CITIES MAJOR WINS WATSON FELLOWSHIP
TO STUDY ELECTRONIC DEMOCRACY WORLWIDE

When Bryn Mawr Now reported recently that a Bryn Mawr senior had won a prized Watson Fellowship, Professor of Growth and Structure of Cities Gary McDonogh let us know that we'd missed a fellow. Watson Fellow Chris Kingsley is a senior at Haverford, not Bryn Mawr, but he's a major in Bryn Mawr's Growth and Structure of Cities Program, and his Watson project proposal grew directly out of his senior thesis on the Wireless Philadelphia initiative, which aims to provide public access to the Internet throughout the city. The $22,000 Watson grant will greatly extend the geographic range of Kingsley's investigation of electronic democracy — to Johannesburg, South Africa; Bangalore, India; and Hong Kong.

Kingsley grew up in rural Maine and took a circuitous route to Haverford — through central Florida, where he earned a two-year degree in audio engineering, and Greensboro, N.C., where he worked for a year in a recording studio. All three environments, he says, suffered in various ways from global development that left citizens isolated from communities, ultimately convincing him that "America is building second-rate models of space and citizenship."

Small wonder, then, that Kingsley was drawn to the Growth and Structure of Cities Program. His Cities major, he says, "has helped me to flesh out and explain the logic of the strange and sad neighborhoods that dogged my early life. Through studies of city planning, municipal finances, sociologies of poverty and suburban life, the program encouraged me to use the tools of many different disciplines to think critically about urban development."

In the meantime, Kingsley was developing an extracurricular interest in Internet communities. He was deeply involved in the creation of go.haverford.edu, a student-developed portal that functions as a community forum for Haverford students. The site rapidly became a communications mainstay for Haverfordians. "It became very quickly a public effort — users demanded new access and oversight, they suggested features, established gatekeepers and joined in the production of the page," Kingsley says.

"It was amazing to me to see what you can do to support activism and community with open-source, nonproprietary software," Kingsley says. He began to see such projects as a potential solution to the growing alienation many Americans feel from local communities and politics — a way to use virtual space to rekindle citizens' connections to their physical environments.

"I feel so fortunate that my professors in the Cities Program helped me develop this passion into a research project," Kingsley says. "I started out with a lot of starry-eyed optimism about the promise of this technology, and doing a rigorous study of it ultimately allowed me to examine my own enthusiasm with a critical eye.

"I'm still excited about the possibilities," he continues, "but learning about the history and politics of other telecommunications technology and other social networks has helped me understand that the ideal outcome doesn't often happen on its own. Communities that want to encourage citizen participation through electronic democracy must approach it thoughtfully and plan carefully if they want to succeed."

Plans are best when laid on a broad and solid foundation of knowledge, Kingsley says. His Watson project will take him to three cities that have been profoundly affected by the information economy, in profoundly different ways.

"It is critical," Kingsley explains, "that our understanding of the Internet account for the wide variations in its local use and meaning, and one excellent way to include this diversity is through examining how local officials, citizens and activists leverage the Internet to comprehend, publicize and counteract crisis."

Kingsley will interview stakeholders in Johannesburg, Bangalore and Hong Kong to understand how they use Internet technology to address environmental crises in all three locales. Studying the way each city's unique cultural expectations and resources shape and are altered by the Internet, he says, will provide a breadth of perspective that is "critical to the public debate over how and why to expand the Internet's franchise."

"By speaking with officials, citizens and activists in these three cities, I hope to map the connections between the old and new, using the negotiation of these environmental crises to contribute to a definition of the Internet — a way to talk about what the Internet is by looking to see what it is used for, not only by what it is made up of."

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