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7. Wired Cities
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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C H A P T E R S E V E N Wired Cities In his 1972 remarks at the MITRE Corporation Conference on Urban Cable, just months after the report and order, Herman Kahn offered his thoughts on the future of wired cities: “If I had a guess, I would say this kind of TV will not be successful in removing the alienation or in education or in changing the minority groups.”1 Kahn’s views were decidedly out of step with the views of his think tank colleagues. The few efforts that were under way during the freeze to develop municipal cable systems as virtual community centers, voting systems, and universities—most notably in New York City—seemed to indicate a promising future ahead. When cable franchising for large cities ~nally became a realistic possibility in the early-1970s, and public of~cials began to make critical decisions about opportunities for citizen-produced programming , Kahn’s colleagues enthusiastically took on new roles as cable advisers to city governments. “The biggest single dif~culty I would say of the kinds of study which MITRE, Hudson, RAND do,” explained Kahn, “is that they are done by people who are not business-oriented, who don’t understand about quick marriages .”2 Defense intellectuals had played critical roles making public-access and government channels part of cable policy, yet Kahn forecast they would encounter signi~cant roadblocks implementing their ideas. During the six-year waiting period, American cities experienced many changes—a new presidential administration, reductions in federal funding, and continuing middle-class migration to the suburbs, with consequent loss of city tax revenues .3 In this context, Kahn suspected, local government priorities vis-à-vis cable might have shifted. In fact, Richard Nixon’s 1969 entry into the White House had signaled a sea change in many aspects of urban affairs. The administration’s ~rst of~cial act was to establish a Council for Urban Affairs in the cabinet to formulate new approaches to urban problem solving. In the face of continuing mismatches between what social science claimed it could do and what social policy actually accomplished, the large-scale federal funding for social programs such as the War on Poverty began to dry up. Johnson’s Great Society initiatives largely were dismantled. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan, assistant to the president for urban affairs, remarked when discussing leadership in urban affairs in the post-Johnson era of lost faith in government spending for problem solving, there was no “Admiral Mahans or George Kennans to provide a master theory of an urban policy comparable to previous formulations of foreign and defense policy.”4 Instead, the Nixon administration placed a new emphasis on private institutions and public-private partnerships. As Kahn predicted, these tectonic shifts at the federal level, and their aftershocks in urban coffers, would have implications for cable franchising. Combined with a nationwide recession in the early-1970s, the political and economic climate of urban areas in the period following the report and order differed signi~cantly from what it had been only a few years before. Without large-scale funding for infrastructure development on the order of a military operation, city leaders became far less interested in the civic potentials of the new medium and far more concerned about capturing the ~nancial bene~ts of a franchise. Had the cable freeze not lasted for six years, had cable infrastructure development become a large-scale government operation of the Johnson or Nixon administrations, the history of cable as an urban technology might have come closer to the defense intellectuals’ visions of wired cities. In the market context of the early-1970s, however, wired cities could not survive as originally conceived. Mayors such as New York City’s Lindsay had praised the long-range perspectives that think tanks offered as an “anti-bureaucratic 196 The Urban Crisis as National Security Crisis [44.222.169.53] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:23 GMT) tonic.” Yet the experiences of several cities illustrate how, as the 1970s went on, reports prepared during the cable freeze, with their emphasis on community participation and social services via television, came to seem increasingly out of touch with the needs of both urban administrators and the urban poor.5 American cities were eventually wired, but cable’s early potential as a forum for political debate, adult education, and job information was eclipsed when new regulations set a course for the renegade technology that remade it into an arm of...