Playing String Figures with Wifi in Motown: Deployment and Maintenance of MESH Networks in Detroit

Abstract

The paper examines, with a distinctive approach, the socio-urbanist impacts MESH wireless community networks had in the city of Detroit (USA). While relying on a comparison between theses local participatory communication networks and the notion of inverse infrastructures, both analysed through the prism of multiple authors working on the question of bonds, we want to understand why such infrastructural commons, in their construction and in their maintenance, can pave the way for a more ethical, open, sustainable and inclusive “digital urban future”. Also, we will demonstrate throughout the article that the very form these networks take in Detroit — decentralized and peer-to-peer — and the reasons why people install them have an impact on the city and on the way solidarities emerge. We shall also analyse the future Detroit may contemplate, miles away from the industrial visions the city convoked decades ago. We aim to understand how MESH networks, although wireless, weave social bonds between Detroit inhabitants thus outlining the contours of a “becoming-with each other” (Haraway, 2020).