Constitutional Infrastructures: The Politics of Urban Sovereignty in the “Race to 5G”

In the late 2010s, deployment of fifth-generation (5G) wireless technology in the United States made headlines as the first Trump administration pushed for victory in the international “race to 5G.” In concurrent legal proceedings, US cities sued the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over its 2018 orders to hasten 5G rollout. In 2020, the Ninth Circuit upheld the FCC's preemption of a range of municipal regulations of 5G deployment in City of Portland v. United States . Taking a constitutionalist approach to the study of urban infrastructure politics, this article argues that the FCC and the Ninth Circuit undercut the ability of municipalities to enable their citizens’ local political agency over the terms of infrastructure deployment—and, simultaneously, the terms of urban social progress. The court's decision to treat the aesthetic and the economic aspects of 5G differently, taking a commonsense approach to aesthetics as a local matter but deferring to the FCC on economic concerns, advanced the FCC's nationalist project of connectivity as the making of a single national market through material means. At stake was a narrowing of citizens’ legitimate role in the shaping of city futures, a role whose implicitly constitutional infrastructures demand careful maintenance in the digital age.