban places and networked
technologies
• Therefore need perspective which addresses parallel
reconfigurations of both cities and networked mobilities

4. II Generalised Theories of
Urban Timespace Often Unhelpful
• General over-reliance on metaphorical and generalised
understandings of how intensifying networked
connections and globalised flows might ‘impact’ on
cities and urban life
• E.g.s. Harvey’s ‘Time-Space Compression’
• Castells’s ‘Space of Flow’ overpowering the ‘space
of places’
• Virilio generalized crisis of urban space due to absolute,
virtual acceleration: ‘tyranny of real time’

5. Example-- The Death of Cities Through ICTs
• 1964 - Marshall McLuhan "the city as a form of major dimensions must
inevitably dissolve like the fading shot in a movie" .
• 1991 - Naisbitt and Aburdene "in many ways, if cities did not exist, it
now would not be necessary to invent them".
• 1993 Virilio "the city of the past slowly becomes a paradoxical
agglomeration in which relations of immediate proximity give way to
interrelationships over distance."
• 1997 -Martin Pawley, "in urban terms, once time has become
instantaneous, space becomes unnecessary."
• 2000 Charles Leadbeater “at the moment it is as if we occupy two
worlds at once”

6. Problems…
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•
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•
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Don’t match empirical urban trends
Long history of dreams of substitution: never fulfilled!
Technologically determinist: miss contingencies
Totalising: miss complex diversity of City-ICT links
Top-down: globalisation ‘rolls over’ local places
Neglect social power imbalances in relationship to urban and
technological change
• Binaries miss subtle and fine-grain ways in which corporeality,
urban co-presence, and valued urban places are revalorised
through networked technologies
• Miss crucial role of urban place and co-presence in shaping
ICT use and their advantages for symbolic, ritualised and tacit
communication

7. Instead Cities are Being Remediated as
‘Gearboxes Full of Speed’ (Wark)
• Cyberspace is "very much a part of our contemporary world
and is constituted through a series of remediations. As a
digital network, cyberspace remediates the electric
communications networks of the past 150 years, the telegraph
and the telephone; as virtual reality, it remediates the visual
space of painting, film, and television ; and as social space, it
remediates such historical places as cities and parks and such
'nonplaces' as theme parks and shopping malls. Like other
contemporary telemediated spaces, cyberspace refashions
and extends earlier media, which are themselves embedded in
material and social environments” (Bolter and Grusin).

8. III Such Remediations and Multiple Speeds
Constituted through Splintering Urbanism
• Shift from Modern
Infrastructural Ideal of
Keynesian-FordistDevelopmentalist urban
timespace (Unitary City) to
flexible, sprawling, neoliberal,
post Keynesian/ developmental
urban regimes
• Infrastructures, mobilities,
timespace increasingly
unbundled and packaged
• Premium network spaces for
privileged users/ spaces

11. IV Temporal Aspects of Splintering Urbanism
• Packaged, unbundled, often privatised infrastructures and
premium network spaces (PNSs) carefully configured to
support mobilities and commodified timespaces
• New digital surveillance and access control
• PNSs erupt within and between legacies of modern
infrastructural ideal
• Critical supports for neoliberal urbanism: Bypass congestion,
support transnational logistical flows, exclude users deemed
risky and dangerous, secede or capsularise from public
cityscape
• Thus accelerated urban timespaces not generalised but
configured for carefully selected users. Can be barriers for
others who face deceleration.

16. (i)
Glocal Bypass
Archipeligo of
transglobal and
urban fibre networks

19. Air travel as city-to-city ‘tunnel effect’

20. Bypassing Borders

21. Premium airport links bypass
prevailing rail systems

22. (ii) Local Bypass
Private, electronically
tolled highways

25. Local splintering: Central congestion charging

27. Satellite
splintering?
S
splin

28. Car culture:
capsularisation and bypass

29. Local bypass: Premium street and mall spaces

31. Local splintering: gated communities

32. Local bypass:
Water apartheid

33. (iii) Virtual Network Competition

34. Call centre timespaces:
Global outsourcing & differential queuing

35. The Internet: ‘best effort’ to prioritised packets

37. • So many attempts within
broader splintering urbanism
trends to forge exclusionary
timespaces which erupt
within and between
globalised, network cities
• But: these are attempts. They
face resistance,
porosities,many constraints,
and are often ineffective
• Superimposed on more
egalitarian legacies of
modern infrastructural ideal
• Also paralleled by range of
often more empowering
attempts to remediate urban
places, especially through
new generations of ICTs

44. V Conclusions
• Instead of generalised timespace shifts which somehow
undermining all cities everywhere cities I see, rather, a broad set
of trends surrounding splintering urbanism. These are
remediating, rather than eviscerating, urban places
• SU perspective stresses new power geometries of bypass,
surveillance, mobility, infrastructure and flow. Encompasses,
multiple networks and scales (bogy to globe) and mutual
constitution of urban and infrastructural change
• Access control, bypass, consumerisation: configured as part of
shift to globalised, networked, neoliberal, urbanism
• But these systems erupt within and between wider legacies of
modern infrastructural ideal. They have real limits. And they are
being resisted through more democratic remediations of the city

45. • “One person’s infrastructure is
another person’s liability”
Susan Leigh-Star