The Bridge Project: Developmental Paths

Seymour J. Mandelbaum

A. Introduction

In 1994, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced a program of grants to promote "the widespread use of advanced telecommunications and information technologies in the public and non-profit sectors," and to "help develop a nationwide, interactive, multimedia information infrastructure that is accessible to all citizens, in rural as well as urban areas."

The first round of projects under this Telecommunications and Information Assistance Program (TIIAP) are now largely concluded and the second (1995) round is underway. In this second round, I am responsible for the evaluation of "The Bridge Project" in the four "communities" joined together in the Philadelphia/Camden Empowerment Zone. (The Camden EZ process has been so slow that we are not sure that the Bridge will ever extend across the Delaware.)

The Bridge design is grounded in an intriguing (because contingently conflicting) combination of an ideological commitment to the democratization of access to knowledge and to the "empowerment" of the residents of small areas as a strategy of inner city economic and social development. The partners in developing the Bridge -- including the Free Library, WHYY (the regional public television station), LibertyNet (a freenet serving non-profit organizations), and the Philadelphia agency largely responsible for managing the EZ process -- will create (with their own resources and a healthy dose of federal dollars) a set of information centers providing computer access to both a specialized EZ menu and the general resources of the Internet. Individuals -- supported by an instructional program and staff -- may use the computers with or without individual e-mail accounts.

I propose three complementary options for the Fall conference in Baltimore:

1. Several months ago, I asked Phillip English at NTIA whether the central staff had prepared a synthetic assessment of the 1994 projects: what had been demonstrated? what new uncertainties had been created? (I wanted to build my evaluation plan upon that synthesis.) The 1994 projects were still preparing their final reports so that my query was premature. I assume, however, that by September, NTIA will be ready and eager to report. I hope you will create a panel to comment on its synthesis. I would certainly be delighted to participate in such a panel.

2. Our first information centers will open in April. By late July, I will be prepared to post an expanded research memorandum that reports on the attributes of the initial group of residents to use the Bridge resources and the character of their first experiences. I will also be able to describe in a preliminary way the interaction of the new information resources and the discursive practices of EZ committees and non-profit organizations acting within the Zone.
3. Finally, I would like to use the Bridge experience to reflect on a large issue posed by the call to this conference: the articulation and assessment of developmental paths.

From the beginning of the Bridge Project, I described the partners as engaged (borrowing Albert Hirschman's term) in a "developmental journey" in which they would repeatedly and in no particular order anticipate the dynamics of unfamiliar futures, encounter unforseen contingencies, choose and assess directions and havens, and select mistakes to be rectified. We would necessarily be attentive to the measurement of performance on pre-scribed dimensions. Principally, however, we should be concerned with the intelligence of our course; with the ways of becoming.

In various forms, participants in our discussions repeatedly evoke the image of a "journey" to an indeterminate destination. "It's a process," someone insists. "We're learning." " Take one step at a time." "Be adaptive!" There is nothing arcane or abstruse about this image. Indeed, it is precisely because it is so common and so compelling that it is so difficult; so hard to specify consensual criteria for intelligent navigation. The developmental scenario -- the rhetorical form within which we navigate -- is an eclectic discursive practice that stretches from the past into the future accommodating historical explanations, experiential craft, abstract models, forecasts, and ethical claims. In contrast to the professional "tools" of experimental design and output measurement, the norms of speaking and acting within scenarios do not appear as a superordinate discipline: they emerge within the journey as modes of collaboration rather than providing a universal compass at the outset of the voyage.

The difficulties of crafting discursive tools of developmental intelligence are accentuated by the plurality of voyages. There is to be sure a dominant developmental journey. NTIA has impressed us into a narrative in which a new "infrastructure" must or should be "accessible" to everyone. Frequently at our meetings, someone will adopt the federal agency's image of a revolutionary epoch: those who don't quickly learn how to navigate in cyberspace will be "left behind." We may disagree among ourselves about particular configurations, the pace of change, the strategic importance of adults or children as agents of change, and the appropriate historical sequence in which to locate our moment and shape our expectations. We agree, however, that ours is an attempt to modify the ordinary diffusion pattern -- as it appeared, for example, in the spread of telephones, broadcast and cable television, and VCR's -- so that the residents of low and moderate income neighborhoods participate broadly and quickly in the resources of the Internet as a communication medium and as a vast library.

There are, however, other communication-centered journeys that are not dominated by the revolutionary image of a distinctive new technology. The Internet is not like the familiar interpersonal, telephone, radio and television systems: successful use is linked to practices of reading and writing rather than listening and speaking; to understanding the ways in which intellectual structures make information tractable. A voyage designed to democratize literacy and knowledge requires a scenario that wrestles with their social patterning and the dynamics of inequality; with the formation of opinion and mind.

Some voyages at the table are, however, only incidently about communication. For some of the participants in the project, ours is an exploration in community and the design of political institutions: the scenario in which this voyage operates begins (in the most familiar version) with the Grey Areas program and Model Cities. Set within this history, it is possible to believe that a shift in the dynamics of public communication networks may influence power, participation, communal discipline, and governmental competence; difficult to imagine that the forms of political interaction will be dramatically transformed by access to the "information superhighway.".

The partners who have imagined the Bridge Project meet regularly either face-to-face or remotely, and have created at least a temporary organization -- centered on a "project" -- both to navigate these multiple journeys and to define the norms of intelligent navigation . The (quite unsurprising) dynamics of our conversations -- illuminate the remarkable difficulties of the large framework evoked by the call to the Baltimore conference.

The call radiates a wonderful intellectual confidence. The questions are written in an artificial present that extends into the past and future. In that moment, we are asked to describe the ways in which changes "affect" populations and alter spatial relations; to monitor and interpret "processes" or "trends" that stretch across time and to forecast the "impacts of changing spatial technology on the city." There isn't a great deal of difference in that present between knowledge claims centered in the construction of pasts and those designed to create contingent images of possible futures. The language of the call encourages a confident belief that "technology" or "technologies" -- the usage varies -- shape social relations (rather than v.v.) but that their "impact" can be modified or mitigated by the application of an intellectual apparatus such as GIS. If communication networks are "infrastructures" or "highways" it appears so sensible and so familiar to ask how they influence spatial arrangements and how their impact is represented in our mapping tools.

When we actually gather together, I suspect that this confidence will fade. Talking empirically, we will shift to the past tense in a way that emphasizes the discontinuity between our factual knowledge and our forecasts; between what we know about the diffusion of the telephone and what we expect or desire for the diffusion of e-mail. We will find it difficult to attribute linear causal relations to the elements of systems and systems of systems that we recognize as heuristic constructions tearing apart and reordering tangled phenomena . (Does technology shape "the city" or is that mysterious idealization - in one of the several meanings we give to the term -- a cluster of interacting technologies?)

Even before we meet, however, reading the call from the perspective of my Bridge experience may, I hope, encourage us to wonder who is asking the questions in the text and who is answering; who is listening and who is acting. Is there a set of projects and are there forms of collective action within the interorganizational field that will shape a synthetic discursive practice? How will we both maintain and cultivate several developmental journeys simultaneously?

Those are the questions I would like to engage in Baltimore.

Biography:

Seymour J. Mandelbaum is Professor of Urban History in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania. His teaching and writing span urban history, planning theory, and communications. He is -- most recently -- co-editor of a collection of essays, Explorations in Planning Theory (CUPR Press, June, 1996). His current work deals broadly with the processes of "making and breaking planning tools." He's particularly engaged in the evaluation of an NTIA-financed project to extend Internet access in the Philadelphia/Camden Empowerment Zone, After a long planning period, the three computer laboratories supported by the project will open this summer. He's written a "pre-data" essay, "The Intelligence of Citizens," for presentation at the joint ACSP/AESOP meeting in Toronto at the end of July and will report in Baltimore on the first months of the new labs.