Ken Hillis
With reference to the societal impacts of geographical information and
analysis, in 1992 an NCGIA Consortium noted that:
... the lay person's access to electronic information will improve
awareness of
political and environmental affairs, and may preserve a healthy level of
interest in global and local governing policies. One may envision a network
of consumers of spatial information, who require appropriate education
including the skills to access. Research on the use and value of such
access,
and the ethics associated with access and privacy are clearly needed.
(ibid.:1992:26-27)
This conference is concerned with changing conditions of accessibility, distance, and spatial interaction in cities. All interaction has a spatial dimension. British communications geographer Roger Robinson (1977) defines accessibility in a way that assists theorizing the impact of spatial technologies. He argues that the density of a network linking a variety of regional nodes will have an impact on accessibility - a concept he refines to explain the evolving relationships among decision making, movement patterns, and networks, as well as to describe a measure of the ease by which places can be reached from one another (Johnston et al, 1994:2). Accessibility focusses on 'structures' within which movement takes place (Robinson, 1977:88). It brings together disparate spatial characteristics into a single form: the accessibility of a location on a network is influenced by the location's relative position within the network, changes in transportation technology, what is being moved, and introductions of new media (ibid.:65-68). Accessibility implies the impact of communications on a network. A geographer might say: such a location has x% of accessibility, thereby expressing where the location stands relative to others in the network. The concept's incorporation of decision making suggests the increasing interplay between the 'human dimension,' technical processes, and information flow. Robinson (1977:88) argues than an ideal accessibility would be "low cost immediate transference of anything in any direction, with the resistance of distance reduced to almost nil." Robinson forecasts and idealizes then-anticipated but now-current on-line networks within which "relative location will cease to be significant in economic terms" (ibid."88).
Robinson's 'relative location' can be theorized with respect to access to information, and how this might apply to GIS and urban planning. David Brusegard (1989:11) details the relationship between the utility of geographic information and those agents charged with decision making and carrying out goal- oriented tasks. This observation applies well to marketing professionals or planners, for example, but does not hold with equal force for, say, homeless populations or inner-city working poor, for whom abstract spatial generalizations facilitated by GIS have little experiential point of purchase. Now, Paul Strassman (1984:117) notes that the more people share information, the more its importance increases. However, this argument ignores the reality that not only must information be available in accessible forms to potential users, but that its withholding also can form part of its power: that information readily readable by a planner but not by an affected neighborhood population may be precisely the point in hierarchical political organizations. Planners may claim that the information is available and ignore coming to terms with the fact that its inaccessibility to affected individuals and groups serves to reify the power of both planners and the state apparatus they serve.
With respect to a GIS, the sophisticated and 'brand name' nature of the software and hardware (see Curry: 1995) further 'ups the ante.' A different, technologically produced reality that differs from the concrete world which it models comes to define what is real, and - given technological limitations - in a hierarchical fashion, however unintentional this might be. Lack of access to new virtual technologies and ITs (Information Technology) reflects the emergence of a new distinction between halves and halve-nots. The old class lines and economic differences still obtain but privilege now also comes to mean who has access to this technology and therefore the virtual worlds to which it is a 'porthole.' Access to ITs and spatial technologies should not be conflated with metaphors of literacy. Both the literate and the oral worlds - text and voice - have language in common. A parallel commonality need not undergird a planner using a GIS to model urban processes and change, and those affected by her or his actions. Not only are citizens often unaware of the nature and implications of the technology to which they are being subjected, frequently they do not know this subjection is underway.
Already in Robinson's earlier noted definition of accessibility, movement is privileged over distance. Though geographers, for example, seldom explicitly conflate space with distance, experientially we understand the former's effects in terms of the latter. However, distance becomes phenomenologically real when we move through it, and how we move through it depends, in part, on our relative degree of social (dis)advantage. Telematics and ITs already suggest a new working arrangement for power. If these networks are where power now moves or circulates, this is to say something different than an observation about any distance between where power resides and an individual's location in space. Aspects of power accessible in relative fashion to human control may have been transferred into cybernetics and networks (of which GIS forms a part) without a full recognition of the consequences of same. We cannot continually discuss the importance of the 'continuous plane' of circulation within geographic discourse without coming to grips with the fact that the 'space' of power, metaphoric or concrete, has shifted. Space used to equal distance. This equation has been 'solved,' in part by ITs, by replacing it with a new one - space = movement - where movement means continual transit across the old space of distance, often by the use of ITs. In this sense, power is now in continual application, and is asserted and accessed by movement - here suggested to now take on both concrete and virtual forms. Power is no longer most vulnerable when visible, but when it stops moving.
The continuous circulation within on-line environments is a new 'center' of power in direct competition with the older materially discrete notes (variously regions, cities, human beings, or other 'geographic individuals' operating at different scales) it was originally intended to link. The 'space of continuous circulation' established by spatial technologies is really a conduit for messages that has emerged as an ironic center in and of itself, thereby challenging contentional understandings of how power works and how social relations are organized. Access to geographic information that might be of use, for example, to local community groups, might be available by world wide web and originally stored on a spatially- distant mainframe computer. Equally, however, corporate and other decisions impacting upon urban localities need not be made at the geographic center of any urban area, and indeed a GIS may contribute to centralizing decision making that may uniformly be applied to a variety of spatially discrete and socially distinct communities without regard to content. Current spatial technologies have the ability to increase social distance between economic halves and halve-nots, and to extend the definition of halve-not to individuals having little or no access to the virtual sphere that increasingly defines how the real will be conceptualized and defined. It is often in the self-interest of professional elites to subtend examination of these possibilities beneath an assumption that the increased power these technologies confer on technically proficient elites (themselves) will be of benefit to all - whether this benefit is suggested to take the form of an (always in the future) equal access to the technology, or a less directly-accessible benefit made available by more traditional means analogous to how the poor are theorized to gain from trickle-down economics.
The above discussion of the context within which spatial technologies impact access and distance/space does not refute the day-to-day positive and pragmatic value of this technology. For example, OC Transpo - the regional transit authority for the Ottawa, Ontario, National Capital Area - makes extensive use of spatial technology. Each bus is equipped with a sensing device and two-way radio. All major intersections throughout the urban area are equipped with sensing devices which transmit the location of each bus to a central display that is monitored for bus headway and timetable adherence. Radio communication permits flexibility at off- peak hours, as the location of buses on intersecting but separate surface lines can be monitored and coordinated at transfer points, thus minimizing long waits during freezing-cold winter months. This technology largely eliminates the need for human surveillance of the fleet. It uses available resources more efficiently, and the Region's financial support is evidence of a commitment to maintaining mobility for the Ottawa area's population that relies on the bus for getting around. It is notable that Ottawa enjoys a 75% modal split in favor of public transit with respect to all individual trips to and from the CBD during morning and evening rush hours. Public transit in the capital is not a marginalized service, though it seems almost too obvious to note that such investments in spatial technologies, which extend and render more efficient transit's spatio-temporal range of service, have the potential to minimize auto use, and thereby street maintenance, and ancillary land uses devoted to parking of cars and so forth. Tax dollars spent on spatial technologies in this regard may well allow other monies to be redirected to a wide range of public services that most would consider socially desirable, though of course, this need not be the case.
With respect to access to information by disadvantaged groups, a key issue is data ownership, which comes to have heightened ethical and political importance: these data are representations of people who may not even be aware of the data's existence. Geography, with its emphasis on pattern, has tended to abstract people through its mechanisms of spatial analysis and the freezing of ongoing temporal processes into discrete and framed 'event patterns.' Given the power of GIS's commercial and military clienteles, theorizing the application of spatial technologies within peopled urban contexts needs to include consideration of how this tradition of pattern and privilege may contribute to undesirable occlusions of different human populations who are part of the collectivity called society, and to initiate dialogue intended to minimize this.
During a period of retrenched public spending, spatial technologies seem well suited to making the bus system more efficient and cost-effective. However, their use by planners for urban geodemographic profiling may well lead to the production of sensitive information about groups that will demand what I will term a principled and carefully thought out ethics of refusal on the part of planning departments, such as this information is not made equally available to all by the professional elites who control it and access to it. For all are not already equal, and publicly-financed production of spatial information, which might reveal, for example, the 'fit' between illegal drug use and a specific land use zoning pattern, could well lead to the mounting of a 'moral' argument in favor of a rezoning beneficial to those already 'more equal' than others. Perhaps it was always thus, though the enhanced power of these technologies and difficult accessibility suggests a 'change in degree' such that it becomes germane to ask at what point the cumulative effects of changes in degree become a 'change in kind.'
Even if it were to become technically, economically, and socially feasible for all to equally access some future GIS, should all groups be theorized as benefitting equally from this access regardless of their size and political thrust? As Mark Monmonnier (1996:63) aptly notes, such ancient devices as ridicule may be more politically effective than reliance on expensive technologies and the elites required to service the latter. At the service of administration and control of populations, GIS will enjoy State and corporate support at a variety of levels of scale in gathering data for surveillance mechanisms that are analogous to a virtual panopticon controlled by the few. This would still be true for modelling locational conflicts involving disadvantaged urban populations. Modelling such conflicts ought to be informed by deliberation of who decides what is a conflict, and its extent.
The widespread diffusion of GIS and ITs more generally makes urgent the need for a sustained examination and development of the question 'Who decides the nature of disadvantage?' They who are defined as 'disadvantaged' ought to have a say in determining not only how the technology will be applied to them, or even how they might achieve opportunities to put it into 'praxis,' but also what constitutes a definition of disadvantaged. Stated otherwise, there is little political leverage to be obtained from defining oneself as a victim in and of itself. To do so already positions oneself as merely subject to GIS technology and practice via one's inclusion as data within a representational space that one 'consents' - knowingly or otherwise - to allow others to define, operate, and manipulate. Yet GIS, as part of a spectrum of ITs, is now gaining wide cultural acceptance even though its implications often are poorly understood by affected individuals and groups. As I noted above, the nexus between IT, who controls it, and who accesses it, has the ability not only to shrink the distance between halves and halve-nots, but also to enhance it. In the new virtual world of information, disadvantage need not lose its association with economics and class even as the experience of those without the skilled 'cultural capital' to access this technology comes to redefine and extend the meaning of disadvantage.
References
Brusegard, David. 1989. 'Research Progress in the Use and Value of GIS Information', Use and Value of Geographic Information, Initiative 4 Specialist Meeting, Report and Proceedings, Onsrud, Harlan, Hugh Calkins and Nancy Obermeyer (eds.), Technical Paper 89-7, NCGIA, November 1989
Curry, Michael R. 'Rethinking Rights and Responsibilities in Geographic Information Systems: Beyond the Power of the Image,' Cartography and Geographic Information Systems, Vol. 22, No. 1, 1995.
Johnston, Ron, Derek Gregory and David Smith. The Dictionary of Human Geography (Third Edition), Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1994.
Monmonnier, Mark. 'Ridicule as a Weapon Against GIS-Based Siting Studies,' GIS and Society: The Social Implications of How People, Space, and Environment are Represented in GIS, Initiative 19 Specialist Meeting, NCGIA, March 1996.
NCGIA Consortium. A Research Agenda for Geographic Information and Analysis, Technical Report 92-7. NCGIA, December 1992.
Robinson, Roger. Ways to Move: The Geography of Networks and Accessibility, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977.
Strassman, Paul. 1984. Information Payoff, Free Press, New York, 1984.