(2002-12-01) Nyc Wi Fi

Tom Vanderbilt on NYC Free Wifi networking: Rather than a paid telecommunications service, its founders regard wireless as an urban amenity with untold implications for a city's vibrancy. "Cities wouldn't work if we didn't have Network-s," Mr. Anthony Townsend said, "for moving people, goods, information."... Bryant Park is an example of what the geographer Kevin Lynch, in his classic 1960 book "The Image Of The City," called a node. Nodes, as he defined them, "may be primary junctions, places of a break in transportation, a crossing or convergence of paths, moments of shift from one structure to another." They help give "legibility" to the city, help us to orient ourselves. Node is also a word synonymous with hot spot - a junction of Wi-Fi signals - and the electronic nodes are turning up in the same parks, airports and public gathering places that Mr. Lynch considered physical nodes.