Scroll down to read about a series of urban design interventions. Click the images to enter immersive scenes depicting specific LinkNYC sites.

Eddie Joe Antonio | April 2023

On a warm day in Brooklyn, a small community will often gather on Fourth Avenue and 24th Street. The size of the group changes, but you can regularly find at least three people sitting in the short overhang of a shuttered deli entrance. People play music, dominoes, and Instagram Reels. A regular visitor named José explained to me the merits of spending “no more than an hour on the same street everyday to be sure you know what’s going on”. Sometimes, everyone locates around a short turn of the block, dodging the sun in the heat and seeking it out in early spring. Watching videos throughout the day, sharing social media posts, or otherwise simply socializing, José and others hang out as the busy avenue rumbles past.

They do this in close proximity to a LinkNYC kiosk. The kiosks, housed in sleek technological boxes, provide free WiFi, phone-calling, and other modern services at no cost. Rolled out in 2015, the digital nodes replaced the city’s aging public payphone system with a remarkable set of communication tools. New Yorkers have observed their deployment with a mix of excitement, anxiety, and fury–it seems no one in the city has forgotten the unfortunate reporting of individuals watching pornography in early 2016 on their built-in tablets. Despite this infatuation with the unsavory side of the system, few have a complete understanding of what the kiosks really are, how they are used, or where they are mostly located.

Street activation at a LinkNYC kiosk on Lawrence Street in Downtown Brooklyn.

At its best, the LinkNYC kiosks are one component of a large public WiFi system that fills in some gaps in broadband access around the city. Public WiFi supports millions of New Yorkers while targeting those without the funds at home or the physical infrastructure in their neighborhoods to get high speed WiFi access. Termed the “digital divide”, it is evident that access to modern communication infrastructure at an affordable cost is highest in wealthier, whiter, and more centrally-located neighborhoods. We know from collective recent experience how important broadband access is for everything from child education to public health, and much data suggests that the most vulnerable and marginalized New Yorkers bear the brunt of the real impact of a lack of digital connectivity.

LinkNYC, as one of the thirteen providers of public WiFi in the city, is the end product of a remarkable effort to tackle this issue. A coalition of technologists, entrepreneurs, government, and advocacy stakeholders designed the system as an intervention in the digital divide. They created a vision for an innovative private-public partnership that provides streetside services in this new and changing field of contemporary telecommunications. The system today that developed from their efforts operates across all five boroughs, permitting both stationary users and on-the-go WiFi seekers to connect to the internet in many of the city’s neighborhoods. Lots of other things are enabled by LinkNYC, too: free telephone calls, USB charging, and a variety of other features on its built-in tablet including a nearest bathroom finder. Perhaps as varied as the city itself, users of the LinkNYC kiosks are utilizing these services in dramatically different ways. On one block, a group of teenagers hangs out while one of them charges their phone. On another block, neighbors linger as they call home, wherever in that world that may be, both on the built-in phone and through their internet-connected personal devices. And on other streets we can often see the kiosks standing unused, weird blobs futuristically broadcasting WiFi for all. I guess these kiosks simply observe the city go by.

A busy site on Fourth Avenue and 24th Street in Brooklyn features music in the warmer months and a continous group of neighbors using the free WiFi.

The kiosks are always observing. At its worst, the LinkNYC kiosks are an unequal product in our city that collect significant amounts of data about our whereabouts and online activities. The rollout of the kiosks has targeted the busy districts of the urban core, where most residents not only already have access to high speed broadband at home but have relatively high median household incomes. Neighborhoods such as Mott Haven and Parkchester in the Bronx or Borough Park and Brownsville in Brooklyn–areas with low access to broadband at reasonable rates with low-income, marginalized communities–are entirely left out of the LinkNYC program at the time of this writing. What’s more, users agree to a legalistic privacy statement when first connecting their phones to the WiFi or when opening up a session on the built-in tablets. The privacy statement includes agreeing to having your device location, URL clickstream, and MAC plus IP addresses recorded by LinkNYC for their use. The services also require an email to connect on your device, a clear barrier to entry for many who do not have an email or do not wish to provide it. Intersection, the company that owns and operates the kiosks, stores all this data in anonymized formats before using it to sell advertisements on the built-in kiosk display screens. Surprised? You shouldn’t be—Intersection’s parent company, Alphabet, has been excelling at this model of targeted advertising for over a decade now with its most famous product: GoogleAds.

In the frenetic heart of Times Square, a LinkNYC kiosk features a lot of diverse urban use.

The kiosks are additionally equipped with three video cameras, including one that users can activate to make video calls. Intersection has, in the past, published video surveillance taken from their 9 foot-high security cameras, openly acknowledging their full cooperation with law enforcement in sharing their footage. They have, however, noted that the cameras are “usually turned off”, although many activists have questioned why the kiosks would be equipped with cameras at all if this were the case. Between the data collection measures, the ability to survey the street, and the business model based on advertisement revenue, the kiosks represent an entirely new way of providing services that could be categorized as a surveillant capitalist model. This will definitely sound blasphemous, but we can perhaps understand the uniqueness of this model by imagining a public school that required we collect information (anonymized, of course!) on students that we then used to sell ads in order to fund their education. Sounds a little funky, no?

In Harlem, an underutilized kiosk is full of potential for activation on this neighborhood street.

Despite the tangible drawbacks to the LinkNYC model, it is evident that the system is highly utilized by a wide variety of users in contemporary New York. In what follows, I share in more detail my observations of the incredible diversity of usages of four specific LinkNYC kiosks across the city. What’s more, it remains a darling of the Adams administration, who has even expanded the program dramatically by crafting a new division known as Link5G that aims to use much larger kiosks to house 5G technology. The next moves for Intersection involve a much-more stringent requirement to locate 90% of their new kiosks outside of Manhattan below 96th Street–a move Dr. Bola Omotosho, chair of Bronx Community Board 5, has described as the “best innovation of the 21st century”. While this expansion is outside of the scope of this paper, it is noteworthy to understand the continued significance of not only the history that led to the system we have today but its current usage in 2023 as policymakers move to expand it.

Public WiFi access points in and around Manhattan.

Over the past six months I’ve observed four specific LinkNYC kiosks, documenting the activities and opinions of their users, and recording the streetlife around these locations. I spent time with the small community at Fourth Avenue and 24th Street and frequented a busy site on Lawrence Street in Fulton Mall. I jammed my way into Times Square, documenting the activity at a rambunctious kiosk on W 45th Street. And I’ve observed a LinkNYC on W 123rd Street in Harlem, a shining metallic box that is barely used. My process has involved arriving at a site and investing fifteen minutes in observing, discussing, and debating the kiosks with anyone willing to talk to me. I have done this with a sense of urgency and, bizarrely, even a feeling of anxiety. It feels like the moment to act is now, but it also feels unclear what the acting is on. What feels clearest is the need to share and discuss where public WiFi is going, and why, before we have closed the door on how it will be deployed.

I am convinced that what we have today is an example of New Yorkers making lemonade out of lemons. Across the city, a system that raises questions around privacy, surveillance, and equity is being used in spectacular spatial, social, and entrepreneurial ways. From the perspective of an urban planner, the activities of LinkNYC users have suggested deeply impactful spatial design interventions that could affect a totally new and unique node in urban life. What follows is a spatial walkthrough of each of my four sites accompanied by a series of some of the design interventions I am proposing based on my research. This is my highly opinionated, minorly quantitative, and deeply qualitative set of guidelines for how we can facilitate this urban design challenge–I look forward to hearing yours.

Public WiFi Locations should interpret land use and economic patterns in their vicinity to locate more strategically Public WiFi solutions should include the robust telecommunications capacities of LinkNYC, especially the ability to communicate with other countries Public WiFi solutions need shade, heated, and cooled spaces Public WiFi solutions should include the ability to charge devices on the go, like in the current kiosks Public WiFi solutions should be spatially distributed according to the needs of the city and not related to the former locations of payphones Public WiFi solutions need to better communication their ability to surveil users and collect data, and otherwise better explain their business models