Politics of Speed in Metaphorical Space: Envisioning the City of the Future

A Dissertation Submitted to the Division of Media and Communications

of The European Graduate School in Candidacy for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

By Asli Telli Aydemir June 2004

2

Dissertation defended:

August 14, 2004 Awarded: Magna Cum Laude Defense Committee: Wolfgang Schirmacher (European Graduate School) Diane Davis (University of Texas at Austin) Diana Silberman - Keller , Ph.D. (Beit Berl College)

3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

i. Abstract 6

ii. Introduction 7

I. Interdisciplinary approaches to the traditional city 17

1. The city as a place, space 17

2. The city as a set of objects 25

3. The invisible city / the city of memory 26

4. The city as an understanding in itself 28

5. The city in urban form 30

6. The temporal city 32

7. The historical city 33

8. The city of constant flux 35

9. The city as an event 36

II. The contemporary city 39

1. The city of flows 40

2. The world city & the global city 44

3. The informational city 51

4. Soft cities 56

5. The digital / virtual city 58

a. city as chora in Derrida 58

b. virtual city examples 59

6. Edge cities 74

III. The city beyond limits 76

1. Citizenship, civil rights and digital democracy in megacities 76

a. Definitions for metropolis 76

i. postfordist metropolis 77

ii. industrial metropolis 78

4

iii. postmetropolis: governing space and the

carceral archipelago 79

b. Definitions for cosmopolis 84

c. Definitions for technopolis 85

d. Variations of metropolitan cosmopolis 87

e. Reflections for Exopolis 88

f. Fractal city 89

g. Simcities 89

2. Urban theories that have constructed academic background 92

a. Currents of urban studies 93

b. Chicago School 94

c. Californian School 95

3. The fourfold by Heidegger 100

a. Gestell by Heidegger 100

b. The city as four by Schirmacher 103

c. Fourfold as it interprets today 105

4. The dual city by Sassen 107

a. Demapping the city 108

b. The impact of telematics on cities 109

IV. Speed, political speed, politics of speed in metaphorical space 111

1. Risk society vs. technological culture 111

2. Accidents vs. Desires 114

3. Fast world vs. slow world 115

4. Utopia, heterotopia, dystopia 117

V. Time over distance 123

1. Speed breeds indifference 123

2. Multi-speed cities and time-squeeze 129

3. Nothing in common means a single commonality 132

5

a. Personal fantasies lie in the virtual 134

b. Characteristics of the virtual citizen as terminal and pathological

human 137

c. The millenium flâneur 138

d. The city is as human as you are 140

i. The future of evolution (memesis) for the cyber-city 142

ii. The memetic flesh in the cyber-city 143

e. Alternative community projects such as smart communities 145

f. Cool-town – recent digital experiment for ideal business /

private life 166

4. Cities will be the life of the future 171

a. Do we really want to preserve the city-state? 173

b. Everybody needs their own fantasy in the real time city 176

c. Does citizensip really matter? 181

d. Accident can be good. Crash can be fascinating 185

VI. Methodology 199

VII. Conclusion - the city of the future 201

VIII. Bibliography 210

IX. Appendix 222

6

i. ABSTRACT

This dissertation takes a philosophical approach to the conceptualization of space and time in

urban realm during the first decades of the 21st century. Three currents of urban studies

presented by Eade & Mele have only come as far as making distinctions in terms of

technological developments. Likewise, the so-called ‘hi-tech society’ has reached its

saturation according to Paul Virilio, William Mitchell, Jean Baudrillard, Wolfgang

Schirmacher, Marc Augé and a few other reknowned philosophers of our time. As space and

time are the main concerns, the new postmodern definitions of technological culture are

confronted throughout this prospective study.

The escape for the 21st century city flâneur seems to be through cyberspace at first instance.

The physical communities have often been questioned in the writings of Jean Luc Nancy to

arrive at an inoperable stage. How those communities will function, when altered for micro-

urban concerns in virtual space is a hallmark for city officials as well as related business

enterprises. However, as issues of governance cast a shadow on communitary freedom,

netizens seek for more flexible derivations than smart(er) urban typologies. This urge for

flexibility introduces a new notion and politics of speed for which consensus between powers

should be an eternal inquiry.

7

ii. INTRODUCTION

A city is a place, a bounded entity marked by a particular core and density. It is

located at a given geographic position, spreading outward until it ends at the outermost

suburb. And yet a city is far more than this. Where is the centre to be located? Indeed, are

there not multiple centres? And who is to say where the city ends, for when does the suburb

terminate and the countryside begin? The loss of the center or creation of many centers could

mean that inhabitants will easily get lost, even in their hometown. Persistant change brings

anxiety as well as plurality of choice. Something new may be abound for each passer-by in

today’s huge cities. Indeed, there are many arguments for seeing the countryside and the city

as simple parts of an overall urban space, for are not the fields and agricultural plains just as

manufactured as is the city proper?

A city is a set of objects. In it we find the significant spaces that constitute urban life.

It is the place of airports and docks, houses and hospitals, schools and colleges, factories and

offices, theatres and stadia, power stations and television masts. Yet different cities offer

different constellations, different arrangements - gridded and irregular, cored and multi-cored,

compact and dispersed, low-rise and high-rise, circular and linear, undulating and flat, islands

and frontiers. A city is, then, a set of practices. It is the place where things happen and people

act. It is the place of making and consuming, driving and walking, teaching and learning,

jostling and sleeping. It is a place where doing occurs. A city is not a singular text, nor indeed

a text at all. It would be the worst kind of illusion to read the city only as objects, for it is a

living, social entity. Yet we cannot just do things without spaces and objects, nor can we do

everything in terms that are visible.

8

The city is invisible. It is the place of exchanges and flows, where money, ideas and

data are transferred (Sassen, 2001: 322). And it is also the place where people fall in love,

where desires and emotions pervade throughout the streets and interiors, filling its spaces with

a powerful force indiscernible to clipboard documentarians and cashflow accountants. And

these flows also leak out of the city, out into networks that connect city to city, building to

building, person to person, across vast distances and instant times.

The city is an understanding of itself. To make it work, to make it operate, to make it

liveable, all manner of ideologies, schema, concepts and images are required. Mathematical

models, city maps, sign systems, poetic descriptions, painterly and photographic

representations, architectural drawings - all these things and many more are the codes by

which we consciously struggle to comprehend the city.

The city is urban professions. Planners consider the economic, social and spatial

operations of the city at an enormous range of scales. On the one hand, they rule on single

buildings, considering their context in zoning plans and streetscapes. On the other hand, they

consider the whole city in regional and global contexts, seeking to position cities in economic

and political patterns. Architects and urban designers, for their part, deliberate on a similar

range of scales, from the single room to the master-planning of city quarters and even, less

frequently, the layout of entire new cities. And then there are the many other cultural

designers and producers at work in the city: graphic designers, fashion designers, film-

makers, university lecturers, artists and musicians, writers and performers ... all of whom

depend on the city for their livelihood, while, conversely, the city depends on them.

The city is temporal. It has been there before, it is now, and it will become. It is a

9

palimpsest of buildings, memories, ideas and traditions1. It also moves at different paces and

rhythms, at once fast and slow, braking and accelerating2. And it repeats certain cycles, such

as those of seasons, commuting, shopring patterns or the sequences of traffic lights (eyelical

time). It is the time of individual perceptions, from the stillness of boredom and the fast pace

of excitement (personal time). And, of course, it is the time of the future, of the city yet to

come (Virilio, 1994: 5).

The city is historical. It is forever changing, always different according to different

conditions, different people, different ages. It is never exactly the same, never predictable. Yet

neither is it a free space, where people can do just what they like. It is a place of opportunity,

but under particular circumstances. It is what Henri Lefebvre has called a 'possibilities

machine' .

Cities, then, are sites of constant flux, their built form mediated by successive acts of

destruction and creation. People's experience of the city is affected by social factors such as

gender, class and ethnicity. For different groups in society at different times, the city is a

different place. Urban experience is also mediated by representations of the city, as in

television news, documentaries and dramas, and by the life of its streets. The city is an event,

a performance in which the roles of actor and spectator are interchangeable. Like any

performance, the city is a product of culture. Culture, in this sense, means a process of

intellectual development through which ideas are formed and changed; it also means the way

of life produced by ideas and forms, such as art, architecture, film and fashion, in which they

take shape. But if the city is a product of culture, it is also where most culture is made and

received. The urban character of this culture may be revealed or concealed by its form where

1 Referring to historical time 2 Referring to differential time

10

technological culture abides (Fynsk, 1993: 240). What Graham and Marvin point out for

digital city experiments, being new models of improvization and policies is interesting: Are

they creating privilidged niches, spaces, corridors (2000:92) or are they real efforts to develop

a more inclusive and sustainable urban future (2000:90)?

To write of the city as an event3 reclaims one of its two, reciprocal aspects, because

conventionally the city of form, conceptualized in plans, tends to dominate over the

experiential city of everyday life. The planned city is shaped by inventions, of which power,

wealth and technology are the instruments. In a democracy, elected representatives play a role

in the processes of regulation. The articulation of plans tends to use a visual language, as in

cartography. As the plan constructs a stage, the drama is played out by a city's inhabitants.

And it may be a matter of improvization as much as the learning of the script provided by the

plan. Moreover, it is possible to write of a dominant or conceptualized city of plans, and an

experiential city of everyday life. Not only buildings, but also everyday acts, including

shopping, going to the cinema, waiting for a bus and skateboarding, comprise a city's culture

(Zukin, 1995: 56).

Cities are produced, then, according to cultural values. They are also represented in

cultural products. The common image of the city in the cultural representations of affluent

societies today is dystopia (Lovink, 1998). Cities are seen as sites of crime, social division

and a collapse of value. The fragmentation of cities through mono-functional zoning, and by

the edges of awkwardness which mark the boundaries of neighbourhoods, is a recurrent theme

in their representation. Yet images of urban decline are consumed by people who, often, live

in cities by choice. Alongside the scenario of the urban war story is the excitement,

3 The event is the concentric concern in Heidegger’s thinking. ‘The city as an event’ within and without its boundaries, should therefore be attributed to him.

11

anonymity and access to worlds of personal affinity which the city enables - danger, but also

desire (Schirmacher, 1993: http://www.egs.edu/Art_Life/wolfgang/stadt.html. Accessed on

Feb. 5, 2005).

So, the processes which produce a city are cultural. Few things are more regulated and

constrained by power, wealth and technology than city form. The choices thereby imposed or

made are derived from structures of power and value. One of the challenges of the new

century is to democratize this process and create transparency in the production of urban

spaces. Citizens are able make free choices and put them to action only when they feel at ease

about their identity and can create a sense of belonging in their surrounding environment.

That is, critically, to see what takes place and according to what sets of assumptions. Those

assumptions, such as the gendering of the public domain, can then be seen as cultural

products and open to change. Besides when cultural representations of the city question the

assumptions on which the design and planning of city form are based, this leads beyond the

limitations of form. A form is never pessimistic (Baudrillard, 2002: lecture notes).

Le Corbusier undermines the fact that the health of the city is its capacity for speed.

His similar approach to Virilio is thought-provoking in the instance of the pleasure of rendez-

vous at a distance. Here is a sketch of Le Corbusier’s contemporary city in mind for the

industrial era.

His contemporary city has an elaborately designed system of transportation. The exact

center of the city lacks the symbolic value one can expect (no cathedral or civic monument).

Center only serves for people in motion. His city exists for interchange: the most rapid

possible exchange of ideas, info, talents, joys. Only the concentration of a metropolis could

12

provide the multitude of juxtapositions which is the special joy of urban life. The central

terminal and interchange is thus an appropriate symbol of the contemporary city. Where

everything is in motion, speed becomes the only constant. His skyscrapers surrounding the

central terminal permit him to reconcile the seeming opposites of urban design: density and

open space. They free the ground for greenery, they are also fitting symbol for the grandeur of

the function they house. The contemporary city is above all a city of administration4 (Eade &

Mele, 2002: 191).

Debates about the future of cities have a tendency to overstatement. To talk of the

postmodern city, the post-industrial city or the electronic city is to mythologize a

transformation that in reality is far less complete or apparent. To outline grand

transformations or universal models of future cities is as reductionist as it was to imagine all

industrial cities conformed to Burgess's concentric zone model earlier this century. It is more

helpful, and a far closer approximation to reality, to think of the diverse trajectories different

cities are taking and to realize that even within individual cities these trajectories of

urbanization will have distinctly different impacts in different places. While some cities, Los

Angeles springs to mind, are at the forefront of urban transformation, others are far removed

and far less affected by postmodern urbanization. Similarly while some spaces within Los

Angeles, such as Orange County, are on the cutting edge, others have been largely bypassed.

While there are many 'new' cities and spaces emerging around the world, it is worth

remembering that many old cities and spaces also remain. When thinking about how

urbanization might forge future cities, it is worth remembering that not all cities are London,

Paris, Chicago, Bangkok, Los Angeles or Mexico City (Komninos, 2002: 7).

4 The city during the machine age/ industrial era.

13

The small collection of global cities that are pulling the strings of the world economy,

and those at the immediate levels below in terms of urban priorities, are evolving very

distinctive spatial forms. This is characterized by the concentration of major financial

functions into truly globally oriented central cities surrounded by an increasing

decentralization of other functions. This decentralization has developed to such an extent that

new urban forms, or ‘Edge Cities’, have begun to form beyond the metropolitan fringe. These

cities are distinctly new cities, rather than simply additions to existing cities. They contain

their own centres, their own cultural and administrative functions and typically grow up

beyond the administrative boundaries of existing cities. Edge Cities tend to be super-exclusive

settlements, catering for wealthy residents seeking an escape from traditional city life and

reassured by the gating, the surveillance and the private security firms who police these

spaces. While most developed around the biggest, most international of American cities, the

lures of the Edge City are spreading to many other parts of the world. The development of

Edge Cities has the potential to alter significantly the existing urban order, producing spaces

and cultures of ever greater privatization and exclusion (Miles, Malcolm; Hall, Tim & Borden

Iain, 2000: 94).

The slow-world, however, is not limited to these cities alone but also includes the

welfare ghettos of the inner city and of social housing, left behind as financial institutions

withdraw in search of richer pickings elsewhere, as well as remote rural areas, aging

residential suburbs and large areas of the less developed world5.

It is worth remembering that, despite the hype, the cultural lives of the majority of the

world's urban populations are, and will continue to be, lived out in the slow-world, rather than 5 This argument will be furthered by adaptations from Six Discourses on the Post-Metropolis by Edward Soja, p.23. A similar process is explained by Leonie Sandercock for Istanbul and Jerusalem. This will also be reflected in the backbone of the dissertation.

14

the fast-world6. This is not to say, however, that these lives will not be profoundly touched by

cultures produced in the centres of the fast-world. For Virilio, speed is the hope of the west

and the western inhabitants will continue to be super-vif - super quick and alive at the same

time. City cultures of the future seem ever more likely to involve an amalgam of the

increasing penetration of cultural products generated in the media 'factories' of Asia-Pacific,

mediated through and consumed within the growing spaces of the slow-world. However, this

is not to suggest any global hegemony flowing out across the world from a few world-cities.

The subversions and transformations of fast-world cultures in the music, cinema, art,

literature and everyday lives of the slow-world suggest the futures of cities and their cultures

are replete with possibilities and challenges (Castells & Hall, 1994: 22).

This dissertation questions the inevitable instantaneity of communications in the

metaphorical spaces of the 21st century. These metaphorical spaces emerge around the

limitless city where a new understanding of speed and time are at hand. The first chapter will

include interdisciplinary approaches to the traditional city, treating it as physical place/space

and looking at its variations around the world. This modernist approach will be supported by

explaining the rise of the contemporary city with the advent of telecommunications. Concepts

such as citizenship, civil rights and digital democracy in megacities are considered in the third

chapter to arrive at a stage during which netizens mind-map the real city beyond limits. New

understanding of temporality is at stake in the next chapter. Speed, political speed and finally

politics of speed are articulated as contemporary concepts that enact to form an alterated

public sphere where spaceless time is the key factor. The final chapter concentrates on how

time dominates over distance while envisioning the soft city of the 21st century.

6 Slow world generally refers to the Third World Countries where ICT development levels is notably low compared to First World countries (fast world).

15

Opponents of new media generally rely on the fact that technology is shaped by social

relations even though the inverse is also true to an important degree. One significant highlight

in their argument is that Internet is assumed to be a one way street. The government, as a

conservative actor, uses the Internet to disseminate material, thus retains control. However,

even this level of usage has a democratic potential which can hardly be underestimated.

Thereby, the overwhelming possibility of a fourth current7 of urban studies occurring

within the fourth (and last to be defined) public sphere8 remain to be explored. In that current,

we are all different, but alike in the sense that we are enemies. The response attempts to the

seemingly everlasting inquiry “What comes after the accident?” will compose major parts of

the study.

7 Currents of urban studies: First current: housing, environmental protection, social inclusiveness, amelioration

of inequality Second current: Jameson and Fraser- the meaning and impact of commodification spread through

everyday life and culture. Third current: Hi-tech society – Marxist analysis sees it as the overwhelming event of

the present period (Eade & Mele, 2002).

8 four public spheres: 1.people act from space as their identities, experiences and interests are materially

intertwined with space. 2.people act on space by working to own it 3. people act in space – physical space

supplies a temporary container for the abstract concept of the public sphere. 4. people make space, providing a

link between metaphorical space and politics (Isin, 2000: 267)

16

LIMITATIONS

This study will aim at presenting future prospects for city life and the role of citizens

in defining their diverse interests by filling policy-related gaps. However, it will not cover

local initiatives that focus on institutional development or pose alternatives for

decentralization. Decentralization, here, is taken to mean, not local autonomy, but the ability

of active city dwellers to participate in basic societal decisions that affect one’s life. The main

question refers to individual freedom as well as changing preferences and how they may be

adapted to the newly emerging living environments (metaphorical spaces) of the 21st century.

17

CHAPTER I

The traditional city

I.1. The city as a place, space

Two significant theorists in the recent theory of urbanism and space who have little

enough to do with each other, but who raise important issues about the city are Jane Jacobs

and Martin Heidegger. Jacobs’ vision of the living city and how it situates itself in the

fundamental triad of Karl Marx on production, consumption and distribution is worth

elaborating. Heidegger’s contribution to the city and urbanism, his analysis of the identity of

building with dwelling and of dwelling with building arouse attention. At best, we tend to

think this is village ideology: it develops a vision of the peasant hut, which is enlarged into a

kind of workshop or place of handicraft production. His antimodernist views on technology,

and in particular his particular theory of what he called Ge-stell, must be read in dialectical

opposition to the picture of the utopian peasant village and certainly have implications for the

modern (even the postmodern) factory world (Jameson in Davidson, 1996: 32).

On the surface, Heidegger’s certainly looks like a production model, even if the

production is artisanal and essentially handicraft. Jacobs’ view of the city is mostly apparent

in her provocative emphasis on small business. The Economy of Cities (1969: 3-48) suggest

that cities precede villages and that agriculture springs from urbanism rather than the other

way around. This is certainly a very characteristic reversal, a stereotypical narrative or causal

link or priority is inverted in order to estrange the phenomenon itself and to make it visible in

unexpected ways. The older view is that agriculture gradually developed and with the surplus

and emergence of political power, an agglomeration came into being that led in a direct line to

18

the fearsome city states of Mesopotomia, the Indus River Valley and Ancient China. With a

certain anti-Cartesian and dialectical conviction that the simple does not precede the complex,

that the smallest unities do not construct the great multiplicities but the other way around- that

the strong forms come first and that the complex causes the simple- just as the present causes

the past. This would be reassuring in our present context and suggest that our city today may

in reality be able to explain its urban predecessors, just as the skull of the human being for

Marx explains the skull of the ape. However, such a view would hardly be that of Jacobs

herself who from another perspective is as culture-pessimistic as Heidegger and who writes

The Death and Life of Great American Cities against all contemporary urban tendencies that

replenish in the global, informational, dual, postmodern, and other qualifications attached to

the megalopolis – our urban reality and experience today.

Both Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre argued that the temporal is as significant

as the spatial in everyday life. De Certeau drew a distinction between two modes of operation:

Strategies, based on place, and, tactics, based on time. Strategies represent the practices of

those in power, postulating “a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base

from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats can be managed.”

Strategies establish a “proper” place, either spatial or institutional, such that place triumphs

over time. Political, economic and scientific rationalities are constructed on the strategic

model. In contrast, a tactic is a way of operating without a proper place, tactics rely on seized

opportunities, on cleverly chosen moments, and on rapidity of movements that can change the

organization of a space. Tactics are a form of everyday creativity. Many of the urban activities

we describe are tactical. By challenging the proper spaces of the city, this range of transitory,

temporary and ephemeral urban activities constitutes counterpractices to officially sanctioned

urbanisms (Crawford in Crawford et al, 1999: 32).

19

Lefebvre also identified another set of multiple temporalities composing urban life.

Everyday time is located at the intersection of two contrasting but existing modes of

repetition, the cyclical and the linear. The cyclical consists of the rhythms of nature: night and

day changing seasons, birth and death. Traditional processes define linear patterns, time

measured into quantifiable schedules of work and leisure with such units as timetables, fast

food, coffee breaks and prime time. Repeated across days, weeks, months, years and

lifetimes, these competing rhythms shape our lived experience. More important to Lefebvre

than these predictable oscillations, however, is a third category of time, the discontinuous and

spontaneous moments that punctuate daily experience – fleeting sensations of love, play, rest

and knowledge. These instants of rupture and illumination, arising from everyone’s daily

existence, reveal the possibilities and limitations of life (Lefebvre, 1991: 69). They highlight

the distance between what life is and what it might be. Although these moments quickly pass

into oblivion, they provide the key to the powers contained in the everyday and function as

starting points for social change. Guy Debord saw them as potential revolutions in individual

everyday life, springboards for realization of the possible (Debord, 1981: 15). It is out of the

recognition and building on these understandings of time that we can explore new and barely

acknowledged realms of urban experience.

The Polis

“Polis” is the Greek word which we translate “city-state”. It is a bad translation

because the normal polis was not much like a city and was very much more than a state.

The first cities were Athens and the other typical Greek cities – among them the cities

of Asia Minor, colonial cities of Sicily, Magna Graecia and the Black sea area. Those cities

only emerged in the eighth and seventh centuries, after the so called “dark age” that followed

the Dorian invasion and the subsequent collapse of Mycanean civilization.

20

Irad Malkin, in his study, suggests that colonization contributed just as much towards

the rise of the polis as it was dependent on this rise for its own existence.

In the Odyssey, the word choros, appears to mean place as location, land, country or

territory. Aristotle’s discussion of topos and chora does suggest a possible guess as to how the

chora of the polis may have been understood in earlier times as a territory made to appear

through a continual remaking or reweaving of its encompassing surface. The archaic polis

was an uncertain place that needed to be anchored at strategic points of center, middle, ground

and outer limit. The regular spacing of the streets suggest the regularity of the kosmos.

The physical form of the polis stressed public space. Private houses were low and

turned away from the street. In contrast, public temples, theaters, stadiums and the agora9

received more attention. In the larger polis, like Athens, these public buildings were spacious

and often beautifully constructed with marble. Even in the smaller ones, the community

devoted many of its resources to them.

The social organization of the polis remains of particular fascination even today. It

represents a form of community which still serves as a model. Not that the polis supported

development of every resident: women and slaves were not citizens and did not participate in

much of the life of the polis. Foreigners could attend plays in the Greek theater, but were

barred from many institutions reserved to the citizens10.

So why did not such towns form larger units? There are certainly economic as well as

geographic reasons behind this. However, the Acropolis, the stronghold of the whole

community and public life- later to be called the ‘citadel’, turned polis into state. Thus, Attica

is the territory occupied by the Athenian people; it comprised Athens – the “polis” in the

narrower sense- the Piraeus and many villages; but the people were collectively Athenians,

9 A combined market place and forum 10 In those days, you had to be free, non-foreign and male to be treated as a citizen.

21

not Attics, and a citizen was an Athenian in whatever part of Attica he might live. The open-

air performances of Greek community in the acropolis also explain why the Greek would not

exchange the polis with a less interesting unity.

The pedestrian goes through buildings, streets, parks, interiors- the endless negotiation

of built forms. He is checking to see whether he is represented within the realm of the place,

called ‘the city’. But whose city?

The material reproduction of urban society depends on the continual reproduction of

space in a fairly concentrated geographical area. Two schools of thought exist in

interpolation. One school of thought identifies with political economy and brings forth these

three terms: Land, labor and capital. The other is identified with a symbolic economy;

focuses on representation of social groups and means of their inclusion in public and private

spaces.

To ask, ‘Whose city?’ suggests more than a politics of occupation; it also asks who has

a right to inhabit the dominant image of the city. The physical shape and arrangement of cities

reflect the culture of societies from which they spring (Eade & Mele, 2002 : 179).

Legibility and identity are interdependent. Spaces are formed by capital investment

and sensual attachment; both who pays for building and rebuilding the gut feeling of being in

and out of a specific city. Nearly all cities use spatial strategies to separate, segregate and

isolate the Other, inscribing the legible practices in urban form.

On Spatiology

One intention could be to inhabit the border zone, as it were, between the informal

though useful employments of the concept of space in architecture and urbanism, and a

stricter, information-theoretic rendition. It is from this ideational interzone, from this glimpse

22

of a new discipline, a new study to which we ought to give the name spatiology. One needs to

address the radical continuity in one sense and discontinuity in another sense of cityspace,

defined as the physical space of our streets and buildings and natural landscapes, and

cyberspace, defined as the electronic space of data and representations generated, organized,

and presented consistently to all viewers connected to a set of globally-networked computers.

The continuity of these two kinds of space is that they are both ultimately constituted by

information, information spread through space and seeking, almost of itself, to maximize its

own complexity and organization.

The most basic discontinuity between cityspace and cyberspace exists because

cityspace is bound up with the principle of least action, with energetics, with

friction, gravity, occlusion and mechanical contact. Cyberspace and what

happens there is all but free of these constraints. Of particular interest to me,

however, is this fact: because each space can—indeed must—be experienced

at some level spatiotemporally, cyberspace, like cityspace, can be inhabited,

explored, and designed. Indeed, I am going to argue that community,

economy, art, design, commerce, recreation, and other urban amenities are

possible in both worlds, in the real and the virtual, in cityspace and in

cyberspace (Benedikt, 1993: 2).

A place is defined by identity, relation and history, on the other hand a space which

has no identity and can not be described neither relational nor historical, one would call a

non-place. Our hypothesis is that the “super-modernity” (ger.: Übermoderne) provokes non-

places, i.e., spaces which are not anthropological places and don’t integrate with the old

places; registered, classified and defined as “Places of memory” the old places become a

special part in them. Decker (2000:45) has a more pragmatic approach for the space, human

and society triangle. He asks whether space could be made a more useful instrument of social

23

transformation, a means of changing the relationship between the individual and the society

by generating a new lifestyle? This modernist approach has surely been carried up until today.

However, like the place, the non-place does not exist in pure form, it is more likely

that new places are generated, relations are reconstructed within. Place and non-place are

contrary poles; the place never disappears completely and the non-place is never fully

established - they are palimpsests on which the confusing game of identity and relation finds

its own reflection over and over (Augé, Feb 15 2003).

24

TABLE 111

Revised Sense of Place Typology

SENSE OF

PLACE Satisfaction

Home as

Insideness Local Identity Type of Attachment

Future

Desires

Rootedness

Cohesive high

here (physical,

spiritual,

emotional)

Strong biographical spiritual

ideological

continued

residence

Rootedness

Divided variable

here and there

(physical,spiritual

emotional)

Split

biographical

spiritual

dependent

variable

Place

Alienation low

there (physical,

spiritual,

emotional)

Weak Dependent

desire to

leave, but

unable

Relativity variable Anywhere Moderate

commodified

(biographical)

(dependent)

to live in

ideal place,

wherever that

may be

Uncommitted

Placelessness (moderate)

anywhere/

nowhere Weak None

no specific

expectations

of place

11 taken from Hummon, 1992: 43

25

This typology resembles quite advertently how citizens having strong levels of

attachment to the neighborhood they live in, would rather stay there for the rest of their lives.

Those feeling uncommitted are not only placeless at the moment the research was being

carried out, they also have no specific expectations of place. Their habitual areas are

probably not one of their prior concerns in life. The most interesting outcome to be derived

from this study is the group with moderate levels attachment to their residential areas (fourth

group down the list). The members of this group would like to live in an ideal place; however

they also indicate a doubtful situation for wherever that place may be. This group of citizens

are probably the ones “to become distinguished ‘netizens’”, operating their fantasies before

their computer screens without making a fuss about belonging to a physical place.

I.2. The City as a Set of Objects

Trash cans, mailboxes, benches, street lights, telephone boxes, bus stops and other

things you pass every day as you are on your way to work and back—all these are essential

elements of the town you live in, part of its spirit and its character. They can irritate you

or make you glad; they can be helpful or terribly inconvenient. They are part of your everyday

existence, too. So let us not underestimate their purpose in city life12.

In the problematizing of the constitution of subjectivity, the city – as site of multiple

differences- becomes pivotal as the location where identities are constituted; the city

transforms and is transformed by these processes (Eade & Mele, 2002: 11). The city is

conceived less as something found or simply out there and more as something constituted

partially through representation and discourse and as a site of interlocking and conflicting

12 This postulate is best reflected by Lebedev, the artist as he portrays objects such as trash can, mailbox, bench, phone box in their natural surroundings.

26

meanings of cultural, political and economic relations. The wholeness of the city13 is viewed

not only as a physical entity but also as a narrative device and as a plethora of signs and

symbols infused with power relations.

The objects that make up the city has been treated in various forms by a good number

of thinkers. The dual city exemplified by Glasgow with her power fuse of economic

dichotomy, closely experienced in Istanbul, the quartered city of Marcuse in the beginning of

modernization and the emergence of metropolis and certainly Harvey’s spaces of hope where

artistic works are produced and exhibited next to once-industrialized, now siliconized techno-

parks – alternative morphing out of city spaces in the age of simulation. As we arrive at the

city as four with its reshaping from circular form to butterfly form, power structures are in

close watch.

I.3. The invisible city / the city of memory

In his book entitled The Image of the City, Lynch developed the notion that

orientation in the urban environment is dependent on the construction of a mental or

cognitive map. Every inhabitant of the city develops their own version of the map, dependent

on their individual activities, but most people rely on common physical characteristics as

reference points for their particular acts of imaginary representation.

From a series of questionnaires and interviews conducted with the residents of three

American cities, Lynch identifies five categories of significant components or ‘building

blocks’ that contributed to the formation of a navigational or cognitive urban map. These are:

Paths, Edges, Nodes, Districts and Landmarks. Those features that people most often referred

13 Often presented uncomplicatedly in conventional urban studies, using geographic boundaries to demarcate and define

27

to when describing or drawing their city centre from memory tended to fall into one of the

above categories. Some of these categories overlapped, as when major paths also formed

distinctive edges or districts, or when the districts themselves were centered on a memorable

landmark, as well as possessing a dominant building type or functional distinction such as

industrial, retailing or residential uses. While other categories of spatial form could perhaps

be added to the list above and the characteristics might vary between cultures, the theoretical

claim would remain substantially the same: orientation in a complex environment is

fundamentally dependent on a sense of the larger, yet ‘invisible’ whole (Leach, 2002: 32).

The process of cognitive mapping is reinforced by correlations between the patterns of use

and movement in a city and its patterns of visual and spatial order.

Wilson’s understanding of “neighborhood places” (Wilson in Crawford et al, 1999:

132) formed by, a civic presence of some sort, an open space and a commercial enterprise

almost contradict the arguments above. Nevertheless, gathering of groups of people in minor

perspectives to serve for common purposes might help in seeing the whole picture in a city.

If one focuses on the past practices, three models of the city exist: The city as sacred

space, the colonial city and the managerial city. In all these three models, space and memory

are brought into a meaningful system in the city (Eade & Mele, 2002: 250).

The power of place- the power of ordinary urban landscapes to nurture citizens’ public

memory, to encompass shared time in the form of shared territory –remains untapped for most

working people’s neighborhoods in most cities, and for the most ethnic history and women’s

history. The sense of civic identity that shared history can convey is missing (Hayden in

Miles, Hall & Borden, 2000: 125).

28

With cities ever more like media and public spaces disappearing, writers foresee a

circular pattern. People’s withdrawal will lead to further disintegration of the physical

environment, which will increase the pull of virtual worlds. Characterising the ‘invisible or

disappearing city’ (Boyer, 1996: 19), Boyer writes:

I tend to agree with William Gibson, who decided even before writing

Neuromancer that what was happening in space behind the video screen was

more interesting than what was happening in the space in front of it – in other

words, that cyberspace pulls the user in to the receding space of the electronic

matrix in total withdrawal of the world (Boyer 1996: 11).

I.4. The city as an understanding in itself

Many writers for whom the image of the city is important have been urban journalists

and dedicated flâneurs14, saunterers through the streets of real cities who have paid careful

attention to their impressions. Balzac, Dickens, Poe, Baudelaire, Whitman, Dostoevsky and

Zola all fit this mold exactly. Even the sociologist and the urban historian, whose primary

obligation is fidelity to empirical reality rather than to the imagination, must, as we say,

reduce the city to words; for them as well as for creative writers, the process is one of

metaphorization. So the process by which the writer evokes the city appears parallel to the

process by which the citizen seeks to encompass his experience of it.

“City” is, by any definiton, a social image (Pike in LeGates & Stout, 1998: 246).

Clashing contradictions: perhaps the central fascination of the city, both real and fictional, is

14 This term has been adapted from Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Arcades Project’ where the flâneur is the city dweller with determination and ambition spiced with a special consciousness.

29

that it embodies man’s contradictory feelings- pride, love, anxiety and hatred- toward the

civilization he has created and the culture to which he belongs.

Urban space has been variously and sometimes inaccurately paired with

contemporary and historical phenomena such as industrialization, mass production and

consumption, a particularly gray aesthetic, and postmodernity. The urban environment is not,

and probably never has been, a homogeneously identifiable ‘thing’ at any level beyond that

of the creatively employed, and sometimes dubious, gauge of population density and the

location of contextualised urban features (Sudjic 1992: 295; Nottridge 1972:1-2, 37). The

homogeneity and comparability that these criteria impart allows specific urban environments

to become defined by difference.

Los Angeles is not Paris because they are physically separated by spaces of lower

population density and contain features which provide both distinguishable and conceptual

distance. This distance is visually expressed through iconified monuments such as the Eiffel

Tower and the Hollywood sign. These icons reduce the urban environment to transitory

points of experience which permit, as Kroker observes of the fictional Moose Jaw, “passing

tourists [to] stop for the obligatory Canadian Moose statue shoot and then immediately get

back in their cars to zoom on to the next photo opportunity” (1992: 137). However, there is a

counterpoint to the iconic distinctions of urban landscapes that is found in the conceptual

proximity which can also be claimed as indicative of the largest cities of late capitalism. This

proximity is observed by Sudjic in the similarities of daily experience among the inhabitants

of these cities irrespective of their individual relationships to the city of late capitalism

(Sudjic, 1995: 5).

Similarly, these cities have also shared a tendency to expand their perimeters in direct

proportion to improvements in communications and transport technologies (Sudjic 1995: 9).

30

As Lewis Mumford observes, “the original container has completely disappeared: the sharp

division between city and country no longer exists” (1987: 618). This ever-expanding

perimeter of the city reinforces the necessity for iconic symbols of centrality and urban

identity to define its difference. Debord, too, asserts that, “this society eliminates

geographical distance only to reap distance internally in the form of spectacular separation.

Simultaneously, the city is increasingly proven to be a primarily conceptual ‘thing’ rather

than a necessarily material one. These observations lead to the conclusion that, “there is often

little or no gap between the so-called ‘real world’ and the ‘virtual world’” (Ostwald 1997:

128).

Sudjic’s critique of the myth of communities within cities similarly suggests that

these arguments fail “to deal with nuances that are involved in the continual movement that

is an essential part of urban life...” (Sudjic 1992: 281). The presence of a form of flâneurism

in cyberspace emphasises the individual, rather than communal, aspects of identity,

electronic or otherwise (McBeath & Webb 1997: 250). It is, however, too simplistic to equate

the flânerie of cyberspace with the contemporary cyber-‘surfer’ identity (Soja, 1996: 21). The

two identities represent the ‘information gap’ between the poet-geographer of nineteenth

century modernity and the multiplicity of identities found with the experientially-focused

consumer and web surfer of the late twentieth century.

I.5. The city in urban form

Louis Wirth’s major contribution to urban sociology was the formulation of nothing

less fundamental than a meaningful and logically coherent “sociological definition” of urban

life. According to him, three characteristics of cities- large population size, social

heterogeneity and population density- contribute to the peculiarly “ urban way of life” and,

31

indeed a distinct “urban personality”. Herbert Gans, for example, argues that both inner city

urban villagers and suburbanites tend to maintain their preexisting cultures and personalities.

The multiplication of persons in a state of interaction under conditions which make

their contact as full personalities impossible produces a certain segmentalization of human

relationships. This has sometimes been seized upon by students of the mental life of the cities

as the schizoid character of urban personality. Urbanites meet one another in highly segmental

roles. In other words, the city is characterized by secondary rather than primary contacts. We

observe a proliferation of specialized tasks in their most developed professional form. The

necessary frequent movement of great numbers of individuals in a congested habitat gives

occasion to friction and irritation. Nervous tensions which derive from such personal

frustrations are accentuated by the rapid tempo and the complicated technology under which

life in dense areas must be lived15.

Today, the new technologies convey a certain type of accident, one that is no

longer local and precisely situated, like the sinking of the TITANIC or the

derailment of a train, but in general, an accident that immediately affects the

entire world. This is quite obvious when we are told that the Internet has a

worldwide vocation. Yet the accident of the Internet, or that of other

technologies of the same nature, also represents the emergence of a total—not

to say integral—accident. And that situation has no reference (Virilio, 2000a:

12).

The Internet has been defined by Paul Virilio as the means of a potential “general

accident”—a global catastrophe taking place everywhere simultaneously. The Internet is an

institutionalization of the technology that has produced our “society of the spectacle,” in

15 This argument will be developed in I. 8.

32

which the image is said to have destroyed the civic sphere existing within the cities of modern

nation states. Lefebvre‘s understanding of urban society furthers this approach. Urban society

is a consequence of the destruction of nature, and its replacement of second nature, i.e. the

town and the urban, a future world of the generalized urban. To the extent that this occurs, the

conflicts and contradictions of capitalism are likely to be found within the urban itself – a

point that Gregory identifies as a mainspring for Harvey’s project. The decorporealization of

space establishes an essential connection between the history of the body and the history of

space (Lefebvre, 1996: 127-8). Lefebvre’s notion of time-space colonization is regarded by

Gregory as an “outward” movement16; Gregory contrasts this with Harvey’s notion of time-

space compression and describes it as an “inward” movement, a view of the world collapsing

in on itself (Gregory, 1995: 18).

I.6. The temporal city

The temporal city has been developed in academic writings of Berman and Soja, who

has been inspired by him. For them, spatiality, temporality and social being can be seen as the

abstract dimensions which together comprise all facets of human existence (Dear, 2000: 64).

Our being in the world occurs through a distancing (detachment, objectification) which allows

us to assume a point of view on the world. Temporality makes sense along with the existence

of spaciality and social being.

16 An invasion, occupation, spreading

33

Here, it is worth mentioning a few things about picnolepsy17- a project enlisted in

www.e-xplo.org18 . The location of the project, dated 21-23 March 2002 was New York City

(Roulette & 16 Beaver). In their project, Manhattan served as the backdrop for an

investigation using attenuated adaptations of various sounds and texts. Using "Picnolepsy" as

a thematic link19 , the artists wanted to juxtapose the represented city, the spatialized city of

neighborhoods and zones, with the temporal city, the city of/as event, the city recollected, the

peripheral city of memory (possibly a faulty memory), and the imagined city, the cinematic

city. Source material included sounds/texts from various films including "While the City

Sleeps," "Escape from New York," "Taxi Driver," "Manhattan," "Red Desert,"

"Armageddon," "Chronicle of a Love," "On the Water Front," "My Dinner with Andre" and

many others... as well as texts by Sam Shepard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy,

Robert Fisk (reporting on the massacres in Sabra and Chatila), as well as original material

created / composed / written by the artists. Together these sources combined to provide the

artists and prospective "tourists" with supplemental materials that would fill in the gaps, and

lapses in time of everyday experience. There was of course, a crosslinked thematic of the tour

as a cinematic form, taking on the role of representing, dismembering, re-membering the city,

the imagined city.

I.7. The historical city

Positive space, negative space, Baroque space, Modern space, urban space,

domestic space, architectural space, urban space, pictorial space, abstract

17 Noun. from the Greek, picnos: frequent. For the picnoleptic, nothing has happened, the missing time never existed. 18 Alterrain explorations website of collective artists 19 A condition marked by frequent lapses in consciousness, wherein the subject is unaware of the missing time, and compensates by filling in the missing time with supplemental information

34

space, inner space and outer space, secular and sacred space, phase space,

parameter space, color space, psychological space, auditory, tactile, personal,

and social space...what are the adjectives qualifying exactly? No one knows.

Thinking about the problem has vexed philosophers since Plato. A quick

review is instructive (Benedikt, 1993:1)

For Plato, space was the totality of geometric relations possible, i.e. the totality of

numerical facts applicable to distances and directions, and vice versa, in short, proportion (On

Space: Timaeus). As he has clearly mentioned in his masterpiece, the Republic, the making of

the universe had to be in due proportion. The attention to proportion that characterizes

classical architecture to this day, as well as the link that still exists between ratio as a

comparison of two quantities and ratio- as the prefix to words denoting reason itself, derive

from this Platonic definition.

Aristotle conceived of the universe as a finite, three dimensional sphere in which

different substances perpetually seek their natural places. He also held an unusual theory of

what space is and why no part of it can be empty (Huggett, 1999: 193). For him, space was

nothing other than place, or the generalized sum and place of all places. If Plato’s definition

was geometrical, Aristotle’s was more topological: (the) place (of something), he said, was

the inner surface of the first, stable, environing container. The place of a chair is the room it is

in, the place of a river is the river bed, the place of the moon is the next-outward celestial

sphere.

A versatile contemporary approach to the historical city comes once again from e-

xplo.org. The project, entitled Domestic Disturbance, Fight or Flight, or Shelter took place

on Sept. 13, 2002 in Berlin in the form of a 16 mm. film (audio-installation). An old war

bunker situated in the heart of the "new" Berlin is the starting point for a multi-faceted work

35

dealing with the intersections between among other things, history, berlin-techno, politics,

war, real estate, and the subject. The bunker represents a crossroad, where these different

threads meet, intersect, and infer a multiplicity of choices. This work is an attempt to develop

a vocabulary for this silent - overdetermined space (the bunker) contaminated by history,

using words, sounds, and images. Well aware that words/images can be reversed, obfuscated,

forgotten, replaced by new ones, e-Xplo also considers the possibly less maleable, less

reversable course of lives that intersect the conditions represented by these words/images.

Well aware that words/images can be reversed, obfuscated, forgotten, replaced by new ones,

e-Xplo also considers the possibly less maleable, less reversable course of lives that intersect

the conditions represented by these words/images.

I.8. The city of constant flux

The city functions at some practical level where platforms are porous, malleable, open

to mutual accomodation - as evident in the Islamic municipality of Istanbul (Keyder, 1999:

195). The polarization caused by globalization is all too real: income levels, life styles,

consumption patterns and space have been divided. In a city such as Istanbul, where in living

memory of residential space reflected an interpenetration and coexistence of diferent levels of

status and class, the separation of space and the exclusionary habitation that has become the

pattern are novel and upsetting.

A vision of a permanently divided city may be overly pessimistic. Metropolises are

condemned to restructure themselves; they are the immediate receivers and processors of

changing material forces and conditions. During the last two decades, globalization has come

to dominate this process of restructuring. As the lives of all the inhabitants of Istanbul are

inexorably transformed, the immediate has indeed been a hardening of the battle lines and a

militant creation of the local. However, this is surely a transitional phenomenon in which the

36

sides do not seem to inhabit the same world. If and when the momentum of globalization

prevails, the conflict may well assume a more familiar visage, a struggle over distribution,

unfolding within a shared universe of conceptual and physical space.

There is the city of everyday life, constituted in the flow of daily life and great events.

Rather than the simple movement patterns assumed by the mid-20th century planners between

home and work / school or shops, there are all kinds of movement patterns and time-space

rhythms, some shaped in a daily dynamic, some in a weekly or yearly dynamic (Allen in

Healey, 2002: 1780). The social space of what we take to be the city is thus a complex

layering of the time space rhythms of multiple time space relations, some confined to a

particular part of the city, the others spread out in multiple webs of relations (Healey, 2002:

1780).

I.9. The city as an event

An event is a kind of accident, one that arises from the unlikely

collision of generally uncoordinated vectors. Definition of event is

less in space than time. Time has finally overcome space as our main

mode of perception. Space becomes temporal. The acceleration of

reality of time causes revulsion at the being-here-present. History has

just crashed into the wall of time. All shapes being formerly

registered in delayed time- the event takes place here and now. Real

time wins over real space (Virilio, 2000a: 5).

How space-time-being is conceptually specified and given particular meaning in the

37

explanation of concrete events is the generative source of all social theory (Soja, 1989: 125).

Therefore, the event moves us closer to temporality. Time explains the accident and surpasses

place.

At every moment of everyday there is a crash event, affecting everything belonging to

the city. Despite being insured, insulated by method, knowledge, prediction, risk analysis and

technology against accidents, we are nevertheless permanently avoiding them. As

technologies advance, so catastrophe looms larger, thereatening fiscal and economic, as well

as physical systems. But the crash brings it all back home. From the crumpled remains of a

Mercedes in Paris to the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York; from Black

Monday on the money markets to Chernobyl’s meltdown; from Crash to Titanic: from James

Dean and Jayne Mansfield to Warhol and Ballard – crashes are individuated, named in order

to prevent the sense that our history, far from being one of steady progress, is in fact an

incremental accumulation of crashes.

In analytic terms, every crash reminds us that we have stepped over the line separating

the benignly abstract from the horribly concerete, from ‘risk society’ to crash cultures

(Arthurs, 2002: 1). The crash resists interpretation – not least because it is an event, with

singular dates and places, shot through with time. Studying the taking place of events might

cause problems. Conclusions reached on the basis of the singular event should be questioned

for their theoretical or practical value. Since the conditions defining the event could not be

repeated, there are no expected or generalized conclusions. Nor do events reach conclusions;

they emerge and dissipate, ramify and ceonnect, impact and exlope. With events, the real does

not wait to be prejudged or interpreted; rather it impacts on our senses, our emotions, our

bodies- creating a material effect that only in time will be reduced and shaped by discourse.

38

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces ‘crash’ as a word back to 15th century

printing, linking it from the start to technologies of communication. Definitions range from

noisy outbursts to overt destruction to information meltdown. The crash is a ‘noise’ constantly

in the background of the spread of communications, reaching a crescendo from the mid 19th

century in discourses of commerce and mechanization. If noise it is, then the crash is also, in

cybernetic terms, systemic noise that leads to collapse – the inseparable dereliction that

accompanies all information, the cessation of exchange implicit in all trade, the broken

transportation that is its animating possibility.

How is this collapse reflected in the city and everyday life of the 21st century? There

is a surprising dialectic when it comes to discussing the city environments. On the city streets,

the billboard images of speeding cars produce simultaneously both a phenomenal shock to the

passer by and a semiotic screen for managing that shock. This, here, is the desensitizing effect

often cited in the contemporary debates about the scandal of our voyeuristic enjoyment of

screen death. However, when the real comes back through, the victim is exposed to an

experience with slightly more impact than repeated virtual death. That is when the city has

monstrous quality for her inhabitants, who as they flee from her trouble, end up overwhelmed

by her never-ending thrill and charm. The safest path is the virtual city experience for non-

believers of life after death.

39

CHAPTER II

The contemporary city

One of the first examples of the contemporary city may be accepted as Le Corbusier’s

city which had an elaborately designed system of transportation. The exact center of the city

lacks the symbolic value one can expect20. Center only serves for people in motion. His city

exists for interchange: the most rapid possible exchange of ideas, info, talents, joys. Only the

concentration of a metropolis could provide the multitude of juxtapositions which is the

special joy of urban life. The central terminal and interchange is thus an appropriate symbol

of the contemporary city.

Where everything is in motion, speed becomes the only constant. His skyscrapers

surrounding the central terminal permit him to reconcile the seeming opposites of urban

design: density and open space. They free the ground for greenery, they are also fitting

symbol for the grandeur of the function they house. The ideal city of Le Corbusier is a purely

large-scale conception, hence non-fractal. Its components are skyscrapers, highways, and vast

paved open spaces. Le Corbusier drew skyscrapers sitting in a giant park, everything being

defined only on the two or three largest scales. There is little distinct structure seen on the

infinite range of scales below the width of skyscrapers, and certainly nothing on the human

range of scales 1 cm to 2 m. He missed the necessity of all the smaller scales in a living city.

Le Corbusier totally misjudged what his "city of the future" would look like (Salingaros,

2003: 32). His skyscrapers did indeed replace the traditional living urban fabric, but they don't

sit in giant parks -- urban forces dictate that they instead sit in huge parking lots.

20 No cathedral or civic monument

40

The contemporary city is above all a city of administration (Fishman, 1994: 142-51).

The Broadacres by Wright follow this model with its individuality and decentralization in the

1940’s. The Garden City of Howard may not be called a contemporary city, yet one of social

improvement considering its principles on sharing and cooperation.

Contemporary scholars of the modern city, like Janet Wolff (1991: 21-30), note that

the male flâneur has no female equivalent. In the 19th century, women’s realm was the

domestic, and a female street walker meant something else entirely. Women on the street

might become the object of the flâneur’s gaze, but the commanding anonymity of the flâneur

was simply not available to them. When individuals like the writer George Sand were able to

access this privilege, it was only by masquerading as men (Bingaman, 2001: 226). The

cyberflaneu(r)se might also be a cyberspace wanderer with a purpose, adopting a set of tactics

for subverting cyberspace.

II.1. The city of flows

Timeless time - time and space are related in society as is nature and their meanings

and manifestations in social practice evolve throughout histories and across cultures. The

network society is organised around new forms of time and space: timeless time and the

space of flows.

Much of the recent literature below was stimulated by Friedmann’s article The World

City Hypothesis. Cautioning that he was providing neither a theory nor a universal

generalization about cities, but rather a loosely joined framework for research; Friedmann

argued that a city’s internal structure and economic prospects would depend upon how it was

41

integrated into circuits of global capital. Certain world cities had become key basing points

for transnational corporate headquarters and the other institutions that organize and control

the economy. For Friedmann, the paradox is that world cities will prosper as important nodes

in the global economy, but the structure of their prosperity generates new forms of spatial and

class polarization which they can neither redress nor manage (Oncu & Weyland, 1997: 25).

Again, the account of a space of flows is growing hoary with age. It dates from at

least the eighteenth century, and ideas of circulation – of desires and letters circulating in the

body of the nation-state. But it comes into its own in the 19th century with the spread of the

railway and then the telegraph (Thrift in Johnston et al, 2002: 48). In France, for example,

writers used it as a convention to describe the new spaces of continuous movement and

circulation that were springing up as a result of these innovations. Modern life is drawn in

terms of speed and flow – everything moves too fast. In the twentieth century the innovations

may change, but the phenomenology of speed and flow remains much the same.

The space of flows is the material organisation of time-sharing social practices that

work through flows. The space of places continues to be the predominant space of experience.

In the network society a fundamental form of social domination is the prevalence of the logic

of the space of flows over the space of places and induces a metropolitan dualism and a form

of social/territorial exclusion which bypasses and marginalizes people and places. A new

spatial dynamics is resisted/opposed by new social movements that appropriate technologies

and penetrate segments of the space of flows with forces of resistance and expressions of

personal experience.

42

What we are witnessing is not just the connecting of real places, cityspaces, together—

as with plumbing or wiring—but the creation of a new medium entirely where real geographic

place is irrelevant. More than just sensorially connecting distant real places21, information in

the quantities we will be dealing with, enables the creation of fictional, consistent, wholly

electrical “third” spaces, places that exist nowhere and everywhere, whose light shines only in

eyes and not on trees or streets. Rather than what Manuel Castells, following Henri Lefebvre,

calls the space of flows, referring to the flow of money and information through

telecommunications, this is the space in flows sensorially reconstituted as space: urban space,

architectural space, cityspace and abstract space all together... reconstituted, namely as

cyberspace. There may well be hundreds of cyberspace domains someday, with unique

cultures and purposes, like countries.

And of what do these “flows” consist? Of information, to be sure, but effectively—

phenomenologically—of power, money, symbols, news, the presence of other people,

decisions, proposals, reports, linkages, references, affirmations, measurements, laws,

entertainments, conferences, classes, stories, real and imaginary images...where shall one

stop? As can be demonstrated with three thought experiments, information is intrinsically

spatio-temporal, and cyberspace is merely the name given to information spatio-temporalized

in a specific way. Flows of people along with flows of images, signs and symbols create the

multi-polar metropolitan culture (Oncu & Weyland, 1997: 58).

The structural domination of the organizational logic of networks and of the relational

logic of flows has substantial consequences that are often as indicators of the new

informational society. In fact, they are the manifestation of a deeper trend: the emergence of

21 With pictures and sound, and various telepresence VR systems, it would be possible to make these places adjacent to each other, or even interchangeable.

43

flows as the stuff from which our societies are made. The consequences of this trend are

summarized below:

The ability to generate new knowledge and to gather srategic

information depends on access to the flows of such knowledge or information,

be it flows between major research centers or insider knowledge in Wall Street

trading. It follows that the power of organizations and the fortune of

individuals depend on their positioning vis-a-vis such sources of knowledge

and on their capacity to understand and process such knowledge.

The productivity and competitiveness of the economic system, a

fundamental subsystem in our society, depend on the position of economic

units in the networks of the global economy. These units may be firms,

regions, countries, or economic areas, such as the EEC.

The flows of images/messages/sounds created by the new media

and the fundamental elements in shaping their representation and

communication patterns of our societies. We left the Gutenberg galaxy some

time ago, and we live now, in a collection of related constellations, made up of

specialized audiovisual universes living off the bridges formed by worldwide

networks of information and entertainment.

The political system is now fundamentally dependent upon the

skilled manipulation of messages and symbols. The media are the fundamental

battleground for political control, at least in democratic systems. Reality is

44

increasingly mediated by media, because they are indeed the virtual reality of

the majority of the population (Castells, 1994: 6).

The materiality of networks and flows does create a new social structure at all levels

of society. It is this social structure that actually constitutes the new informational society, a

society that could be more properly named the society of flows, since flows are made up not

only of information but also of all materials of human activity22. The societal diffusion of

information and communications technologies (ICTs) remains starkly uneven at all scales. It

is in the contemporary city that this unevenness becomes most visible. In cities, clusters and

enclaves of 'superconnected' people, firms and institutions often rest cheek-by-jowel with

large numbers of people with non-existent or rudimentary access to communications

technologies.

II.2. The world city & the global city

The older cities have kept some kind of special position in the global hierarchy, not of

size, but of function. Here we need to explore those other elusive terms, which tend to get

mixed up with mega city: they are world city and global city. It turns out that world cities,

too, are not exactly a new phenomenon. Patrick Geddes already recognized them and defined

them, as long ago as 1915, in a book that has become a

classic of the planning literature: Cities in Evolution. And just over

thirty years ago, in 1966, Peter Hall published a book entitled The

World Cities, defining them in terms of multiple roles:

22 Capital, labor, commodities, images, travellers, changing roles in personal interaction etc.

45

They were centres of political power, both national and international, and of

the organizations related to government; centres of national and international

trade, acting as entrepôts for their countries and sometimes for neighbouring

countries also; hence, centres of banking, insurance and related financial

services; centres of advanced professional activity of all kind, in medicine,

in law, in the higher learning, and the application of scientific knowledge to

technology; centres of information gathering and diffusion, through

publishing and the mass media; centres of conspicuous consumption, both of

luxury goods for the minority and mass-produced goods for the multitude;

centres of arts, culture and entertainment, and of the ancillary activities that

catered for them. One may argue that these kinds of activities tended to

grow in importance; so, in the twentieth century, the world cities went from

strength to strength: even as they shed some kinds of activity, from routine

manufacturing to routine paper-processing, so they took on new functions

and added to existing ones (Castells & Hall, 1994: 24).

This definition, one would argue, still applies forty years later. But it does need

amplification and modification, because of the phenomenon of globalization and its impact on

the urban system, coupled with what can be called the informationalization of the economy,

the progressive shift of advanced economies from goods production to information handling,

whereby the great majority of the workforce no longer deal with material outputs. About

fifteen years ago John Friedmann was the first to suggest that this was resulting in a global

hierarchy, in which London, New York and Tokyo are “global financial articulations”,

Miami, Los Angeles, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Singapore and “multinational articulations”,

and Paris, Zurich, Madrid, Mexico City, São Paulo, Seoul and Sydney are “important national

articulations”, all forming a “network” (Friedmann, 1987; Smith and Timberlake, 1995: 294).

46

Manuel Castells has characterized this as the fundamental economic shift of the present era, as

momentous as the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries (Castells, 1989: 51-55; Castells, 1996: 21).

Another approach to the world city comes from Fuat Ercan (1996: 67) who claims the

accelerating speed and volume of traffic can only be controlled, or rather attempted to be

controlled in world cities. The emergence of control in those cities also brings to mind the

possession of all traffic related vehicles, money and image which are also clustered in those

geographies. Harvey adds in the entrepreneurial stitch to these cities; a perspective which

develops a separate dimension of competition for becoming globalized. The interesting take

from Ercan (1996:84) would be his prospects for the future of Istanbul. He, not only disagrees

with economists who see Istanbul as a city with comprehensive potential for a world city, but

also introduces the fragmentation/separation process of the city as it becomes

internationalized. This separation within the internal dynamics of the city also has a

significant impact on her spatial matrix and cultural positioning. One must carefully note the

distinctions between a world city and a global city as well as the process of

internationalization and globalization. World cities with their recent positions have the

incentive for detecting and shaping material, finance and symbol trafficking whereas

international cities only belong to that trafficking system. The impact of this late 20th century

system on new city developments will be analyzed in the following chapters.

Now the interesting point is that all this is not new either. The process of tertiarization

of the economy was already recognized half a century ago; by the 1980s, 30-40 percent of the

workforce in advanced countries were engaged in informational industries. Some argue that

these activities still depend on production; but evidently, as the combined effect of

globalization and informationalization, the important point is that the production of advanced

47

business or producer services becomes increasingly disarticulated from that of production. As

Saskia Sassen has put it:

The spatial dispersion of production, including its internationalization,

has contributed to the growth of centralized service nodes for the

management and regulation of the new space economy ... To a

considerable extent, the weight of economic activity over the last

fifteen years has shifted from production places such as Detroit and

Manchester, to centers of finance and highly specialized services

(Sassen, 2001: 331).

Thus, as production disperses worldwide, services increasingly concentrate into a

relatively few trading cities, both the well-known “global cities” and a second rung of about

twenty cities immediately below these, which we can distinguish as “sub-global”. These cities

are centers for financial services and headquarters of major production companies; most are

also seats of the major world-power governments (Sassen 2001: 187). They attract specialized

business services like commercial law and accountancy, advertising and public relations

services and legal services, themselves increasingly globalized, and related to controlling

headquarters locations. In turn this clustering attracts business tourism and real estate

functions; business tourism allies with leisure tourism because both are in part drawn to these

cities because of their cultural reputations, with effects on the transportation, communication,

personal services and entertainment-cultural sectors.

There is intense competition between cities both at a given level in the hierarchy and

also between levels in the hierarchy; but also a great deal of historic inertia. Take London, on

which David Kynaston’s excellent history gives a comprehensive view of the nineteenth-

century global trading city. Thirty foreign banks were already established in London before

48

1914, 19 between the two world wars, another 87 down to 1969. Then the pace accelerated:

183 in the 1970s, 115 in the first half of the 1980s; in all, between 1914 and the end of 1985

the number of foreign banks in the City grew more than fourteen-fold, from 30 to 434. Both

London and New York now had more foreign than domestic banks (LeGates & Stout, 1998:

47).

Globalization plus informationalization meant that the informational industries locate

in order to gain access to their central raw material, information. To understand the

significance, we need to understand how this informationalization of the economy has

occurred. We can say that, with every successive major technological development of the last

century and a half, the information content of the innovation wave became more and more

pronounced.

In the first so-called Kondratieff long wave (defined as the constant push-pull of the

economy), during the first half of the nineteenth century, it was negligible: the only

contribution was indirect, through transport technology in the form of the turnpike roads and

the fast mail coach, which significantly speeded the exchange of letters. In the second, dating

from the second half of the last century, as well as transport technology in the form of the

railway and the steamship, came the significant innovation of the electric telegraph, for the

first time effectively separating the message from the human carrier. The third Kondratieff, in

the first half of this century, saw one of the greatest bursts of information technology

innovation; yet oddly, since electrical generation and transmission were also an outcome of

this innovation wave, most were not electrical but mechanical in character.

The real marriage of electricity and information through electronics had to await the

fourth Kondratieff just after World War II, though of course the innovations themselves were

made before and during the war. And in this wave, though there were also significant

49

developments in transport technology23, the fundamental innovations were informational.

Information for the first time drove the economy, both through innovations in production

technology (the computer, the copying machine) and also through developments in consumer

technology (the transistor radio, the television, audio and video recording). And the fifth

Kondratieff wave - which Kondratieff enthusiasts expect before very long - will undoubtedly

see the effective convergence of these technologies into one, which will have the interesting

characteristic of being simultaneously a producer and a consumer technology in a way that no

previous technology has been.

The sociocultural flows made manifest by space of flows and the informational

economy is represented by six categories (Appadurai, 1997: 202):

Technoscapes, produced by flows of technology, software and

machinery disseminated by transnational corporations, supranational

organizations and government agencies

Finanscapes, produced by rapid flows of capital, currency and

securities, made visible not only through teleports and concentration of

financial workers, but also through the rapidly changing geography of

investment and disinvestment.

Ethnoscapes, produced by flows of business personnel,

guestworkers, tourists, immigrants, refugees, etc.

Mediascapes, produced by flows of images and information

through print media, television and film.

23 for instance, the jet engine

50

Ideoscapes, produced by the diffusion of ideological constructs,

mostly derived from Western worldviews such as democracy, sovereignty,

citizenship, welfare rights.

Commodityscapes, produced by flows of high-end consumer

products and sevices, such as clothes, interior design, food, household objects.

There are also theorists in the field who stipulate that more than private enterprise,

public alternatives such as voluntary organizations and social clubs serve well in empowering

cities (Frug, 1999). It is the same theorists who pay attention to the formation of ‘digital

cities’, an example of which will be explored within the flow of this chapter.

51

II.3. The informational city

In The Informational City, Castells makes note of the enormous expenditure on

telecommunication equipment by US business creating geographically nondescript landscapes

of anonymous office buildings. “This is the best example,” he writes, “of the direct

relationship with location in a given place as a means of access to the placeless

communications network (Castells, 1989). He is right of course, except that with cyberspace

that ‘communications network’ is no longer placeless, or rather need not be. Shoshana Zuboff,

in her book In The Age of the Smart Machine, makes a similar point: computerization cuts

people off from each other, from place, physical intuition, and sensory reality. Once again,

this is only true until cyberspace and VR technology can reconstitute and recover the space

hidden, as it were, in the dimensions of pure information. Castells’ idea for the dual city

comes into view right around this point where he claims that the informational city is also the

dual city. This duality (Catterall in Bridge at al, 2000: 192) exists in the sense that it opposes

the cosmopolitanism of the elites to the tribalism of local communities. This challenge has

value as long as cyberspace offers alternative platforms for both sides of the duality.

Moving Information

The historical background is important to understand, because - even in a world where

much information is now conveyed through high technology, to the degree that high

technology and information technology tend almost to become conflated - information is still

communicated in two entirely different ways: by electronic transfer, but also by direct face-to-

face communication. Face-to-face communication, as recognized long ago by the American

52

economist Robert Murray Haig, encourages agglomeration in the global cities, because of

their historically strong concentrations of information-gathering and information-exchanging

activities and their position as nodes for national and international movement, especially by

air and now also high- speed train. And this is fortified by the remarkable recent growth of the

arts, culture and entertainment sector, where - for instance - employment grew by 20 percent

in London during the 1980s24, with further indirect impacts on associated personal services

including hotels, restaurants, bars and associated facilities. For this group, too, clusters within

urban cores and is subject to considerable locational inertia; but this can be modified by

revitalization projects like London’s South Bank and Barbican, or the Grands Projets in Paris.

However, it was never feasible to operate an informational economy simply on the

basis of dense agglomeration; even at the end of the Middle Ages, Florentine bankers were

engaged in dense networks of activity between the major cities of Europe, and into the Far

East, all conducted by couriers rushing all over the then globe. And, as global activity

increased under capitalism, so transport networks multiplied, connecting these dense face-to-

face agglomerations, in the form of railway systems and steamship lines backed up first by

letter post, then by the telegraph from the 1830s, then by the telephone from the 1870s.

During the nineteenth century, the growth of global cities like London, New York and

Tokyo was supported by their position as centres of national rail networks and of international

steamship lines (though the latter might operate through subsidiary ports connected by

railways, such as Liverpool and then Southampton for London, Le Havre for Paris, Hamburg

for Berlin, or Yokohama for Tokyo). Then, to some extent in the interwar period but

overwhelmingly after it, air travel supplanted trains and ships for all intercontinental business

travel and a substantial proportion of local inter-city travel over a certain threshold [typically

24 taken from reports by the London Planning Advisory Committee, 1991.

53

about 300 kilometres]. Since this revolution, which was more or less complete by the end of

the 1950s, the technology of air travel has remained remarkably stable, though increases in

size and range of aircraft have had a significant impact in eliminating the need for

intermediate stops on long-haul flights, with some notable urban impacts - particularly over

the Pacific, the world’s largest ocean.

One consequence, associated also with the dominance of a few major airlines and the

increasing tendency to mergers and strategic alliances between them, is that this traffic is

increasingly concentrated on to a relatively few major hub airports, all in the largest cities,

which offer the biggest range of direct nonstop flights and also the most convenient and

frequent interlining facilities. Recent studies of the interconnectivity of cities by air suggest

that London is top, followed by Paris, New York and Tokyo (Smith and Timberlake 1995:

298; Cattan 1995: 304- 308).

The really new element, constituting a further transport revolution of profound

significance, has been the arrival of the high-speed train, first in Japan in 1964 [and thus a

fourth Kondratieff technology], then in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Experience shows that

effectively it competes with air transportation in the range up to about 500 kilometres, and

may effectively supplant it for much shorter-distance traffic between major urban centres,

particularly if these centres are disposed in axial or corridor fashion25. The significance of the

trains is not merely that they compete effectively, but that they are likely to alter the delicate

geographical balance within metropolitan areas: with the exception of some services

deliberately designed to interconnect with longer- distance air routes [as for instance through

Paris-Charles de Gaulle], they essentially connect traditional central business districts, and

thus powerfully help to correct any tendency on the part of business to migrate from these 25 As is the case for instance on the Tokaido corridor in Japan between Tokyo and Osaka, or in Europe between Paris, Lyon and Marseille, or between Hamburg, Hannover, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Munich, or more recently between London, Paris and Brussels

54

centres to suburban locations close to the airports - a trend long observed in the United States,

but now becoming evident in Europe also, in developments around London Heathrow, Paris

Charles de Gaulle, Amsterdam Schiphol or Stockholm Arlanda.

Electronic communication, it is often argued, works in the opposite direction, as an

agent of dispersal: as the costs of telecommunication have fallen dramatically26, informational

activities should be increasingly free to locate away from the old central locations, indeed

anywhere they like. Not only can they migrate to lower-cost back offices in the outer suburbs

- a tendency observable worldwide, in such concentrations as Greenwich [Connecticut] and

the New Jersey “Zip Strip”, or Reading west of London, or the Paris New Towns, or Omiya

and Kawasaki outside Tokyo]; they may also migrate to quite distant provincial cities offering

even greater savings in rents and salaries, such as the new financial centres of Bristol or Leeds

in England, or such locations as Salt Lake City or Omaha [Nebraska] in the United States;

and, eventually, there is always the prospect that some such activities can be transferred to

even lower- cost offshore locations, as has happened with so much manufacturing. But there

are limits: telecommunications are not costless, and [unlike the traditional arrangements with

mail] the costs are not uniform regardless of distance; world cities create their own demand

for state-of-the-art telecommunications services; linguistic and cultural boundaries, especially

in Europe, create powerful barriers to the transfer of any activity based on direct voice

communication, whether direct telephone sale of insurance or international television

transmission.

Even in Europe, studies show that the diffusion of advanced information technology is

far more rapid in the largest metropolitan regions than elsewhere (Goddard and Gillespie

26 The cost of a three-minute daytime phone call from London to New York, in constant 1996 prices, has fallen from an impressive £487 in 1927 to £63 in 1945, to just over £12 in 1970, to precisely 52p. Today.

55

1987, 1988). And so, as the informational economy grows, the largest global cities retain their

key role.

Besides, there’s another factor. We tend to think of telecommunications as substituting

for personal travel and face-to-face meetings, but the reality is that they are also

complimentary. Data from France show that over a long period, the curves for

telecommunications traffic and personal travel have risen almost precisely in parallel; there is

no doubt that the evidence from every other country would be identical (Graham and Marvin

1995: 262). If you need further evidence, just look at the growth of international business air

travel, at the growth of the major international hotel chains, or indeed the convention

business. Again, apart from developments in some major resort areas such as Florida or

Queensland’s Gold Coast, these convention centres tend to be located in the hearts of the

major cities, next to existing concentrations of business hotels and restaurants and associated

nightlife. They form a very significant part of the phenomenon of business tourism, one of the

fastest-growing sectors in the global cities today, and one that is highly synergistic with the

other growth sectors.

We can best summarize the economic structure of these cities in the following way.

They are divesting very large areas of economic activity - manufacturing, goods-handling,

routine services - to other cities, regions and countries. They are showing rapid growth in a

relatively few related sectors: financial and business services, both financial and non-financial

(including the fast- growing design services like architecture, engineering and fashion);

command and control functions such as company headquarters, national and international

government agencies, and the whole web of activities that grows around them; cultural and

creative industries including the live arts and the electronic and print media; and tourism, both

leisure and business.

56

These are highly synergistic. They cater simultaneously for local, national and

international markets; the international business, though generally a minority share, is

significant in providing an export base. Some but not all of them are now exhibiting

productivity gains associated with the injection of information technology, which is producing

jobless growth. They offer a wide range of job opportunities, but there is some tendency to

polarization: on the one hand there are what Robert Reich (1996: 35) has called the symbolic

analysts, performing jobs that require high formal education, professional training and

interpersonal skills; on the other, there is a wide range of semi-casual and low-paid work in

personal services, which offer no career prospects and are often unattractive as an alternative

to welfare payments (Wilson 1987: 1996).

II.4. Soft cities

The technological means to create private places in cyberspace are available, but the

right to create these places remain a fiercely contested issue. Can you always keep your bits to

yourself? Is your homepage your castle? However, there is always a possibility for alternative

castles (Mitchell, 1995: 200).

Even though we may travel ‘there’ everyday, the virtual space of the Internet is not a

place as we typically understand the word. Yet the city is still a productive spatial metaphor

for the electronic network. William Mitchell, for instance, titles his book on the subject the

City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn (1995). Certainly in both the physical city and the

Internet, people meet, carry out work, gather information, shop and sightsee, or as the case

may be, site-see. Marshall Mcluhan suggested that every new medium is a rearviewed mirror

to its recent historical past (McLuhan 1964:ix) and, indeed, patterns of cities are enacted

online. Many sites are slick and glossy flat façades with flashing banner advertisements,

functioning like a mall or the Las Vegas strip. The Internet’s notorious ‘red light’ zones might

57

be thought of as corresponding city districts, but they are more closely associated to each

other by numerus links than they are to any other neighborhoods. While structures and

materials are different – bits and files versus bricks and mortar; coded information versus

buildings; and links and search engines versus streets and subways – the two worlds remain

linked. Industries familiar from the real world are visible to the web wanderer, though their

web architectures may differ dramatically from the corresponding physical space.

By the 1990s the digital electronics and telecomunications industries had configured

themselves into an immense machine for the ongoing production of cyberspace. We found

ourselves rapidly approaching a condition in which every last bit of computer memory in the

world would be electronically linked to every other. And those links would last forever.

Because its electronic underpinnings are so modular, geographically dispersed and redundant,

cyberspace is essentially indestructible. If big chunks of the network were wiped out,

messages would automatically reroute themselves around the damaged parts.

Ever since Ur27, urban places have been linked by movement channels of various

kinds: doorways and passageways have joined together the rooms of buildings, street grids

have connected buildings to each other, and road and rail networks have allowed

communication between distant cities. These familiar sorts of physical connections have

provided access to the places where people lived, worked, worshipped and entertained

themselves.

Early MUDs (multi-user dungeons) relied entirely on typed descriptions of characters,

objects, scenes, and actions. James Joyce surely would have been impressed by this city as

text, text as city notion. Every journey constructs a narrative.

27 It is known as the ancient city of the Sumerian civilization and the home of Abraham, father of the Hebrews. Its ruins are between the modern city of Baghdad, Iraq, and the head of the Persian Gulf. It was caled Ur by the Chaldees who settled in the area around 900 BC.

58

The online environments have increasingly resembled traditional cities; the extent of

complexity of the street networks and transportation systems linking these places, the capacity

to engage our senses and social / cultural richness.

It does not rain in cyberspace, so shelter is not an architectural issue. However,

privacy certainly is. The technological means to create these private places in cyberspace are

available, but right to create these places remains a fiercely contested issue. The following

chapter is devoted to how this issue has been dealt with during the establishment of the digital

city project of Amsterdam.

II.5. The digital / virtual city

a. city as chora in Derrida

As if receiving all these ways of crossing the word, Derrida notes that khora will

always already be occupied, invested. One hears the word “core” within it, suggesting its

necessity and presence in all writing and reading. And yet, khora moves across the

demarcation of “core” that would fix it within a bounded interiority.

More recent explorations for digital cities indicate different purposes for their

existence. The best technology today could be dead tomorrow. However, virtual communities

need time and technical stability to develop and thrive. This presentation will take you on a

grand tour of diverse technologies available today to build the digital cities of tomorrow. It

will concentrate on systems that facilitate the creation of virtual places that are highly usable28

and sociable29, pointing out how the mediating technology influences the forms that

inhabitant interaction takes (Borner 2001 accessed [24 November 2003] ).

28 They provide intuitive and efficient access to information and information services 29 They support effective communication and collaboration among inhabitants

59

The media-technological composition of communication has changed. A new group of

cultural, inter-cultural and transcultural references emerged. It is integrated in the multiverse

of artificial environments. The City, as the most complex informational and communicative

environment the modern territorial society produced, is confronted with a more complex and

competitive structure: the infographical, three-dimensional spaces of virtual corporation (W.

H. Davidow et al.), virtual neighborhood (H. Rheingold), virtual societies. The interpersonal

social density is replaced by the trans-social teledensity (Fabler 2000 accessed [24 November

2003])

b. virtual city examples

Cyberspace as a whole, and networked virtual environments in particular,

allow us to not only theorize about potential architectures informed by the

best of current thought, but to actually construct such spaces for human

inhabitation in a completely new kind of public realm. This does not imply

a lack of constraint, but rather a substitution of one kind of rigor for

another. When bricks become pixels, the techtonics of architecture

becomes informational. (Novak, http://www.aec.at/ctheory/a34-

transmitting_arch.html, accessed on March 25, 2004)

According to planning / policy models, the digital city include the following types:

Smart cities

Intelligent cities and regions

Virtual innovation islands: virtual districts, technology poles, regional innovation

systems

60

Telematics and online innovation / knowledge management : the Digital California

Project as well as Zora may be examples.

The Digital California Project is a state-funded effort to build the necessary network

infrastructure required to enable California's schools to take advantage of tomorrow's

advances in network technology. In essence, we are developing an advanced-services network

to serve the entire K-20 education and research community (http://www.cenic.org/DCP.html-

Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California).

Zora, created by Marina Bers Umaschi and her team at the MIT Media Lab in 2001, is

a three dimensional multi-user virtual environment that engages learners in the design of a

graphical virtual city and its social organization. A summer workshop was conducted with a

multicultural group of teenagers using Zora. They designed a virtual city populated with

objects and characters representing aspects of themselves and their values. In this

participatory microcommunity those values were put to test. Reflections and future work that

points toward a new research agenda in the area of the learning sciences were also derived

from the project (Umaschi Bers, Marina, 2001).

Here the initial dichotomy to reflect upon is whether virtual city projects act as

functional substitutes for the physical city (Wakabayashi, 2002: 14) or proceed in total

interpenetration (Hales, 2001:12). ‘Geocities’ stand out as a failed project for the idealized

version of the physical city over the web. One has to examine each project and its facilities for

including citizens to decide about the semantic quality. Below is one of the first projects that

has left a noticeable mark in the academic arena.

61

Virtual cities in Europe

First, at the European level, it is clear that the percentage of the observed sites that can

be included in the holistic virtual cities category is relatively small at around 10 percent. This

demonstrates that, despite all the hype, the use of the Internet for civic purposes is still quite

limited and is used primarily as an electronic brochure or database – a means for the one way

distribution of information to consumers (citizens, businesses, tourists) of cities. Cities’ use of

the Internet is still overwhelmingly dominated by exploration of its potential as a cheap and

innovative tool for information, and above all, promotion and place marketing. While this

reflects the growing importance of city marketing to urban policy, every city offers a bland,

similar, even standardized message.

A sharp divide exists in technological advancement between southern and northern

European countries. Italy, for example, has relatively advanced and sophisticated virtual

cities, with a higher than average number of interactive and holistic virtual cities. The most

well known of these is the “Iperbole” initiative from Bologna city council (Aurigi & Graham

in Bridge & Watson, 2000: 497). In France, meanwhile, virtual cities remain poorly

developed. High-profile virtual city initiatives of the holistic kind are practically absent, in a

nation that has recently been extremely sensitive towards the potential of new

telecommunications technologies. The reason for this is the barrier presented by earlier IT

technologies such as the Minitel systems, which have been widely adopted throughout France.

The widespread use of city Minitel systems has prevented French municipalities from

developing Internet-based initiatives.

62

To analyze the urban governance of virtual cities, the contrast between Italy and UK

would be helpful. In Italy, local authorities still tend to identify themselves with the whole

city, assuming a central, sometimes hegemonic role in the management of urban territory.

Local councils remain the main actors and decision makers shaping the development of public

cyberspace in Italian cities in the form of holistic virtual cities. The participation of the private

sector is not completely absent from the picture. However, it is often limited to the technical

assistance from some IT firms. The case of the UK is very different. True public-private

partnerships with a good degree of collaboration among the partners exist in UK virtual cities.

They reflect the complex, competitive and fragmented nature of urban governance in Britain.

As Simon Davoudi notes, British city governments are no longer the key locus for

integration of urban relationships, but one of the many actors competing for access to

resources and control of agendas.

Way, Way off Amsterdam – attempts for a telepolis

Across Europe, virtual town halls, community intranets and community telecenters-

from Amstredam and Berlin to Athens, Bologna and Barcelona to East London- are starting to

allow some marginalised communities to assert democratic rights within structures of

governance, often for the first time (Tsagarousinanou et al., 1998: 27) Perhaps the best known

example here is De Digitale Stadt (the digital city), an Internet space in Amsterdam, which

now has over 100,000 residents (both locally and globally). Using an explicitly urban

metaphor of themed town squares and cafes, DDS supports a vast range of specialised

political, social, environmental and interest based communities and discourses which, within

the constraints of biased social access to the Internet, support a gigantic alternative to the

underground world (Graham, 2001: 123) as well as an official city on the surface and in the

63

open. To its founders, the city metaphor used as the web interface for DDS “stands for

diversity... What we have in mind are all those different places and localities that are possible

in a real as well as a virtual city” (Lovink and Riemens, 1998: 185).

Initiated in 1994, the virtual city project of Amsterdam may be recognized as the

initiator for dematerialization of the city and her transfer to the virtual platform by interlinked

projects based on community networking and cyber-involvement. An exemplary instance of a

practical synthesis of these developments is provided by the six and a half years history of the

electronic community network known as the Digital City of Amsterdam (DDS). DDS is one of

the first examples of grounded virtual cities; it is grounded in the sense that the dynamics of a

real-time city has been adapted to virtual format. Among the ungrounded ones are

“cybertown.com” and “cool-town” of which details are included in the chapters to follow.

This project, launched in high-spirited and adventurous atmosphere in January 1994 has been

since going through a remarkable number of changes and adaptations to ever new conditions

and circumstances. It evolved from an amateur, low-tech, non-budget grassroots initiative into

a fully professionalized, technology and business driven organisation. This culminated

recently in its transformation from a non-profit foundation into a private sector ICT venture.

In December 1999, the astonished ‘inhabitants’ learned that the directorate of the DDS had

opted for a corporate framework, and that community-building and support were no longer a

paramount objective.

Anyhow, the changes in activities of and expectations patterns about the DDS over the

past six years had probably played a larger role in its decline as a genuine community network

than the - often purely reactive - decisions of its management. In its early days (around 1994-

95) the DDS was almost the only avenue to Internet access available to the general public in

Amsterdam, and a model followed by a few initiatives elsewhere, usually with far less

success. But within a few years, the explosive spread of Internet connectivity had robbed it of

64

this fundamental function. Free e-mail, webspace and chat facilities are now available

everywhere. Scores of new commercial providers have popped up all over the place, offering

the same services, and often more and better ones, than the DDS is able to provide. They

advertise massively, and attract a customers pool far removed from the idealistic concerns that

used to inform the original Digital City . This has resulted in a substantial quantitative, but

more importantly, qualitative erosion of the DDS’ user base the last year and half - and the

process is accelerating. Even if the absolute number of accounts has risen to reach an all time

high mark of 160.000 in early 2000, an analysis of the use patterns show that these can no

longer be considered conducive to community building or even to socio-politically relevant

information exchange - homepage-building and upkeep, for instance, no longer attract much

interest.

As a platform for discussion of local issues, the DDS has receded in importance,

despite genuine efforts to trigger debates around important political events. Because of this,

the DDS has basically been turned into a facilitation structure providing the usual ICT

services to its ‘clients’, most of which see it as a convenient funnel for one-to-many, Dutch

language interchange, and care little for the ‘community’ as a whole. The decline in the

quality and the social usefulness as a whole, have been unmistakable. Keeping the Dutch

language as the principal medium of transaction can indeed be said to be the sole remaining

distinguishing feature of the DDS as a community network. The business equivalent of the

Virtual Platform has meanwhile also come into existence under the acronym, ANMA the

Amsterdam New Media Association, modeled after the New York original. (Lovink &

Riemens, 2000: 85)

Following Amsterdam, Rotterdam, in Amsterdam’s footsteps, also set up an

interactive local area network. Utrecht Province opened its digital doorways, with Groningen,

The Hague and Eindhoven following suit shortly. In an interview Marleen Stikker (one of the

65

digital city founders) gave in a daily paper, the central issue with DDS is stated as the

fulfillment of human needs. She goes on: “Everybody is equal on the net. People who never

left their houses because they were afraid of crowds now regularly gather on bulletin-boards.”

66

Table 2. Some basic statistics

May

1994

May

1996

May

1998**

Total number digital citizens 10.000* 48.000* 80.000*

Average visits per day 2.000* 8.000*

Tourists per day 2.000*

Respondents 1.200 1.300 700

Of which: Male 91% 84% 79%

Higher education# 86% 86% 64%

Age 18-25 29% 48% 38%

Amsterdam based 45% 23% 22%

Working 49% 39% 40%

Unemployed, old aged 8% 0.5% 12%

Housewives 0.1% 0.6% ***

Student incl. high school 31% 56% 48%

Turn over in 1997 $500.000

Number of employees About 15 About 25

* Provided by the Digital City.

** Preliminary results.

*** Included in ‘unemployed’.

# Users studying at college or university, or with a degree.

67

Table 3.

What do digital citizens do?: use of various functions*

Activities: 1994 1996

Email 52% 95%

Information

search

54% 85%

Information

supply

55%

Debate 16% 40%

Virtual face-to-

face

22% 30%

* % (very) important

68

Table 4.

What do digital citizens do?: fields of interest

Topics Important

Squares*

Info.

Providers

**

Discussion

Groups**

Technology, Internet,

DDS

10 13% 12%

Culture, leisure,

lifestyle

7.5 35% 64%

Information& education 7 15% -

Politics & civic 4.5 20% 24%

Economy & work 3 12% -

Miscellaneous - 05% -

* 1996-Survey

** Adapted from DDS homepage.

The figures suggest that the use of the DDS is Internet related and mainly recreational.

This is also reflected in the distribution of information providers in the DDS and the

distribution of the discussion groups. Although the DDS started as an activity aiming to

improve local democracy, it is not very strong in political issues and civic activities. The DDS

does not play a main role in the local political debates, and the political community is not very

active in cyberspace. Traditional communication media are still far more important here. It

should be noted that civic organizations are only starting to use the DDS (and the Internet in

general), and therefore their activities on the Web are still in their infancy.

69

The answer to the question whether a virtual public space and cybercommunities are

emerging in addition to real space and local communities. The answer is ‘yes and no’. Yes

since an increasing number of regular contact as well as active communities exist. No, since

traditional media are still the decisive factor in political activism. In the case of Amsterdam,

sponsorship and commercial enterprise played the main role in the portal’s survival within a

few years’ of its establishment. The business equivalent of the Virtual Platform has

meanwhile also come into existence under the acronym ANMA, the Amsterdam New Media

Association, modeled after the New York original.

Other web initiatives, like Bologna Iperbole, have involved the distribution of free e-

mail accounts to municipal populations, as attempts to develop direct forms of electronic

interaction and democratic governance between citizens and municipalities. The central

challenge here is to design local ICT systems which are equitable in terms of access as well as

supportive of genuine community and civic dialogue. Too often, municipal and local

government websites amount to little more than government shops which simply broadcast

information about services to consumers.

Above all, such efforts to build up ICT, social and institutional capacity in parallel in

local communities need to build on knowledge and understanding of how people and

communities communicate, obtain information and transact at present. Too often, all groups

within a settlement and community are forced into some imposed and standardized top-down

model which neglects the huge diversity of communicational cultures between them

(Shanmugavelan, 2000: 29-31). The problem with advocates of digital networking and ICTs

in the city are that the opposing parties do not respond to them by using their tools of

communication. Therefore, public policies would need to be backed-up to create looser ends

to transfer information between various localities.

70

The Zora Case

(Umaschi Bers, Marina, 2001: 365-70)

The name Zora was inspired by one of the imaginary cities described by Italo Calvino:

"This city is like a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things we want to

remember ... So the world's most wise people are those who know Zora" (Calvino, 1978: 13).

The hope is that by engaging with the Zora ICE, kids will also become wiser by knowing who

they are. It is a three-dimensional multi-user environment particularly designed to help young

people explore identity as constructed by diverse and conflicting aspects and values.

Zora provides an environment to support the formation of a virtual just community. It

involves learners in the creation of a participatory microcommunity where they can put to test

personal and moral values through actions and conversations. For example, in the city hall,

people engaged in powerful conversations about dilemmas as well as in the development of a

just community in which values are not only a matter of analysis and reflection but also of

everyday action and behavior. Zora supports a plurality of styles for exploring values by

providing two different design features. Learners can enter their values and corresponding

definitions directly into a collaborative values dictionary tool, thus exploring values as

universal abstractions disconnected from particular instances. Or, they can assign values and

definitions as attributes of the objects they construct in the virtual city, thus exploring values

in a more concrete way, grounded in experiences represented by those objects.

Zora explores the potential of using objects to help people think and learn in new ways

about identity and values. It integrates the use of virtual objects and narratives by

appropriating the object-oriented programming paradigm. Within this framework,

71

computational objects are modeled after real-world objects that have both attributes and

behaviors, which allow them to communicate with other objects or the outside world.

The object-oriented metaphor is particularly useful in providing ways of thinking

about values in concrete rather than abstract ways. For example, it highlights the relation

between identity and personal and moral values. The answer to the question "Who am I?" is

represented by the objects that learners decide to put in their virtual autotopographies. A flag

of the parents' homeland, a picture of a best friend, a soccer ball, and a piece of the favorite

cake are all examples of objects that represent fragments of important aspects of the self. The

answer to "What are my cherished values?" is represented by the value attributes associated

with those objects. For example, the value "honoring your ancestors" linked to the flag, the

value "friendship" associated with the best friend's picture, "productive exercise" to the soccer

ball, and "health" to the cake. While making an explicit decision about which objects would

become part of their virtual homes, and what kinds of values they convey, learners engage in

self-reflection. In the process, they ground abstract values with concrete, personally

meaningful objects.

* The virtual places: Learners can personalize their virtual places by selecting different

textures and colors for the walls, floor, and ceiling. It was a design decision to include

amongst the tools for building the virtual spaces three distinct templates: personal homes,

community centers, and public temples. Although the underlying system architecture is the

same for all three, having them as separate categories engaged learners in different thinking

processes about their identity. While creating a personal home, kids think about designing a

virtual space that contains different aspects of the self. The personal home displays those

objects and characters that kids believe to be constitutive of who they are. While creating a

virtual temple, kids design a space that represents cultural traditions or group interests dear to

72

them. While creating community centers, they think about the need of social institutions for

community life to flourish. For example, one of the girls working remotely created a junk

shop to drop objects that "no one wants around but no one wants to delete." This space

became popular30 and was regulated by a law that said that it could never be too full. It

became a community space for informal social interactions. Whereas the city hall was

invested with a sense of "important business," the junk shop was a space to get together and

chat in an informal way.

* Conceptual foundation: Need of a community to develop a sense of self and values.

* A multi-user environment: The rationale behind designing a multi-user environment

was to provide a social context that encourages self-exploration and community building.

Both introspection and participation are needed to learn about identity and develop personal

and moral values. A sense of self doesn't develop in a vacuum but through constant

interaction with others in a community. As shown by research on moral education presented

in the Theories of Moral Development section, only in the context of a community can

learners go beyond treating values solely as matters of reflection but also as matters of

behavior. Therefore, the choice is of a multi-user environment that supports the formation of

community.

* Multiple modes of interaction: In Zora communication is both synchronous (learners

converse with each other via a graphical real-time chat system using both text and gestures)

and asynchronous (learners post messages, read and write text stored in their artifacts and the

values dictionary). Real-time chat facilitates exchanging points of view in a dynamic way.

Communicating through gestures makes the experience more engaging and provides a

different channel of expression, particularly of emotions. By communicating with each other,

30 By the end of the workshop it had 33 objects.

73

kids not only express their sense of self and values, but also learn how to exchange opinions

and debate in a respectful way.

* The cases: The notion of a case was introduced in Zora to help kids ground the

online conversations in concrete artifacts. A case is an object representing an event or

circumstance to be discussed and agreed on by the community members. In the same spirit as

legal cases, they require community members to take action to resolve them. This kind of

participation in a learning environment serves as a model of the larger political community in

which the child will participate as an adult. Zora presents new cases as an empty template

with a default shape of a green pyramid. Kids can make new cases and personalize them. For

example, in Zora's city hall, kids created different kinds of cases. Most dealt with setting up

the social organization of the virtual city, such as “I think that people should not change or put

things in other peoples rooms. Unless they have permission” or “Anyone should be able to

drop anything anywhere, but with a consequence. This should be like breaking a law,

punishable by imprisonment of one hour.” Other cases were about controversial current

events reported in the newspaper.These cases fostered thinking not only about the Zora

microcommunity but also about society at large. In Zora, the nonstructured discussion of

cases is a key element for forming a participatory community.

On the one hand, the virtual city hall provided a public forum for participatory

democracy and decision making about authentic dilemmas faced by the Zora community,

such as the creation of laws, a jail, or a stripping bar. On the other hand, it provided a safe

space to voice opinions and discuss moral dilemmas faced by society at large. According to

most of the workshop participants, being online helped them to discuss certain issues in a

deep way.

74

One can drive from the two cases above that Information and Communication

Environments serve best to interests of the young population in the midst of their identity

formation. The city hall along with few other public spaces to share common problems are

mostly cared for when citizens involved are at an early age. This apparently explains why the

The Digital City of Amsterdam (DDS) has transformed into a portal of e-commerce for

entrepreneurs in a few years.

II.6. Edge cities

Until very recently, the prevailing wisdom concerning the changing geography of

many post-industrial societies went something like this: the dense downtown ringed by

residential suburbs had been natural to the limited forms of information transfer that

characterized the early modern city. Messengers, meetings, face-to-face contact among

negotiators, proximity to goods and services all made a dense and commercial downtown

necessary. Residents moved to the suburbs that ringed the city or jeweled out along transit

lines: they were freed from the hazards and inconviniences of commenrce and the downtown

gained ever-greater efficiency. This changed as new forms of transportation31 decreased the

necessity for downtown density, and as the ring suburns aged, decayed and became less and

less desirable. Soon ‘edge cities’ became the new sources of commercial and cybernetic

energy. The downtowns were dead.

However, the development of cybercommerce ad cyberculture upended that history.

High speed data access and transfer meant corporations and their workers could live and work

where they wished. From the center-weighted grid of the old city shape, the edge-city 31 Super-highways, tollways, mega-airports, hub airport, comuter air travel

75

phenomenon reorganized it into a doughnut-form, with the grid diminished to the point

where, it appeared as if fluidity was the new law. With the radical placeless democracy of

hyperconnectivity, however, the grid returned as a more flat and democratic form of urban

development. Hales (2001: 13) delivers details about Chicago’s downtown today with Internet

start.ups and dot.coms, computer game developers and hardware manufactures all located in

once-gang-infested Logan Square. These shops pose good examples for the reverse commute

pattern32.

In his book, Edge City, Joel Garreau has argued that this type of “urban” environment,

facilitated by and dependent on the highway, is a direct outgrowth of the democratic free

choice; it is the way people want and have deliberately chosen to live, and it reflects

everything that is essential to the nature of contemporary city life and the American ideals of

individual self-realization. Edge City, he implies, represents a search for utopia at the center

of the American dream. It reflects the perpetually unfinished business of Americans

reinventing and restoring themselves, announcing that their centuries old perpetual revolution

– their search for a future inside themselves- still beats strong.

32 City to suburb in the morning and suburb to city at night

76

CHAPTER III

The City Beyond limits

III.1. Citizenship, civil rights and digital democracy in megacities

The definitions of what constitute urban places and urban populations differ

internationally and change over time, as do political boundaries, making historical and

comparative research difficult. There is, moreover, a fundamental need to give far more

attention to the basic concept of “mega-city”. Rather than size alone, Goldstein argues that a

more comprehensive set of criteria based on such variables as size, financial resources,

industrial/commercial structure, political role, educational facilities and scientific personnel,

service functions and the position in the world system should be considered for classifying

cities as “mega-cities” (Fuchs et al, 1994: 129).

III.1.a. Definitions for metropolis

Both the concept of postfordist and industrial metropolis introduce the notion of

cosmopolitan metropolis. These living spaces are referred to as a large city inhabited by

people from many different countries, but we know nothing about the qualities of their living.

The basic dilemmas for urban governance arise in the following six cities in the works

of Sandercock (2000: ch.7): New York, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Istanbul, Jerusalem. She

identifies these cities with these respective remarks for where they stand in terms of their

functions and living patterns for their inhabitants.

NY- very much a cosmopolitan metropolis, is not cosmopolis.

London- small steps towards metropolis

77

Paris- not ready to become cosmopolis

Frankfurt- been forced to deny cosmopolis

Istanbul- must decide whether to become cosmopolis

Jerusalem- must invent her own cosmopolis

None of the above has a common civic culture which has embraced the social project

of tolerance, alterity and inclusion (Sandercock, 2000: ch7). The vast majority of the mega-

cities, and the most rapidly growing, are to be found in developing countries. There they serve

simultaneously as national and regional engines of economic growth, centres of technological

and cultural creativity, homes for the poor and the deprived, and the sites and sources of

environmental pollution (Fuchs et al, 1994: 12).

III.1.a.i. Postfordist metropolis

Other than having the qualities of a cosmopolis, the prior economic relations are also

determinant in the social structure of a metropole. According to Soja, postfordist economic

restructuring intensified globalization, the communications and information revolution, the

deterritorialization and reterritorialization of cultures and identity, the recomposition of urban

forms and social structures, and many other forces shaping the postmetropolitan transition

have significantly reconfigured our urban imaginary. This has blurred the once clearer

boundaries and meanings while also creating new ways of thinking and acting in the urban

milieu (Soja, 2000: 324).

So how about the favela in Brazil, poblacione in Chile, villa miseria in Argentina,

cantegril in Uruguay, rancho in Venezuela, banlieue in France, ghetto in the United States

78

and gecekondu in Turkey? They are known, to outsiders no less than to insiders, as the

“problem districts,” the “no-go areas,” the “wild” precincts of the city, territories of

deprivation and dereliction to be shunned and feared, as they are — or are widely believed to

be — rife with crime, violence, vice, and social dissolution. The novel regime is one of

exclusionary closure and sociospatial relegation that has arisen in the postfordist city as a

result of uneven changes in the most advanced sectors of capitalist economies (Wacquant,

2001: preface). The concept of welfare states has also been disarticulated lately as these bear

on those segments of the working class and include ethno-racial categories which dwell in the

marginal regions of social and physical space. Risks, accidents and danger in general are

believed to arise from those neighborhoods, but the hyper-capitalist relations are never

inquired as they are known to be inevitable by the more advantageous communities.

III.1.a.ii. Industrial metropolis

Many contemporary urban scholars, Edward Soja to come on the fore, concentrate on

the interplay between urban culture–urbanism as a “way of life”– and the geopolitical

economy of cities, especially with regard to the new urbanization processes. In this regard,

globalization, economic restructuring have been reshaping cities and regions over the past

thirty years. Soja is also the first scholar to name Los Angeles as the postfordist industrial

metropolis, the synthesis being a rather contemporary phenomenon. Public policy planning

has had to occur, with the urban characteristics in mind, specifically for this conglomerate.

Urban restucturing, too, has had to adapt the conditions of a postmetropolis of fluidity.

79

III.1.a.iii. Postmetropolis: governing space and the carceral archipelago

Psychastenia is one of the psychological syndromes associated with life in the

postmetropolis, where the boundaries of identity are rapidly changing and many of the old

spacial specificities of urbanism seem to melt into the air. As Olalquiaga writes: “Bodies are

becoming like cities”, with the self perception and identity both tied increasingly to “the

topography of computer screens and video monitors”, giving us “the languages and images

that we require to reach others and see ourselves”.

This reference to an invasive new electronic topography picks up on a

similar connection made by Chambers and many others for the

contemporary city. In our new Information Age, with its inveigling

webs of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, netscapes, cyberspatial

communications, and “digital communities”, the hard materialities of

cityspace seem to evaporate as the whole world (and more) is drawn

into every city’s symbolic zone. In this “semiotic extension of details”,

there is a simultaneous “loss in focus” for there is no longer a definable

“outside” to cities. (Soja, 2000: 151)

Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis (Soja, 2000:23)

1. FLEXCITY: on the restructuring of the political economy of urbaniza-

tion and the format of the more flexibly specialised post-Fordist industrial metropolis.

the primacy of production

crisis-formation and the Great U-Turn

the ascendance of post-fordism

80

the empowerment of flexibility

getting lean and mean

2. COSMOPOLIS: on the globalisation of urban capital, labour and

culture and the formation of a new hierarchy of global cities.

the primacy of globalisation

the 'glocalisation' process

the glocalisation of discourse in New York and London

the vanity of the bonfires

reworlding Los Angeles

3. EXOPOLIS: on the restructuring of urban form and the growth of edge

ciries, outer cities and postsuburbia: the metropolis turned insideout and outside-in.

paradigmatic Los Angeles

deconstructing the discourse on urban form

rosy reconstitutions of the postmetropolis: the New Urbanism

exploring the darker side of the Outer and Inner City

4. METROPOLARITIES: on the restructured social mosaic and the

emergence of new polarisations and inequalities.

a new sociologism

widening gaps and new polarities

the 'truly disadvantaged' and the 'underclass' debate

the new ethnic mosaic of Los Angeles

5. CARCERAL ARCHIPELAGOS: on the rise of fortress cities,

surveillant technologies and the substitution of police for polis.

cities of quartz: Mike Davis' s Los Angeles

further elaborations: interdictory spaces in the built environment

81

taking an Other look at The City of Quartz

5. SIMCITIES: on the restructured urban imaginary and the increasing

hyperreality of everyday life.

the irruption of hyperreality and the society of simulacra

cyberspace: the electronic generation of hyperreality

simulating urbanism as a way oflife

variations on a theme park

scamscapes in crisis: the Orange County bankruptcy

“Flexcities: The Changing Geography of Production” analyzes “deindustrialization”

and “reindustrialization”. There is as yet no standard nomenclature for the computerized

economy. Accelerating change hurts some but boosts others, accentuating the penalty for

being unskilled and unschooled. Yet, “indirect genocide” and similar epithets (Soja, 2000:

440) are pure overreach. Similarly, “Growth in the FIRE sector has fueled the emergence of

Los Angeles as a major challenger to the triumvirate of Tokyo, London and New York atop

the global hierarchy of capitals of capital” (441) sounds good but is wrong. The major banks

have been leaving Los Angeles. But, that does not fit the script. Helping to sustain the

oligarchs “... is a teeming underground economy and an immigrant-fed pool of low-wage

labor ...” (441). The teeming underground economy generates incomes that are invisible to the

authors of the city.

”Cosmopolis: Globalization and World City Formation” magnifies the error. “...

downtown development in Los Angeles more directly reflected the effects of

economic and clutural glocalization (sic). Its specific geography was split in two, with

a half-city of First World skyscrapers and financial power standing starkly above a

half-city of Third World cultures and street scenes. Capping this divisive society and

82

holding it together is the governing domestic Citadel-L.A.- a band of social control and

surveillance ...” Actually, the decline of L.A.'s downtown is clear from the 1987 and

1992 economic census small-area employment data: the CBD incurred net losses of

both retail and services jobs in the five-year interval. This was on the heels of a 25-

year $2.5 billion downtown renewal effort. The sum does not count the mega-dollar

downtown focused rail transit system or the $500 million convention center expansion.

Yet, those skyscrapers now have some of the nation's highest vacancy rates. The

Economist (1997) reports “... today not a single major bank, department-store chain or

telecoms company calls the nations' second largest city its home” (p. 25). This is why

the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency is, “facing what may be the

worst financial crisis in its 49-year history ...” (L.A. Times, 1997a). There is even talk

of converting empty downtown offices to lofts (L.A. Times, 1997b).

”Splintered Labyrinth: The Repolarized Metropolis” repeats concerns over a “missing

middle” (446) and the plight of immigrants who surely should have figured it all out and sent

word back home that their followers should blaze a new path. “Unending Eyes: Revamping

the Carceral City” scoffs at “security-obsessed urbanism” in Los Angeles. Soja may not have

heard that “4 of 10 in L.A. Know a Victim of Violence” (L.A. Times, Feb. 10, 1997c). These

tragedies fall heaviest on Blacks and Latinos who are clearly not imagining the whole thing.

But, “The policed metropolis is augmented by the quieter presence of what may be the most

extensive network of military installations around any major city, a global strike force

allegedly prepared to take on any challenge anywhere in the universe” (450). When Soja sees

class warfare he apparently is not kidding. “Simcities: Restructuring the Urban Imaginary”

takes on the “theme parking” of urban life, “.. a duplicitous spatial terrain in which fraud is

practiced with the ultimate hypersimulated honesty” (453). It is then a hop-skip-and-jump to

83

junk bonds (invented in Beverly Hills) , the “..hyperreality that was practiced in the Reagan-

Bush years ...” (455), S&L fraud and other plutocractic excesses, all culminating in the 1992

riots. Soja verbally strings all of these together, apparently expecting that the standard

Pavlovian response to each item is enhanced by bundling them. Yet, a case cannot be built on

arm-waving. He ends the book by repeating its greatest weaknesses.

Drawing on Hami Bhabha, Paul Virilio and others, Boyer develops an argument about

the lag-times, temporal disjunctions, and colonial non-places that now form the disappearing

centers of the postmetropolis and shape the emerging new urban imaginary.

In the late twentieth century, unknown and threatening territories are inside the

boundaries of the metropolis, where there are many lag-times, temporal breaks in the

imaginary matrix, and areas of forced delay put on hold in the process of postmodernization.

These partitions, cuts, and interruptions in the urban imaginary allow us to deny our

complicity in the making of distinctions between the well-designed nodes of the matrix and

the blank in-between places of nobody's conception. Disavowed, overlooked, marginalized,

left out of our accounts, these are the center's truly invisible places-the inexpressible, the

incomplete, the unattended-that have been rendered absent and forgotten . . .

The imaginary matrix performs spatial and temporal disjunctions that

enable us to think of city centers as if they were natural hipolar places of

linear development, rather than effects of a willful dismemberment that place

certain lives and locations outside of, and only sometimes beside, the main

events of contemporary cities. It is this splitting that the binary logic of the

computer matrix allows us to achieve with relative ease. Such an arrangement,

for example, provides Paul Virilio with his images of the disappearing city -

84

where chronological topographies replace constructed geographical space,

where immaterial electronic broadcast emissions decompose and eradicate a

sense of place. (1996: 118-19)

In later chapters, Boyer ventures into her own New York-focused and feminist version

of the Carceral as well as the Cybercity, complete with scenes to Blade Runner, Chinatown,

RoboCop, detective stories, technological violence, surveillance systems, the militarization of

space, the robotized enclaves, safety zones, the sprawling and malling of American cities,

CIDs and HOAs, urban boosterism, and the destruction of publics. What Boyer effectively

captures is a hard-hitting late modern (rather postmodern) radical critique of the dystopian

imprint of cyberspace on contemporary cities and citybuilding, a less truculent and mare

architecture.

III.1.b. Definitions for cosmopolis

One way of describing my cosmopolis- my ideal construction site of the mind, my

imagined community, my postmodern Utopia which can never be realized but only ever be in

the making – would be describing what all the listed cities are not, or are not yet33. In none of

these cities is there a common civic culture which has embraced the social project of

tolerance, alterity and inclusion. ‘From Perikles’ to Athens to Davis’s Paris, the word “civic”

has implied an intertwined fate, a crossing of fortunes. It was conceivable to a Periklean

Greek that his or her fortune could be separated from the fortunes of a city’ (Sennett

1994:369). It is increasingly being argued by a variety of scholars that, in this era of

globalization, there are two important geopolitical shifts in power. One is from the nation-

state to transnational financial institutions like International Monetary Fund and supra-

33 The cities in question are NY, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Istanbul, Jerusalem

85

national political institutions such as the European Union. The other is the shift from nation-

state to city-state. This may be called a paradigm shift (Sandercock, 2000: 129).

In their interpretations of globalization and the new Cosmopolis in chapter 7, Engin

Isin and Leonie Sandercock contribute their views to the current debates on regional

democracy and spatial justice. Isin focuses his attention on contemporary struggles over

citizenship and the rights to regional cityspace, especially in postmetropolitan Toronto, where

a more conservative form of the new regionalism has recently taken hold. Sandercock echoes

her attention to the related rights to the city-region and to difference. In her imagined but

approachable postmodern utopia, a transformative politics of difference is seen as leading the

way in creating new spaces for justice, community, and connection. The ancient concept of

citizen's rights and responsibilities, the re-empowerment of civil society, and the 1960s

demand for greater rights to the city or le droit de la ville, Henri Lefebvre's trenchant phrase

that played a key part in mobilizing the May 1968 uprising in Paris, are given new life in

these writings. Especially significant here and also noted in chapter 7 are Raymond Rocco's

concrete studies of associational rights claims and situated spatial practices in the Latino

communities of Los Angeles.

III.1.c. Definitions for technopolis

Technopoles are startlingly different from the cutting edge cities of the industrial era.

Clean and populated mainly by an affluent elite, they have little in common with Manchester

and other gritty nineteenth century industrial cities with their pollution and wretched slum

areas hidden from the grand boulevards and fashionable sections frequented by the rich

(Engels in LeGates & Stout, 1998: 47). The technopole phenomenon has not suddenly

sprouted by some kind of accident. They are deliberate attempts, by farseeing public and

86

private actors, to help control and guide some exceedingly fundamental transformations that

have recently begun to affect society, economy and territory and are beginning to redefine the

conditions and processes of regional and local development.

Generally, technopoles are planned developments. Some are pure private sector real

estate investments, and these happen to be among the most numerous but least interesting. A

significant number, however, have resulted from various kinds of cooperation or partnership

between the public and private sectors. They are promoted by central or regional local

governments, often in association with universities, together with the private companies that

occupy the resulting spaces. These technopoles, the more interesting ones, are invariably

more than just plots to rent. They also contain significant institutions of a quasi-public non-

profit type, such as universities or research institutes, which are specifically implanted there

in order to help in the generation of new information. For this the function of the technopole

is to generate the basic materials of the informational economy.

The effort to innovate and develop “the new”, very often takes the form of creating

and nurturing what we have called “technopoles.” A more precise definition is needed; under

this name we include various deliberate attempts to plan and promote, within one

concentrated area, technologically innovative, industrial-related production: technology parks,

science cities, technopolises and the like. Comprehension of the technopole phenomenon has

been so blurred by political, ideological and business biases that any serious study must start

from a careful empirical analysis of how these centers are created and developed, and of the

factors that account for their differential success, according to a set of criteria that must be

established at the start. Most of the older major metropolises, such as Paris and London,

remain among the major innovation and high technology centers of the world.

87

III.1.d. Variations of metropolitan cosmopolis

What are at issue are questions of coexistence, interaction and democracy.

How, in the light of these transformations, might civic life and civic space

be transformed in Istanbul? ... The modernizers – for whom the return of

the repressed culture, in any of its forms, is anathema – do not recognize

these questions, and consequently can provide no answer to them. (Robins

and Aksoy 1995: 230)

Other interpretations to point out here would be conceptual contributions by Soja in

his “Thirdspace” category. For him, thirdspace may also be called alternative space for

alternative projects by the civil society. He goes on to argue that activists have been

attempting for creating suitable platforms for their expressions since ‘80s and it is after ‘90s

that they have realized virtual platforms may well serve their interests. They use webboards

per se for their announcements regarding preparatory meetings and brainstorming sessions via

the net. This method enables access of thousands of people even in metropolitan areas where

it is hard to focus on any issue. Some support without any need for mobility in different

aspects of say, the recycling event, while others move on to spread the word. Many outspoken

events and gatherings in the name of “anti-globalization movements” have used the same

tactic to get a move on throughout the planet. Frederic Jameson notes in Postmodernism, or,

the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism that the cultural conditions of postmodernity have

created the need for cognitive maps to link our ideological positions with our imaginations,

and hence they enable social transformations to take place.

88

The other side of the coin covers terrorist attacks that are organized in a thirdspace

approach. Even though these attacks have forced many states to increase their security and

control measures both over the net and in terms of police forces, worse comes to worse. Sept.

11 being the ground zero limit, terrorists escape all control mechanisms to ride into buildings

in trucks loaded with explosives34.

III.1.e. Reflections for Exopolis

Criticisms of the growing hyperreality of cities s well as physical spaces in general

exist in many academic writings, significantly touched by Soja for Los Angeles, Eco &

Kunstler for Las Vegas and McKenzie for Disney and Florida. In their surmise, America’s

cities are entertainment if Europe has amusement parks. US is a great example for fabrication

of history of a historiless country and she is filled with cities that imitate a city. Sorkin

develops this line of argument and claims that a city is remade in the image of TV. Computer

matrix and the space of the city analogy is more entertaining, however and has been

introduced by Boyer (1996). Boyer is flabergasted when he says what is happening in the

space behind the videoscreen is more interesting than what’s happening in front of it. Virtual

environments have become part of everyday reality in that the past of the city is a simulation.

The city invents and reinvents itself, therefore it is not static and can not be authentic (Light in

Crang et al, 1999: 108-130). It is true that virtual and physical environments are not

equivalent, but the interaction between them helps us conceive which chemical reactions add

up to construct the city of individuals. As the spectrum of difference between these

environments narrow down, technologies will win the battle of reality in cities.

34 Note the last bombings in Istanbul that occurred in November 2003.

89

III.1.f. Fractal city

One of the most apparent examples for this type of city is Los Angeles with her absent

center and randomly distributed working areas. Her micro-centers which include small-scale

industries, shops and recreational areas surround the residential areas. Her beaches are lined

with luxury houses away from any main spot around the region. Life goes on travelling on

highways; one can easily notice a mobile living sociology developed. Surprisingly enough,

however, LA was not the city where recreational vehicles (RV) first appeared. RV

communities are most frequently seen around the state of Texas. With their high mobility

features, these vehicles provide a never-ending holiday adventure to their owners. Some

families with spouses around the age of 35-54 prefer this lifestyle since the sense of belonging

is replaced by the concept of world citizen. These populations are generally used to fractal

environments where they have to travel long-distances to meet their needs. They are lovers of

nature, but at the same time enjoy what new technology has to offer them. Their RV has all

the technological luxury they ask for. The main target group of RV maufacturers are baby-

boomers that amount to around 30 million in US; their pottential target group are Generation

X’ers of ages around 21-35 years. RV communities are good examples for how mobility

provides freer lives with the priviledge of communicating in your own time.

III.1.g. Simcities

One project to recall here is that of ART+COM called the ‘Cyber-city’ for which a

simulation exists in Berlin National Museum, conceptualized by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

The museum houses four modern thinkers whose philosophies are assumed to be antipodes to

each other (Boyer, 1996: 67). Four concepts are symbolized in this work-in-progress:

adventure, hope, utopia and catastrophe. A red pyramid, the symbol of fire, represents

90

adventure and is controlled by Willem Flusser. A green cube, by Joseph Wiesenbaum,

symbolizes the house of hope. Marvin Minsky occupies a hexedra of blue water, which is

supposedly symbolic of utopia. Paul Virilio is housed in a yellow sphere of air, standing for

catastrophe.

There is a distinction between the Latin and Greek terms for the city. In the Latin

model, the primary term designates the inhabitant himself –civis- while in the Greek model,

the primary term designates an abstract entity or Idea – polis. This is the reason for us to

introduce two distinct terms: media-city and media-polis (Leach, 2002: 288). This new

discursive context remains anonymous for much of the time. We can not say, in most cases,

who or what is behind such a slogan, opinion poll, public report or scientific information. The

messages are transmitted continuously, but their senders remain ‘out-of-context’. We are thus

faced with a mediatic scene whose discourses are off-screen. This is apparently an imposed

condition, due to the extra-territorial condition of our metropolitan global milieu.

We have therefore evolved from an ancient society organised around the image of

power – a secular or sacred power which attempts to impose its discourse and thereby

reterritorialise society – to a heterogeneous metropolitan and chaotic context haunted by a

multitude of discursive fragments which attempt to redefine and reproduce as well as possible

the desires and aspirations of its public. If, in totalitarian societies, the repressive forces of the

political police control private communications in order to eradicate any individual attempt to

think freely and territorialisingly, by contrast, in a metropolitan society, all metropolitan

institutions try to find out and reveal, by whatever means, our very desires and most intimate

dreams, and then offer them up for sale. One such example is the utilisation of contemporary

means of communication, the Internet included, as highly sophisticated tools for learning

91

about and controlling tastes, interests and social interactions; all this without any warning

whatsoever. Electronic cultural spying is most of the time installed by default in our systems

of communication. This process of erasure and replacement of social actors and robotised

systems, whose goal is to sell back to us our own image, generates a diluted society – a

society which represents itself through what Leach calls catabolic signifiers.

We are faced today with the ever growing manipulation of reality through

technologies of simulation, with the capacity to copy/paste/modify our symbols, images,

discourses, signs and living matter ad infinitum, to bring about, in other words, a form of

generalised cloning. We are faced today with a catabolic and extra-territorial society which

produces and amplifies an anabolic discursive milieu.

Within the strangeness of this new milieu, the only kind of referentiality which still

remains verifiable is our own personal identity. But this last refuge is itself not secure: this

milieu changes us continually by imposing its laws. We are asked to act more and more

catabolic and extra-territorial persons who produce an amplified and anabolic discursive

milieu mentioned above. Without limiting ourselves to a simple referential illusion, in the

case of territorialities, or to a biographical illusion, in the case of catabolic identities- to refer

to the concepts introduced by Barthes and Bourdieu – all that remains is the possibility of

constructing, as free subjects, our own subjectivities as an expression of our true and authentic

identities.

Yet, we must recognise, along with Michel Serres, that existence itself could have a

double nature: parallel to the Heideggerian vision of being – Dasein, “being there” – there

could be a second nature, which coincides with the virtual. This nature is revealed by the

92

etymology of the word “existence” itself, which comes from the Latin ex-sistere: “being

placed outside of”.

This double nature could be perceived as both beneficial and dynamic. Within such a

context, the metropolis could be seen at the same time as a territorialising and extra-

territorialising milieu. To study this double nature, the MIT Media Lab has initiated the Star

Logo project in which turtles represent dwellers in the metropolis. After the software

programme is simulated in different parts of the world, they hope to acquire intricate results

that will provide hints for governance of cities35. Another sim-city project is cybertown.com,

but this non-grounded virtual city placed as an idealized urban metaphor has entertainment

and commercial purposes more than an aspiration for research.

III.2. Urban theories that have constructed academic background

The traditional city is fused with cumulative layers of development and

decay, in which the continuity and transformation of urbanism are

embedded. Because a textual structure has dominated the study of cities,

the culturally unique yet universal structure of vision has been

overshadowed. Are there other ways to assess the life of the city, its

successes and failures, its transformation and recoveries? What kinds of

urbanism would these studies predict or suggest for the 21st century?

(Davidson, 1996: 21)

35 www.media.mit.edu/starlogo.home.htm, accessed 15 January 2004- The Media in transition website of MIT featuring the Star Logo project.

93

Not only are urban forms described as sites of simulation standing on the spaces of

older more authentic cities, but commentators describe the cities as a fall into mediation,

drawing analogies between cities and media. From Jean Baudrillard’s remark that the

shopping mall resembles “a giant montage factory” (Baudrillard 1995 (1981): 76), to Michael

Sorkin’s observation that “the structure of this city is a lot like television” (Sorkin 1992b: xi),

to Edward Soja’s comments on “real-reel life” (Soja, 1996:238) the mediated city is a

common motif. This motif criticizes the efeects of media on cities, suggesting that “television

harbingers a totally recast public realm, a city remade in the image of TV” (Sorkin 1992a:

71). To update such an academic narrative for the information age, Christine Boyer has drawn

an analogy between the computer matrix and the space of the city (Boyer 1996: 9), a parallel

popularized in cyberpunk science fiction (Gibson, 1984; Stephenson, 1992).

Cities are becoming dematerialized in people’s imagination. As Sorkin puts it, recent

years have seen the emergence of a wholly new kind of city, a city without a place attached to

it” (Sorkin 1992b: xi). According to him, rather than the disappearance of the city, the decline

of reality with cities having little connection to their local geographies is at hand. This claim

points at new urbanism.

III.2.a.Currents of urban studies:

(Eade & Mele, 2002: 5)

First current: housing, environmental protection, social inclusiveness, amelioration of

inequality

Second current: Jameson and Fraser- the meaning and impact of commodification

spread through everyday life and culture.

Third current: Hi-tech society – Marxist analysis sees it as the overwhelming event of

the present period

94

Fourth current: to be explored while it is being constructed within the boundaries of

the fourth public sphere36

III.2.b. The Chicago School

The rise of Chicago school of urban social sciences dates back to the end of WWII

when the master trends of the period were industrialization, bureaucratization, and

urbanization. In order to understand the social life of Chicago, immigration must be added to

these trends. Social researchers at the University of Chicago in the 1940s who envisioned

Modern cities as “Great Communities” made up of hundreds of interrelated small groups is

the most basic explanation of the Chicago School (Baran & Davis, 2000:102). Advocates of

this school opposed marketplace of ideas notions and argued that unregulated mass media

inevitably served the interests and tastes of large or socially dominant groups. Small, weak,

pluralistic groups would be either neglected or denigrated. This perspective also held that

ruthless elites could use media as a means of gaining personal political power. The empirical

inductive approach diffused throughout the various social science disciplines at the University

of Chicago in large part because much of the research was interdisciplinary by design. This

interdisciplinary, substantive focus was formalized in the Social Science Research Committee

at the University in 1923.

The Chicago school of urban sociology was intellectually grounded on ideas derived

from ecology, concepts such as competition, invasion, succession, segregation and

equilibrium, infusing their discussions of urban social structure, process and problems. The

reliance on ecological concepts and biological analogy imbued studies by Park, Burgess, 36 Fourth public sphere: people make space, providing a link between metaphorical space and politics (Isin,

2000:267) Note the first three in the introduction part.

95

McKenzie and their co-workers with a pervasive organicism that today stands as one of the

primary hallmarks of the Chicago School. Yet, naturalizing the forces of urbanization also

removed human agency from city growth and development, and depoliticized processes of

local decision making. This is despite the fact that Chicago’s development trajectory relied

upon a tremendous transformation and appropriation of nature, and its industrialization

generated environmental hazards and toxic pollutions of unprecedented proportions.

To start with, highly centralized, bounded city of the Chicago school of urbanism not

only precedes, but also lies in contrast to the suburbanization and decentralization claimed by

the LA school. Alihan provides a clear criticism of the LA school as he points out that no real

city can also serve as an ideal type that totally exemplifies core social processes (Eade, John

& Mele, 2002: 163).

More recently speaking, the shift to post-industrial society has caused more

interdisciplinary perspectives to emerge in the city. Urban policy issue is at stake now.

Governments, not only work together with civil society, but they also benefit from the know-

how of university research.

III.2.c.Californian School

The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-

culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as Wired and Mondo 2000 as

well as the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and many others. The new faith has been

embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, thirty-something capitalists, hip academics,

futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not

been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended

96

adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the ‘infobahn’, cutting-edge artists and

academics have been championing the ‘post-human’ philosophy developed by the West

Coast’s Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian

Ideology appears to be complete.

On superficial reading, the writings of the Californian ideologists are an amusing

cocktail of Bay Area cultural wackiness and in-depth analysis of the latest developments in

the hi-tech arts, entertainment and media industries. Their politics appear to be impeccably

libertarian - they want information technologies to be used to create a new Jeffersonian

democracy in cyberspace where every individual would be able to express themselves freely.

Implacable in its certainties, the Californian Ideology offers a fatalistic vision of the natural

and inevitable triumph of the hi-tech free market - a vision which is blind to racism, poverty

and environmental degradation and which has no time to debate alternatives.

Despite its claims to universality, the Californian Ideology was developed by a group

of people living within one specific country following a particular choice of socio-economic

and technological development. Their eclectic blend of conservative economics and hippie

libertarianism reflects the history of the West Coast - and not the inevitable future of the rest

of the world. The hi-tech neo-liberals proclaim that there is only one road forward. Yet, in

reality, debate has never been more possible or more necessary. The Californian model is only

one among many.

This ideology rejects notions of community and of social progress and seeks to chain

humanity to the rocks of economic and technological fatalism. Once upon a time, West Coast

hippies played a key role in creating our contemporary vision of social liberation. As a

consequence, feminism, drug culture, gay liberation and ethnic identity have, since the 1960s,

97

ceased to be marginal issues. Ironically, it is now California which has become the centre of

the ideology which denies the relevance of these new social subjects.

They claim that it is now necessary for us to assert our own future - if not in

circumstances of our own choosing. After twenty years, we need to reject once and forever

the loss of nerve expressed by post-modernism. We can do more than ‘play with the pieces’

created by the avant-gardes of the past.

According to their vision, we need to debate what kind of hypermedia suit our vision

of society - how do we create the interactive products and on-line services we want to use, the

kind of computers we like and the software we find most useful. We need to find ways to

think socially and politically about the machines we develop. While learning from the can-do

attitude of the Californian individualists, we also must recognise the potentiality of

hypermedia can never be solely realised through market forces. We need an economy which

can unleash the creative powers of hi-tech artisans. Only then can we fully grasp the

Promethean opportunities as humanity moves into the next stage of modernity.

In this version of the Californian Ideology, each member of the ‘virtual class’ is

promised the opportunity to become a successful hi-tech entrepreneur. Information

technologies, so the argument goes, empower the individual, enhance personal freedom, and

radically reduce the power of the nation-state. Existing social, political and legal power

structures will wither away to be replaced by unfettered interactions between autonomous

individuals and their software. Indeed, attempts to interfere with these elemental

technological and economic forces, particularly by the government, merely rebound on those

who are foolish enough to defy the primary laws of nature. The restyled McLuhanites

vigorously argue that big government should stay off the backs of resourceful entrepreneurs

who are the only people cool and courageous enough to take risks. Indeed, attempts to

98

interfere with the emergent properties of technological and economic forces, particularly by

the government, merely rebound on those who are foolish enough to defy the primary laws of

nature. The free market is the sole mechanism capable of building the future and ensuring a

full flowering of liberty within the electronic circuits of Jeffersonian cyberspace. As in

Heinlein’s and Asimov’s sci-fi novels, the path forwards to the future seems to lie backwards

to the past.

The prophets of the Californian Ideology argue that only the cybernetic flows and

chaotic eddies of free markets and global communications will determine the future. Political

debate therefore, is a waste of breath. As neo-liberals, they assert that the will of the people,

mediated by democratic government through the political process, is a dangerous heresy

which interferes with the natural and efficient freedom to accumulate property. As

technological determinists, they believe that human social and emotional ties obstruct the

efficient evolution of the machine. Abandoning democracy and social solidarity, the

Californian Ideology dreams of a digital nirvana inhabited solely by liberal psychopaths.

Even if it is not in circumstances of their own choosing, it is now necessary for

Europeans to assert their own vision of the future. There are varying ways forward towards

the information society - and some paths are more desirable than others. In order to make an

informed choice, European digital artisans need to develop a more coherent analysis of the

impact of hypermedia than can be found within the ambiguities of the Californian Ideology.

The members of the European ‘virtual class’ must create their own distinctive self-identity.

This alternative understanding of the future starts from a rejection of any form of

social apartheid - both inside and outside cyberspace. Any programme for developing

hypermedia must ensure that the whole population can have access to the new on-line

services. In place of New Left or New Right anarchism, a European strategy for developing

99

the new information technologies must openly acknowledge the inevitability of some form of

mixed economy - the creative and antagonistic mix of state, corporate and d.i.y. initiatives.

The indeterminacy of the digital future is a result of the ubiquity of this mixed economy

within the modern world. No one knows exactly what the relative strengths of each

component will be, but collective action can ensure that no social group is deliberately

excluded from cyberspace.

A European strategy for the information age must also celebrate the creative powers of

the digital artisans. Because their labour cannot be deskilled or mechanised, members of the

“virtual class” exercise great control over their own work. Rather than succumbing to the

fatalism of the Californian Ideology, we should embrace the Promethean possibilities of

hypermedia. Within the limitations of the mixed economy, digital artisans are able to invent

something completely new - something which has not been predicted in any sci-fi novel.

These innovative forms of knowledge and communications will sample the achievements of

others, including some aspects of the Californian Ideology. It is now impossible for any

serious movement of social emancipation not to include demands for feminism, drug culture,

gay liberation, ethnic identity and other issues pioneered by West Coast radicals. Similarly,

any attempt to develop hypermedia within Europe will need some of the entrepreneurial zeal

and can-do attitude championed by the Californian New Right. Yet, at the same time, the

development of hypermedia means innovation, creativity and invention. There are no

precedents for all aspects of the digital future.

As pioneers of the new, the digital artisans need to reconnect themselves with the

theory and practice of productive art. They are not just employees of others - or even would-

be cybernetic entrepreneurs. They are also artist-engineers - designers of the next stage of

modernity. Drawing on the experience of the Saint- Simonists and Constructivists, the digital

100

artisans can create a new machine aesthetic for the information age. For instance, musicians

have used computers to develop purely digital forms of music, such as jungle and techno.

Interactive artists have explored the potentiality of CD-rom technologies, as shown by the

work of Anti- Rom. The Hypermedia Research Centre has constructed an experimental virtual

social space called J’s Joint37. In each instance, artist-engineers are trying to push beyond the

limitations of both the technologies and their own creativity. Above all, these new forms of

expression and communications are connected with the wider culture. The developers of

hypermedia must reassert the possibility of rational and conscious control over the shape of

the digital future. Unlike the elitism of the Californian Ideology, the European artist-engineers

must construct a cyberspace which is inclusive and universal. Now is the time for the rebirth

of the Modern.

Present circumstances favour making luxury national. Luxury will become

useful and moral when it is enjoyed by the whole nation. The honour and

advantage of employing directly, in political arrangements, the progress of

exact sciences and the fine arts...have been reserved for our century

(St.Simon, 1975: 35).

III.3. The fourfold by Heidegger

III.3. a. Gestell by Heidegger

It is appropriate at this stage to switch our gears and to see what in Heidegger’s

conception of technological modernity blocks the unfolding of a Jacobs’ like enthusiasm for

development38. Richard Dienst identified four currently proposed philosophical translations

37 The Hypermedia Research Centre is a research group composed of academics, artists, artisans, designers and writers. Their website is: http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/ accessed 26 April 2004 38 Which may perhaps tentatively be identified as proto-modern, even though Jacobs is decidedly anti-postmodern when it comes to the last stages of capitalist city-form

101

for Gestell: enframing, installation, emplacement and construct, to which Jameson adds

plantation39.

For Heidegger (1978) the essence of modern technology is denoted by the German

word Gestell. Gestell means in German “skeleton”, frame or shelf. Note, in passing, that the

word Untergestell means chassis and infrastructure40.

But Heidegger uses the word Gestell in a new sense stemming from the two parts

composing the word in German: the prefix “Ge” and the word “Stelle” derived from the verb

“stellen”. “Ge” in German is the prefix that denotes reunion, gathering, or collecting and

reassembling41. Stelle and stellen have a variety of meanings. The noun means place, spot,

location. The verb means generically put, place, stand, set, arrange, regulate, provide, order.

Thus, Gestell means literally the reunion of the placing, arranging, regulating,

ordering. Of what, and how? And what has such a reunion to do with technology? First,

Heidegger suggests that the essence of technology is not something technical, i.e. linked to

the more or less fascinating technical aspects of highly sophisticated tools for production,

transport, communication, or power generation.

The essence of technology as a phenomenon lies beyond the appearances. Specifically,

Heidegger (1977) approaches what lies behind the captivating appearances of modern

technology from two slightly different angles.

In his 1949 Bremer lectures, Heidegger (1994: 76-78) starts by remarking that despite

the power of modern technology of shortening distances, things remain for us still far. “All

the mastering of farness does not deliver any proximity”, rather we experience the world as an 39 In the antique dual sense of colony and industrial plant 40 Again meant as a light physical support 41 Think of Ge-sellschaft = society; or Ge-meinschaft = community; or, the example introduced by Heidegger himself, Gebirge = mountain (Bergen) chain

102

undifferentiated “without distance”. But such a “without distance” has definitely a place: it

constitutes the stock or standing reserve (Bestand) of all what is available (present-at-hand). It

is because of this “distortion” in what we encounter as real, things, people, the world, that

“machines created by the technology can only shorten distances, but at the same time do not

bring about any proximity, precisely because the essence of the technology does not give

access to proximity and farness”, but just undifferentiated, average availability (Heidegger,

1994: 95).

Gestell refers to the ways through which the ordering and setting up unveils what is

extant as standing reserve of resources (including human) made available for future

deployment. We are now in the position of looking at the links between Gestell, or the

essence of modern technology as arrived at by Heidegger, and some key aspects of the

modern corporate information highways. The emphasis put by Heidegger on the enchained

processes of ordering highlights a paramount aspect of how infrastructure is conceived today

by the management literature. Networks are not only there to facilitate communication, but to

reduce costs of transacting, in supporting the alignment, disintermediation and interlocking of

business processes within and between organizations. This is precisely the phenomenon of the

intertwining of networks and computers as a layer on which enterprise packages can run to

implement the linking of business processes (ERP) and the management of the workflow.

What is the essence of the danger, then? It is that Gestell comes to represent what "is"

and what "is not". The danger lies in the fact that Gestell delivers "representations" of all that

subsists, and these become the "real world". If one can talk about the domination of

technology, one should speak of "the domination of the essence of the technology that orders

in its appropriating even and precisely the representations man makes about it... The essence

of technology, the Gestell, carries out its own simulation" (Heidegger, 1994: 76-78). The

103

outcome of such representing and simulation is the essence of the danger, able to encompass

any discourse pro or con the technology and its effects (see on all these aspects the thorough

analysis of Kallinikos, 1995).

More radically, technology works outside the sphere of means and ends. It is not an

object, or a tool among many. Rather, it is the hidden trait of all that today is “real”. In sum,

“Heidegger's concern is the human distress caused by the technological understanding of

being, rather than the destruction caused by specific technologies... The danger, then, is not

the destruction of nature or culture but certain totalizing kinds of practices - a levelling of our

understanding of being” (Dreyfus, 1993: 7). How to deal with “the danger”? Again,

Heidegger avoids falling into the “easy” role of being a romantic and reactionary critic of

technology (as a mistaken and superficial reading of his works on the subject has led some to

conclude).

Releasement, that is a comportment toward technology which expresses a “yes” and a

“no” simultaneously. “We let technical devices enter our daily life, and at the same time leave

them outside” (Heidegger, 1994: 50). A new sense of responsibility. The traditional notion of

responsibility means to be in control of what comes from us. Releasement, instead, implies

responsibility in accepting what is largely beyond our control, the unforeseen. It is right at

that point that the 21st century city dweller is left in awe, trying to decide whether to pay bills

over at the cyber-cafe next block or hire a virtual assistant to deal with the unpleasant daily

routine.

III.3.b.The city as four by Schirmacher

According to Schirmacher and his interpellations from Holderlin, the phenomenology

of the city, which wants to be more than cultural criticism, must not only arise from

architecture, town planning, sociology, but also art, film and new media. The city as geviert

104

(four) sketches the context for an authentic theory directed towards the practice of the

metropolis. The philosophical perception is still to a large extent blind and has Holderlins

dictating word of “geviert from sky and earth, the Divine and the Mortals” to the place of the

X set. The geviert thinking is lived intuition, which transcend the bivalent logic of the

everyday life discourses likewise like the dialectic of synthetic thinking. The experience of

the raised one, with fascinating inspiration, which is imperturbable intuition let in into the

geviert, works at the same time emotionally, intellectually, physically, and socially. As

esthetic-ethical experience and authentic language activity- the geviert is by no means

utopian, but as inconspicuously persistent in its possibility for humans. The areas - aspects -

dimensions – basic tones of the gevierts (the earth, the sky, the divine and the mortal ones)

need each other and are always untrue as isolated. The city as geviert sketches the context for

an authentic theory such as practice of the metropolis.

As for phenomenology of the gevierts; Schirmacher touches on the new city as dream

or nightmare. The modern dream of released living changed modern cities to a nightmare in

the post office. The metropolitan cities disintegrate increasingly into a center, which are

depopulated ever more, and a periphery, which rampantly grow cancer-like. Whether

pedestrian precinct or auto+fair city, which remains of the protecting rectangle or inviting

circle, is often only one daily window blind for business and shopping, after break-down of

the darkness and dangerously. Biomorph instead of anthropmorph develop the city

landscapes. To update the article which has extrapolated the scenario of the 1990s, one must

add in that, the periphery remain as housing and settlement area for metropoles; however, the

centers are extended, gentrified and morphed into living as well as working spaces. One

prominent example is Istanbul with her extended milieux in compressed time.

105

His second phenomenological approach is marked as abundance instead of scarceness.

We do not need anything, because we have always already everything! The successful ones

and the unsuccessful ones profit both from the city, from the leakages and the time lags come

the necessary resources to survive. The identity of a city is based likewise very much on its

acoustics as on their sketch. Cities grow from their own landscape; they remain not in the

province, but open to the width and to the adventure. Packing density, proximity of people,

the tolerant attention of the differences like the natural invitation to networks, carry out an

ambivalent life technology, which is peculiar to us, mortal ones. It is coined/shaped

depending on variety and stubborness, inevitably on others and nevertheless always also in

concern around own. No city in the country exhibits the necessary dialectic of attraction and

repulsion, of reality and simulation. The juxtaposition is well introjected towards the end of

his writing. He claims that Telepresence is offered to us, while we need the straight

complexity of society. He concludes with a hope: Which theoreticians understand, the

architects can build. However, the life art, which he so dearly tends, is not necessarily in the

hands and minds of theoreticians, architects or city planners. Especially in the case of

cosmopoles, reknowned for their worldwide activities, real-time surfaces are bombarded with

amorphous, incomprehensible structures. Hyperspaces, with their inherently diverse

characteristics, carry time-unbound potentials for reconstructing a new dynamics of the

geviert.

III.3.c. Fourfold as it interprets today

The 'fourfold' is a conceptual scheme containing four elements: earth, sky, mortals and

gods. The gathering together of these four elements makes up the ontological meaning of each

thing. The earth and sky, which represent nature, supply the matter for each thing. The

mortals and gods, which represent history, provide the meaningful context in which each

106

thing becomes part of a web of relations. It represents a departure from the model in which a

single entity radiates meaning to its surroundings and thereby forms the center of meaning all

by itself. The Internet may be considered in a sense “letting be”. In the Internet too, as the

unified, universal, technically produced electromagnetic dimension, the “sudden flash of

being” could grant a sharing of the world by mortals with one another. This could very well

occur before the gaze of the gods, beneath the sky and on the land and the oceans. For

utopians, the new technically produced dimension of the Internet could be apppropriated to

become a unified crossing for the play of world regions towards each other.

Our question today is a different one: Not merely whether a Heideggerian urbanism is

conceivable, but whether in the light of what has been said, something like a Heideggerian

postmodern city can be imagined. Our sources of energy- cybernetic flows of information- are

radically different from those that marked the age of modernity: Can one imagine ways of

fetishizing these new sources of energy, of making them into icons of power that could then

be somehow incorporated into the postmodern city of the future? Jacobs’ delight in perpetual

development and expansion of new needs and new production can be reconciled by way of a

certain modernism, with the Heideggerian abhorrence of technological modernity. Is that

relevant for us now that postmodernity and postmodernization is part of late history?

Here the concept of critical regionalism introduced by Frampton seems to be an

accountable proposal. He attempts towards valuing both technological means and the

propinquity of place as positive forces in history. This approach, however, may cause

philosophical confusion since it relies alternately upon the opposing assumptions of critical

theory, which are modern, and those of Heidegger, which are postmodern. To solve this

confusion, Bruno Latour’s nonmodern thesis may be fit. He argues that we have never been

modern at all. In other words, modernity has been so powerful, and sometimes

environmentally destructive that it has concealed our existence within nature.

107

Let’s try to apply this thought to how the world really works. Citizens with different

positions are actually quasi subjects and objects (Moore, 2001: 135). At one moment, we have

the power to control conditions, at another we are ordered about by the digital logic of

machines that determine health care benefits, or telephone bills. In such a world where places

show up as placemaking is practiced, it is hard to distinguish between the qualities of a place

and the technologies involved in their construction. It is right at that point that I would

propose virtual environments to deal with the nonhuman phases of our lives. This may easily

be turned to a contractual basis to leave more time for individual leisure outside of work.

III.4. The dual city by Sassen

The combination of geographic dispersal of economic activities and system integration

which lies at the heart of the current economic era has contributed to new or expanded central

functions and the complexity of transactions has raised the demand by firms for highly

specialized services. Rather than becoming obsolete due to the dispersal made possible by

information technologies, a critical number of cities:

a) concentrate on command functions;

b) are post-industrial production sites for the leading industries of our period, finance

and specialized services;

c) are national or transnational marketplaces where firms and governments can buy

financial instruments and specialized services.

How many such cities there are, what is their shifting hierarchy, how novel a development

they represent, are all subjects for debate. But there is growing agreement about the fact of a

108

network of major cities both in the North and in the South that function as centers for the

coordination, control and servicing of global capital.

III.4.a. Demapping the city

The most powerful of these new economic geographies of centrality at the inter-urban

level binds the major international financial and business centers: New York, London, Tokyo,

Paris, Frankfurt, Zurich, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Sydney, Hong Kong, among others. But

this geography now also includes cities such as Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Bangkok, Taipei

and Mexico City. The intensity of transactions among these cities, particularly through the

financial markets, transactions in services, and investment has increased sharply, and so have

the orders of magnitude involved. At the same time, there has been a sharpening inequality in

the concentration of strategic resources and activities between each of these cities and others

in the same country.

Alongside these new global and regional hierarchies of cities, is a vast territory that

has become increasingly peripheral, increasingly excluded from the major economic

processes that fuel economic growth in the new global economy. A multiplicity of formerly

important manufacturing centers and port cities have lost functions and are in decline, not

only in the less developed countries but also in the most advanced economies. This is yet

another meaning of economic globalization.

But also inside global cities we see a new geography of centrality and marginality. The

downtowns of cities and metropolitan business centers receive massive investments in real

estate and telecommunications while low-income city areas are starved for resources. Highly

educated workers see their incomes rise to unusually high levels while low- or medium-

skilled workers see theirs sink. Financial services produce superprofits while industrial

109

services barely survive. These trends are evident, with different levels of intensity, in a

growing number of major cities in the developed world and increasingly in some of the

developing countries that have been integrated into the global financial markets (Sassen 1996:

chapter 2).

III.4.b. The impact of telematics on cities

Telematics and globalization have emerged as fundamental forces in the

reorganization of economic space. This reorganization ranges from the spatial virtualization

of a growing number of economic activities to the reconfiguration of the geography of the

built environment for economic activity. Whether in electronic space or in the geography of

the built environment, this reorganization involves institutional and structural changes.

City users have often constituted strategic spaces of the city in their image:

emblematic is the so called hyper-space of international business, with its airports built by

famous architects, world class office buildings and hotels, state of the art telematic

infrastructure, and private security forces. They contribute to change the social morphology of

the city and to constitute what Martinotti (1993) calls the metropolis of second generation, the

city of late modernism. The new city of city users is a fragile one, whose survival and

successes are centered on an economy of high productivity, advanced technologies,

intensified exchanges.

On the one hand, this raises a question of what the city is for international business

people, and what their sense of civic responsibility might be. On the other hand, there is the

difficult task of establishing whether a city that functions as an international business center

does in fact recover the costs involved in being such a center: the costs involved in

110

maintaining a state of the art business district, and all it requires, from advanced

communications facilities to top level security (and “world-class culture”).

The massive trends towards the spatial dispersal of economic activities at the

metropolitan, national and global level which we associate with globalization have

contributed to a demand for new forms of territorial centralization of top-level management

and control operations. National and global markets as well as globally integrated

organizations require central places where the work of globalization gets done. Further,

information industries require a vast physical infrastructure containing strategic nodes with

hyper-concentration of facilities; we need to distinguish between the capacity for global

transmission/communication and the material conditions that make this possible. Finally, even

the most advanced information industries have a work process that is at least partly place-

bound because of the combination of resources it requires even when the outputs are

hypermobile.

111

CHAPTER IV

Speed, political speed, politics of speed in metaphorical space

IV.1.Risk society vs. technological culture

Science figures prominently in all risk scholarship (including Risk Society), because

science provides the language, perhaps the only legitimate one, with which to carry on

arguments about risk and danger. Beck says that science and experts are "dethroned" by their

own success. As science progresses, it simultaneously provides the logic, evidence, and

conceptual tools for its own debunking. “In its progress, science has just lost the truth--as a

schoolboy loses his milk money....Science has changed from an activity in the service of truth

to an activity without truth....Science is becoming human. It is packed with errors and

mistakes.”42 More concretely, the probabilistic nature of modern risks presents special

problems in assigning blame and in apportioning justice. If we are all responsible, if

“everyone is cause and effect,” then there is no responsibility and there are no real causes.

The invisible, intangible nature of modern threats makes the problem all the fuzzier. In the

clouds of such ambiguity powerful organizations evade political accountability, promote more

risk production, and dismiss critics as irrational and emotional.

Beck suggests that we are moving out of an industrial modernity organized around the

distribution of scarce “goods” and entering a new phase of modernity, one where “bads”-risks

such as SARS, pollution, terrorism-will be the central organizing feature. Whereas in

industrial modernity, social class served to insulate certain segments of the population from

42 Refer to Ulrich Beck’s thoughts on the risk society in his book, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, published by Sage in 1992. The key contribution of this book is that it allows us to use its ideas about risk, danger, and society to create a theory of modernity.

112

the problem of scarcity, in our new modernity, these kinds of “global risks” will be more

egalitarian and difficult for the wealthy to avoid. As a result, Beck claims, in the risk society,

people will grow disenchanted with capitalism, science and technology, and other

foundational institutions of industrial modernity, leading to a populist, global movement to

address risk through other means.

While treating this issue, one can turn extremely pragmatic like Dewey when he refers

to the young population as promising future intellectuals who are capable of performing

analysis of the present to predict for the future. Another approach could be more similar to

Van Loon as he theorizes risk. In particular, he does a good job of exploring the strange

ontology of risk, explaining that a risk is always “becoming”. In other words, when a risk

manifests itself and becomes some effect in the material world, it is no longer a risk.

Understanding this about risks allows us to see how certain communities may be in positions

to take advantage of the inherent uncertainties surrounding risk, especially industrialists,

marketers, and scientists. In this sense, risks get perpetuated not just because the foundational

institutions of modernity create a lot of unintended consequences, but also because risks have

become a kind of industry in their own right. Take for example, the case of scientists and

other experts who work to quantify risk. The more they explore risks, the more questions this

raises, and the more risks present themselves. Our “technological culture” then depends on

these experts to find out more about these new risks, which in turn creates ever more, an

endless cycle. Van Loon's discussion of this dynamic, particularly in his four empirical case

studies43, shows how central the concept of risk really is to late modernity. The city within

this paradigm needs more specialized focus.

43 His studies may be reached in his book: Risk and Technological Culture: Towards a Sociology of Virulence (International Library of Sociology) published by Routledge in 2002.

113

One light of argument comes from urban thinkers like Townsend (2000: 98) who

claim that the new urban metabolism introduces syncoptic action and swift decision making

on the side of the urban flâneur. As cell phones become more and more geographically

aware of user location through Global Positioning System technology, a new level of

improvement adds to the on-the-fly decision making in and outside the city. This brings us

back to the bit-by-bit reconstruction of cities with totally decentralized networks of

individuals. The bit-by-bit phenomenon (Mitchell, 1999: 183) certainly slips the minds of city

planners; thus the official control mechanisms in the city are overridden by persistent risk

creators. Technological devices belonging to individuals, groups, or networks (taxi drivers per

se) ease life conditions up to a certain scale, but remain out-of-date in terms of risk prediction.

The micro-management of space has been placed by that of time lately.

A different light of argument, though not in any contrast to the former, come from

educational initiators. This light generally embarks upon the capitalist structure of the

postmetropolis and tries to create mechanisms of adaptation for the less advantaged suburban

youth. The summer camps and after-school tutorial programs aim at sharpening skills of the

young generation so that the technological culture to be achieved is more or less evenly

distributed among the society. A 16 year-old suburban kid, who goes to a public school with

insufficient number of computer terminals, gets to learn web-design during summer from

high-profile experts of the field. In developing countries, this realm is usually undertaken by

NGOs or civil partners subheaded by IT companies. Not so much to be considered a long

term investment as tailors of the technological culture in the 21st century are some 10-15

years younger than the yuppies of the late 20th century.

114

IV.2.Accidents vs. desires

Do not think one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the

thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to

reality -and not its retreat into the forms of representation- that possesses

revolutionary force. (Foucault in McWhorter, 1999: 27)

How much of a revolutionary force humankind has in store for the 21st century

technological mechanisms will determine the impact and volume of accidents unexpected.

There are certainly other lacking factors to be added into the magical mix. Bentley (1999: 25)

discusses the necessity of desire in human existence and adds that artists must be involved in

the transformations of cities and urban change.

At this crucial instance, the third line of urbanism must be closely monitored. In

general terms, it takes its starting point from the conviction that modern cities not only offer

the articulation of utopian desires, but also provide possibilities for catastrophes. The

production of a clean, pure space that involves masculinist desires goes back to the time of

Corbusier. Now time has come to consider possibilities for accidents in a city of impurity

(Bingaman 2001:55). Persistent fantasies about modern cities are over. Our vision in this

regard should be post-apocalyptic. During the close of the decade, cyberspace became the

utopian space, or has it?

The horizontal / vertical juxtaposition for the city has, in the first instance, male

/female; in other words gender-related attributions including “the city as whore and virgin”.

115

Vladimir Toporov, a Russian scholar, has recoined this understanding to arrive at an

intriguing terminal: that the vertical city is open for the extenuation of the female territory,

allowing more chance in the city. However, this regeneration of chance also signals the arrival

of more risks to be encountered. These risks may well be assumed to create deeper spaces;

thus focusing in on the electronic fiber challenges. This assumption today, does not turn in to

the ‘Crash’ effect as in the movie with the same title, but has its promises for Agamben’s

‘homo- sacer’44 of the 21st century.

It is without a doubt that hyper-space introduces hyper-surface which is inherently

diverse in nature and becoming. This quality brings to the fore the posthuman agency,

liberated from Cartesian thought; hence liberated from the body. Many scholars that embark

upon the ‘cult city’ agree in one stance: The ontological assertion of being is supported in the

cult setting. The cult city also regards a sense of totality which in return creates a wish for

immortality. Cult city is violence itself (Eradam, 2004: conference notes); however the desire

for being there at the focal point of competing interests is so inviting that the probability of

accident and danger is ignored. This may be called a play of contradictions which entertains

the human mind in a contemporary ‘space of deviation’.

IV.3.Fast world vs. slow world

Among the affluent within the fast world, reterritorialization results from colonizing

and invading spaces that can be given both social meaning and spatial identity (Knox in

Johnston et al., 2002: 339). Perhaps the most dramatic examples of reterritorialization are

those derived from the lived experience of low-income transnational migrants, exiles and

44 Ref. to Agamben’s metaphor of concentration camps in his book Homo sacer: The Sovereign Power and Bare life where he points at a new urban space in which laws can not be applied

116

refugees. Within world cities, such groups are able to establish new networks and new

cultural practices that define new spaces for daily life. In addition to the transformation and

adaptation of old neighborhoods and obsolete socio-cultural spaces within consolidating

ethnic enclaves, this involves the emergence of otherwise marginalized voices and alternate

representations. These voices and representations can be carried over into the host society and

carried back into the homeland. The former, not only contributes to the cosmopolitanism of

world cities, but also has the potential (realized only in a few world cities- London, NY, San

Fransisco, Los Angeles and Sydney) to foster distinctive and innovative multicultural spaces-

the latest phase in the sociospatial dialectic of global metropolitanism (Knox, ibid).

Harvey insists that it is the intensity of experience of time-space compression that

distinguishes the conditions of postmodernity – all local economies have been incorporated

into a global pattern of commodity exchange, and local systems of meanings subsumed within

global information networks, with the result that multiple and compound geographies tend to

be erased (Dear, 2000: 86). The erasure of these geographies serves as a signal for living

spaces with extreme conditions.

Most obviously, online meeting places insulate you from physical risk. You can not be

beaten up by those who take violent exception to your views. There are no muggers, no cops

with billy clubs. This sometimes creates the ground that would not occur otherwise; in Santa

Monica, California, under the name of PEN civic network. PEN is accessible both from

private homes and offices and from kiosks in public places and has provided a congenital,

nonthreatening place for the homeless population and their more fortunate fellow citizens to

open up a dialogue (Mitchell 2000:87). It also marks a step forward in terms of slow world-

fast world cooperation in a virtual platform of seeming commonality.

117

IV.4. Utopia, heterotopia, dystopia

What interest Foucault in the lecture on other spaces, is neither space as a

mathematical and geometric entity45, nor space as a fantasmatic and psychological category46,

but that space which “draws us out of ourselves,” where “erosion occurs,” where there are

irreducible and non-superimposable sites that resist the operations of consciousness, in fact

may subvert it. It is a question of those sites that stand in relation to all other sites, that

“render suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations they happen to designate, mirror, or

reflect.”

These places are called both utopias and heterotopias, and Foucault proposes that we

distinguish between them. Utopias, Foucault suggests, are an inverted or perfected imaginary

forms of current society, and thus properly without a place in that very society. Heterotopias,

on the other hand, are real, they are implied in the very founding of society as countersites

that represent, contest, and invert all the other places. Indeed, Foucault somewhat jokingly

says, there could be envisaged such a thing as “heterotopology,” a description, if not a

science, of these places.

These heterogeneous spaces of sites and relations – Foucault’s heterotopias – are

constituted in every society, but take quite varied forms and change over time, as “history

unfolds” in its adherent spatiality. He identifies many such sites: the cemetery and the church,

the theatre and the garden, the museum and the library, the fairground and the vacation

village, the barracks and the prison, the Moslem hamam and the Scandinavian sauna, the

brothel and the colony. Foucault contrasts these “real spaces” with fundamentally “unreal 45 Of which he however provides us with a brief account leading from ancient Greece to modern science and informatics 46 Which, as he also notes in passing, has been dealt with in depth by Gaston Bachelard in terms of a “poetics of space”

118

spaces” of utopias, which present society in either “a perfected form” or else “turned upside

down” (Soja, 1994: 16-21).

In this sense, Soja believes that our current utopias should be understood more in the

sense of heterotopias: real-and-imagined places that allow for a freedom of movement,

fantasy, and reflection. Heterotopias are not necessarily diametrically opposed to our ordinary

topoi, rather they make them deviate by prolonging something that was already present in the

first site, thus causing it to become different from itself. Perhaps art can have something of

this quality: not opposing itself to life, but inserting itself in it, acting in the space be-tween

(the “thirdspace,” as Edward Soja might say) so that both sides of the opposition are set in

motion. The difference between the “ou-“ and the “hetero-“ of the “-topia” is not always be

easy to pinpoint, perhaps it is just a shift in mood, tonality, and affectivity, but in the long run

it might have tremendous consequences. Why attempt an absolutely different life somewhere

else, in the beyond of negativity and nothingness, why not try to live, act, and desire

differently here and now, not absolutely, but relatively? (Wallenstein, [15 September 2003])

Heterotopia has also been substituted for marginal space, paradoxical space or third

space, standing for both resistance and order. There are six ways the idea of such space has

been used in recent analysis:

1. As sites that are constituted as incongruous, or

paradoxical, through socially transgressive practices (Rose,

1993: 141-3)

2. As sites that are ambivalent and uncertain

because of the multiplicity of social meanings that are attached

to them, often where the meaning of a site has changed or

119

openly contested. Soja uses the example of heterogeneity of

downtown Los Angeles to illustrate this use (1990: 151)

3. As sites that have some aura of mystery, danger

or transgression about them, places on the margin perhaps

(Shields, 1991: 8)

4. Sites that are defined by their absolute perfection,

surrounded by spaces that are not so clearly defined as such

(Delaney, 1992: 135)

5. Sites that are marginalized with the dominant

social spatialization (Lefebvre, 1991: 78)

6. Incongruous forms of writing and text that

challenge and make impossible discursive statements.

To think about utopia as a practice rather than literary writing and imagined future

worlds, we can best begin with Marin’s seminal deconstruction of the term Utopia and all that

it implies for practice. The word Utopia, first used by Thomas More in his book Utopia (1995:

3), is a pun which plays on two Latin terms: eu-topia or good place and ou-topia meaning no

place. More brought these together to convey the idea of a perfect society represented by an

imaginary place – a satirical idea to challenge many of the fantastic writings of travellers to

the East which emerged during the Renaissance. Utopics, the spatial practice associated with

making Utopias, involves attempts to cross this gap to create out of a no-place, a place whose

existence can serve as a model for a future society (Hetherington, 1998: 128).

“Community” is often associated with a romantic sense of togetherness in the city.

Frug (1999: 22) tries to avoid this sense by offering a much more modest goal: community

building to increase the capacity of metropolitan residents to live in a world composed of

120

people different from themselves. Neither cities nor the individuals who live within them need

to rely for their protection on fortifying the boundary lines that separate them from others in

the region. But they also do not have to fuse with others into a larger whole. Instead, they can

develop the kind of relationship with each other that has historically characterized city life,

one built on the ability to find an accomodation with those who inhabit the same geographic

area, no matter how dissimilar they may be. Iris Young helps to illuminate this alternative

conception of community through her description of the ideal city life – a version of human

relationship that she defines as “the being together of strangers”(Young, 1990: 214).

Utopia can never itself be realized. It should always and only be in the

making. My utopia is not the same as yours. Our utopia is a social project,

dialogical and dialectical (Sandercock, 2000: 48).

Harvey (2000:189) explains utopia in four tracks in ‘Spaces of Hope’:

1. certain particular interests, brought properly together, are in fact the

general public interest47.

2. elimination of spatial barriers48 (59)

3. referrals to More’s utopia49 (160)

4. Utopian genre as seen in fictional work of Le Guin, Lessing, Piercy

47 Ref. R. Williams before making the derivation that crowds have nothing in common anymore

48 Technological advancements cause reductions in cost and time of movement. 49 Morin considers More’s utopia spatial play. Owen’s New harmony and Fourier’s ideal city are cases to be

drawn in this track.

121

Is dialectical utopianism what we are looking for? How can we integrate social

process and spatial form in Utopianism? Creating utopia goes through destroying the existing

state of things as reflected by More.

According to Baudrillard, the unlimited realisation and the virtual programmation of

the world would amount to the perfect crime (Baudrillard, 1996: 18): not only would it

simultaneously conjure and exhaust in real time a perfect world- from which we would be

expunged – it would annihilate all traces of its production and seduction. One could not even

the sense the criminality. The perfect crime always already amounts to the perfect conspiracy.

There would be no redress. And the absolute real, which amounts to the technological dream

of virtual reality, would leave no room at all for the dangerous imperfections of humanity,

extensive space-time, or mundane reality. Environmental determinism par excellence,

technological determinism par excellence. Everything would have been accomplished in the

degree zero-punctum of intensive space-time. Utopia achieved: the final resolution of a faulty

world without trace.

In effect, if we consider utopia as the perfect crime mentioned above, the perfect crime

is absolutely impossible. There are always traces – and nothing but traces. ‘Yet we still dream

of perfect computers, but do not allow them to have their own will. No desire, no will, no

liberty, no sexuality. We want them complex, creative, interactive, but without spirit’

(Baudrillard, 1995). For if absolute reality of the virtual were finally accomplished, we would

be obliged to step out of the world without leaving a trace. We would never have been (t)here

(Doel & Clarke in Crang et al, 1999: 277).

Mitchell’s contribution to this context is through suggesting to reinvent urban design

and development and to rethink the role of architecture. According to him, the payoffs are

122

high, and so are the risks. However, we have no choice; we cannot realistically opt out. We

must learn to build e-topias- electronically serviced, globally linked cities before it is too late

(Mitchell 2000: 8). The urban design he envisions encompasses both physical and virtual

places, software as well as hardware.

123

CHAPTER V

Time over distance

V.1.Speed breeds indifference

In the Futurist imagination, speed is the essence itself of the existence of

modernity: both as the indispensable mechanism in the relationship with

contemporary life and as the guiding factor in relationships of the psyche and

thought with reality, shaping new individual and collective relations, which

were by then projected into the future (La Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta,

www.mazotta.it, accessed February, 5, 2004)

Speed, Modernity, and Post-Modernity

The concept of speed is prevalent in, and has many implications for, contemporary

western society. Speed is simultaneously a form of behaviour required of individuals in their

professional lives as the electronic workplace becomes faster and faster, and an experience

that many people crave as a form of release from the slow pace of personal or recreational life

as this is defined by our physical limitations.

In his recent book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, popular science

writer James Gleick discusses instances of where speed functions as a social mechanism that

pushes people to function with the speed and efficiency of machines. He describes how speed

has become embedded physically, mechanically, and psychologically into almost every aspect

124

of social behaviour, often overwhelming our mental and physical ability to cope with its

effects. Speed has become a necessity, a desperation, and a desire to fulfill.

The concept of speed is explicitly identified with Modernism, yet it continues to be a

focal concept in what may be termed the Postmodern present. Postmodernity is a concept

used when discussing aspects of today's culture. Culture, itself has become a highway of

information technology where images and information are being consumed at a fast speed,

causing society to enter into hypercapitalism. As time is bound together with speed, according

to Frederic Jameson, as well as many other contemporary philosophers, this symbiotic

relationship seems highly expected. In The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson refers

to postmodernism as a movement in arts and culture corresponding to a new configuration of

politics and economics, "late capitalism": transnational consumer economies based on global

scope of capitalism.

Jean Francois Lyotard’s sense of postmodernity has a different call for culture.

According to Lyotard, postmodernity causes crisis in culture by breaking down meaning and

narratives leaving the question of "what is real?" The decontextualization of meaning, the

acceleration of information and images, and the fragmentation (replacing meaning with

fascination) of culture leads to virtual realization of what is real in culture and what is just a

product of all this.

Velocity is the key word of Virilio's thinking, the post-modernity treasure, and the

modern society capital. Reality is no longer defined by time and space, but in a virtual world,

in which technology allows the existence of the paradox of being everywhere at the same time

while being nowhere at all.

125

Speed in Futurist Philosophy

The Futurist movement has been discussed widely elsewhere, so I will not offer a

repetitive description here. It is sufficient to refer to the fundamentals of Futurist philosophy

as it is defined by F.T. Marinetti in ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, Le Figaro

(Paris), 20 February 1909:

“We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the

beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of

explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the

Victory of Samothrace. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his

spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.”

Without condoning or embracing the fascist, anti-intellectual, multi-anti-ism elements

of Futurist philosophy; one needs to draw attention to this evocative pronouncement of its

obsession with speed in order to provide a thematic basis for the material that follows. Speed

is defined as a form of great mechanical accomplishment and as an immense intellectual,

emotional, and spiritual force that is symbolic of the ideal or progress and human

achievement.

Speed and Contemporaneity

Milan Kundera in his novel Slowness employs the concept of speed to characterise a

frenetic ecstasy of the present, which he disparagingly views as archetypally modern:

126

... the man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present

instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the

past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is

outside time; in other words he is in a state of ecstasy. In that state he is

unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no

fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the

future has nothing to fear (Kundera, 2002: 31).

The “progress” of the technical revolution, so worshipped by the Futurist thinkers, is

for Kundera an experience that is more mental and psychological than it is physical, due to

the inability of the human body to produce the thrill of speed to the extent that machines can.

He contrasts mechanically-induced speed to that produced by our own bodies:

As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his

body, forever required to think of his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs

he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his

time of life. This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a

machine: from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives

over to a speed that is non-corporeal, non-material, pure speed, speed itself,

ecstasy speed. (2002: 35)

For Kundera, “Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on

man.” This statement accords with the Modernist vision of speed as the motif of industrial and

social progress, but it does not really elucidate what characteristics the speed itself possesses.

127

The Characteristics of Technologically Enabled Speed

Interpreting from Kundera’s thoughts on speed, it is possible to surmise that:

The speed produced must be significantly beyond that capable of being produced by

the unaided human body;

The technical production of speed and the reliance on sophisticated equipment to do

this paradoxically produces a purely non-corporeal, metaphysical or psychological experience

that is outside time and beyond immediate physical consequences; and

Speed is a form of ecstatic experience that is comparable to other forms of ecstasy,

such as sexual or religious experience, or the use of psychotropic drugs.

In contemporary society the experience of speed is determined by the following

concepts.

The Personal

I know of no better way to experience speed in a raw, immediate, and

sensory-fulfilling way than to ride a motorcycle faster than is legally

permitted. Unlike other forms of mechanical travel—cars, aircraft, trains—

motorbikes offer a direct way to really feel speed. The image of the

motorcyclist in Slowness is evocative for me because Kundera’s language

(even in translation) gives my immediate experience a lyrical context

(Ward, 2000: 89).

128

In other forms of transport, the traveller is too far removed from many of the

sensations of speed, even when travelling at greater speeds than a bike can manage. Cars are

safe, and you can speed in them more safely than on a bike. The relative distance from the

road and the wind is greater, however, and the traveller is thus further removed from the

elements that make the sensation of speed so intoxicating. When riding a motorcycle, the

wind hits you roughly at higher speeds, gently at lower speeds, and moves around you

unpredictably, pushing the bike in different directions.

Sliding through Europe or across Australia in a train is a wonderful way to travel, but

all too often the pace is too slow or uneven, and the journey marred by overcrowding, crazy

travel companions, and the inability to go wherever you want to go. Flying is a fantastic way

to experience speed—the takeoff in Boeing 747 is brilliant, as you thunder forward before

experiencing the wheels lifting from the ground—but again it is too safe, you are too removed

and cosseted from the point of reference that we use to gauge speed: the ground.

The experience of speed, in particular of speeding in a personal vehicle that you

control, is extremely addictive. This addictive thrill can be experienced passively by watching

motor-racing on television or by playing racing simulation games such as Formula 1, Need

for Speed, and Grand Turismo, or by enjoying driving (or riding) for real.

Racing

The rebellious, renegade idea of driving or riding illegally fast on public roads is

examined and discussed at the Flat Out Website. A far safer and less costly alternative is

watching motor-racing on television (or better still actually at the track).

In Formula 1, the ultimate form of international motor-racing, speed is sought and

worshipped in many forms, from the speed of the cars and the drivers themselves to the speed

129

of the associated technologies used by the teams. What fascinates most spectators, however, is

the desire of the drivers to take risks in order to go faster than anyone else, and go faster than

they have ever gone before. Legendary drivers like Stirling Moss, Gilles Villeneuve, Nigel

Mansell, Ayrton Senna, and Michael Schumacher have earnt respect and admiration in

relation to the intensity of the experience of speed that they are able to share with their fans.

The number of races they win is immaterial in relation to the style with which they drive.

Villeneuve, for example, only won six races, yet he is worshipped more than drivers who

have won many more than that because his style of driving demonstrated the purity of speed.

He desired the thrill of speed more than the glory of victory.

Vicariously, spectators of speed share in the glory and sensationalism it creates. Speed

is meant to be fun for both the participant and the spectator; it does not have to mean anything

more than this. Visualise a Bullet Train or TGV slicing through glorious Japanese or French

countryside. Marvel at a 500cc GP rider like Mick Doohan sliding his bike through a smooth

fast corner to the adulation of thousands.

V.2. Multi-speed cities and time-squeeze

It should be discussed here whether information-rich communities50 are enabled to

compress more activities into time while information-poor ones are made to expand more

time in accomplishing the same tasks. A project entitled, “Multispeed Cities and the Logistics

of Living in an Information Age”, supported by the Economic and Research Council and

carried out by Steve Graham and Mike Crang has that objective. The researchers will be

applying their methodologies in two close-by neighborhoods of New Castle upon Tyne and 50 Time-poor, but cash rich are information-rich communities and vice versa is true for the information-poor.

130

hopefully coming up with results about how ICTs are integrated in information poor/rich

communities of multi-speed cities.

The search for the necessary city is part of the operation of what Urry has termed the

‘tourist gaze’. Urry suggests that it is not the pedestrian flâneur who is emblematic of

modernity, but rather the train passenger, car driver and jet-plane passenger (Bingaman,

2001:256). This tourist gaze in different vehicles of transportaion may be extended to the

presence of a form of flâneurism in cyberspace that emphasises the individual, rather than

communal, aspects of identity, electronic or otherwise (McBeath & Webb 1997: 250). The

differing gazes might be taken to mean differing desires in search within the electronic fiber

network of the city. The accelerating possibility of the intersection of these gazes remind one

of the increasing alternatives for unexpected accidents to occur.

Furthermore, the vast and speed-swept space of the urban freewaay challenges the

capacity of the city to serve as a vessel for collective and individual identity. Humanist space,

which once gave definition and meaning to the place of the individual in the city, has been

obliterated by the vector of speed, to the detriment of the physical environment. The highway

is a permanent reality in the modern city which must be dealt with as an integral part of the

total urban landscape. High speed travel, of course, must be safely separated from the

surrounding city, and it is the first job of the highway engineer to ensure that his or her

creative efforts meet the precise specifications of safe and efficient rapid movement. Today’s

freeways make possible a whole new type of urban existence based on speed and instantenous

connections across vast distances. Some have called these colossal feats of engineering “the

cathedrals of our time”, implying that they are monuments which have inherent cultural

relevance in our era as symbols of the freedom, mobility and energy that make the modern

city so exciting.

131

Currently, however, these new “cathedrals” are conceived of as little more than

utilitarian components in the larger urban infrastructure, and as such, they are primarily seen

as tools for “going someplace”, rather than as compositional ordering devices used to

communicate the larger significance of “being someplace” or even to celebrate the experience

of movement (Gamard, 1993: 6). The highway, together with electronic communication

technologies, eliminates time and space so effectively that face-to-face bodily contact has

nearly disappeared as an essential aspect of public street life. The infrastructural and

electronic networks that establish the necessary means for human interaction are invisible in

the sense that they have no major role to play in the organized formal and spatial relationships

that visibly convey the shared values of the now atomized collective. This city is often

criticized as being a chaotic and placeless environment, sprawling infinitely without center or

edge and divided into semi-autonomous enclaves which leave only a nebulous spatial residue

between them. These empty “in-between” realms, these voids of “no-man’s land”, are the

most distinguishing feature of the post-industrial city, and they carry social and spatial

implications which demand careful consideration.

The highway is perhaps the most powerful force in the city, both physically and in the

psychological and emotional sense of symbolic association. As Paul Virilio asserts in the

Aesthetics of Disappearance, the contemporary urban dweller’s insatiable quest for speed and

instantenous connections in time has undermined not only the visual cohesiveness of the

physical environment, but the very nature of waking consciousness. Speed, he suggests,

“perverts the illusory order of normal prception, the order of the arrival of information... With

speed, the world keep coming at us, to the detriment of the object”. The world viewed at sixty

miles per hour is seen as fleeting, transitory ans continuously transforming, like a fire burning

in our eyes, and we are unable to grasp the endless mutations of this fluid and ephemeral

landscape. The accelerated voyage, where one is unable to remember the sequence of random

132

events or to put them into any sort of organized structure, represents the driver’s innate desire

to identify with spatial and temporal power of the motor and to “become the vector”

(Arnheim in Gamard, 1993: 56) The city as seen from the highway is less like an urban

“theater”, where drama and tension could be slowly cultivated through a carefully

orchestrated spatial narrative; it is more akin to a montage or film, where one is merely along

for the ride and in which sharp juxtapositions in scale and in time operate without logic or

reason. Here, the only “suspense” is in the sheer danger of the accident.

V.3. Nothing in common means a single commonality in terms of community

Jean-Luc Nancy's Inoperable Community and Maurice Blanchot's Unavowable

Community both offer a post-humanist take on "being-with." They describe a community that

exists not in the common work effort but rather in the moment of "unworking," in the

hesitation, the backspin, the crack up. It exists as what is in-common before any projected

telos. The members of a post-humanist community, Nancy suggests, find communion across

the exposition of their own unsharable finitude, which becomes the very condition for their

commonality. Community in a post-humanist world, Nancy says, is the exposition of finitude

and not a bondage. It's not even that communication happens as a result of the common pain

of finitude, the common pain of separation by death or misunderstanding, what Bataille calls

"lacerations" (54). Communication does not result from the "triple mourning I must go

through: that of the death of the other, that of my birth, and that of my death" (Nancy, 1991:

30). Community is the very exposition of that "triple mourning." And it is not the singular

being that gets lacerated by it; "on the contrary," Nancy says, "this is where the singular being

compares," at the site of these lacerations (Davis, 1997). What gets lacerated is the so-called

"communal fabric" that is produced by the rhetorics of community and then pre-supposed.

133

It has been long recognized that cities are “a world of strangers”, a world very

different from that of a village or a small town where, it is often said, “everyone knows each

other”. The city, as Lyn Lofland puts it, “is the locus of a peculiar social situation: the people

to be found within its boundaries at any given moment know nothing personally about the

vast majority of others with whom they share this space.”

What distinguishes many suburbs from central cities is not the presence of strangers,

but the fact that the strangers who live in a suburb often think of themselves as constituting a

coherent group (Frug, 1999: 116). This picture of a suburb presents it as being like a

voluntary association, such as political organization, church or country club. People join

voluntary organizations to be with people like themselves or to pursue a common interest; if

big enough, voluntary associations, like suburbs, can also be populated by strangers. It is

worthwhile to explore whether the “we” feeling, introduced by Richard Sennett, the sensation

of similarity arising out of the desire to identify with other people and the desire to belong,

still exist in certain parts of the world.

Here is how it goes in southwest of US: In contrast to the fluidity of its urban fabric,

the social fabric of Los Angeles is fragmented; it is not a single city, but a collection of

microcities defined by visible and invisible boundaries of class, race, ethnicity and religion.

This multiplicity of identities produces an intricate social landscape in which cultures

consolidate and separate, reacting and interacting in complex and unpredictable ways

(Crawford et all, 1999: 26). LA is similar to Istanbul’s mosaic in that sense. How this

similarity may play a role in a prospective outlook for hyperrealization of Istanbul will be

commented in the parts to follow.

The process of choosing expressive identities, for whatever personal reason, tends to

lead some people to organize their lives around interests and enthusiasms that are individually

chosen, but collectively and affectually realized outside of routine daily activities associated

134

with work and family life. In doing this, however, the enthusiasts are more likely to seek

collectivities of like-minded others with whom they can identify. This is especially so in the

case of those who seek to create a lifestyle that is ethically committed towards others. Such

lifestyles as those associated with “new social movements” seek to make life meaningful on

affectual and value-rational grounds. In both cases, therefore others-indeed, the category of

Other- become of significance on emotional and moral grounds (Hetherington, 1998: 92).

According to Mitchell (2000: 89), it is far too easy to equate communication with

community and to conceive of cyberspace as some sort of vast village green in the sky.

Online meeting places can simultaneously strengthen others, and even create new ones. And

they are clearly creating a condition under which individuals position themselves less as

members of discrete well-bounded civic formations and more as intersection points of

multiple, spatially diffuse, categorical communities.

V.3.a. Personal fantasies lie in the virtual

A city stands for disparate experiences people have in a physical space; no two people

have the same experience of a single city. Similarly, people’s experiences online differ, and

no two people have identical experiences in the varied geography of the Internet. Just as a city

does not mean one thing to all people, the ‘Internet’ and ‘cyberspace’, while singular words,

are not monolithic things. Any theory that attempts to overlay a simplistic, unidirectional

interpretation on interactions online is likely to find a counterexample (Light in Mike Crang et

al., 1999: 128). Other than the interactions of multiple communities stated above, personal

appearances that these communities are comprised of should also be explored.

135

Gibsonian cyberspace is the full, and future articulation of an environment which is

sensorily immersive, humanly interactive and provided through massive computing power.

The Internet, and Barlovian cyberspace, only convey part of the experience and interactions

that are possible in this space. However, future cyberspace does not necessarily represent a

larger space but, rather, one that is more intensely articulated. This intensity cannot currently

be experienced except as a development of fiction and in the social imaginary although

inklings of it can be found in the computer games parlours of the shopping mall and

downtown arcades. Despite this impediment to its ready analysis through social science

discourses, Gibsonian cyberspace has already informed the development of various

interfacing device and technologies including VR glasses, 3D mice and miniaturised

computer systems. In a similar vein, the development and early capabilities of the Virtual

Reality Modelling Language (VRML) could be claimed to have been directed and shaped, at

least in part, by these visions of cyberspace. The focus upon the technical aspects in the

development of this visualization system however obscures the effect of these and other

efforts to map cyberspace. Baudrillard's comment on the rise of simulation over “reality” can

be directly applied to these efforts. “It is the map that precedes the territory...that engenders

the territory” (Baudrillard 1994: 1). This position also supports an artefactual sense of

cyberspace which contributes to the demarcation of boundaries and differentiated experiences.

How urban is the personal experience? There are theorists like Barbara Becker who

claim that the processes of virtual self-design in the nets may be regarded as desires from

people who wish to achieve some control over their own self by blanking out their body, the

others, and the world. However, avatars or humanoids go a little further than that. They are

human representative characters of virtual worlds created outside of real life. Most of these

virtual worlds display a more focused and playful version of real-time and space. Except for

space travels characterized over the net, interactions are familiar. Gaming fatures, too offer an

136

environment where players can not really distinguish virtual from real. Players feel secure

with avatars of their choice in simulated environments, not very different from their actual

neighborhoods or living spaces. Outside of gaming activities, virtual worlds created as

alternative areas of facilitation and social exchange51 provide casinos, huge malls and parks as

parts of entertainment or recreation and also feature a town hall where no serious discussionn

takes place. A similar type of security and peace is created since each newcomer has to

choose an avatar and spend enormous time for introducing him/herself to the other

inhabitants. Everybody knows each other and no predictions are required to find out who

could mess up their peace in the micro-paradiso. The technical jargon for these environments

is micro-communities.

Micro-communities have two distinguishable features that make them a safe space.

First, the number of members is relatively small; therefore issues of social organization and

democracy can be tackled without the problems encountered by large virtual communities

(Kollock & Smith in Umaschi Bers, M., 2001: 367). Second, in contrast to virtual

communities in which members may or may not meet face to face, in microcommunities

having regular face-to-face interactions is an important part. Zora, a virtual learning

environment designed specifically for kids, allows interesting interactions which may not take

place in real life. For example, young patients undergoing dialysis at Boston's Children's

Hospital were able to program their characters to interact in thoughtful ways with their peers.

Participants, generally, are seen to attribute real-world properties and expectations to

the contents of the virtual world. Therefore, the search for fantasy and utopia go hand in hand

in both worlds.

51 www.cybertown.com may be given as the most contemporary example with highest hits.

137

V.3.b. Characteristics of the virtual citizen as terminal and pathological human

The contemporary citizen as ‘terminal and pathological human’ is a concept coined by

Geert Lovink in his latest writings. Lovink refers to virtual qualities of this contemporary

citizen as he opens up his argument by a “Will to Virtuality” as well as many other sets of

dirty practices. In contrast to Marshall McLuhan and his followers, he rejects a

technologically determinist attitude and prefers an ironic perspective towards new media and

technologies. He is aware of the fact that economic impact of virtuality is huge and hard to

forecast. The interesting part of his claim is when he points at “cultural intelligence” as the

determining factor for the inner dynamics of virtual relations on political level. His terminal

citizen discovers new portals as he surfs through the Internet and becomes informed by nodes

of diverse channels monitored by noone and everyone.

Closed networks in an open society have arisen within the last few years since in fast

growing networks, people tend not to get to know each other anymore so flame wars over

nothing are being unleashed, in most cases without any outcome. The effect of this is a loss of

confidence in the public sphere of cyberspace, with its relatively open forums and

communities. As a response, business and developer groups, as well as activists and

researchers have started mailing-lists and discussion forums within password protected sites.

This creates a different kind of cyber-elitism logged onto sites of specific interest. Citizen

consciousness is applicable within groups of distinct economic class with seemingly similar

interests in fields such as governance, leadership, environmental issues, knowledge,

communication and education. Thereby, Lovink’s nihilism is challenged by cybervisionaries

138

whose commissioned projects still hold substantial value in the minds of not only western

elite, but also educated scholars of the southern hemisphere.

Recent projects with thematic priorities “governance, citizenship, knowledge &

communication and learning” are supported by the Economic & Social Research Council of

UK52. He asks a fundamental question in the midst of his study, “In what ways are Internet

and other electronic technologies changing our lives?” Many researchers, cyberpunks and

cyber-apocalyptics have been questioning what it means to be virtual within the last decade.

Some, like Haraway, have even come up with declarations and rules of virtuality. However,

the virtual citizen still needs considerable attention for how terminal, pathological and

functional s/he can possibly be.

V.3.c. The millenium flâneur

Sudjic’s critique of the myth of communities within cities similarly suggests that

these arguments fail “to deal with nuances that are involved in the continual movement that

is an essential part of urban life...” (Sudjic 1992: 281). The presence of a form of flâneurism

in cyberspace emphasises the individual, rather than communal, aspects of identity,

electronic or otherwise (McBeath & Webb 1997: 250). It is, however, too simplistic to equate

the flânerie of cyberspace with the contemporary cyber-surfer identity (Soja, 1996: 21). The

two identities represent the information gap between the poet-geographer of nineteenth

century modernity and the multiplicity of identities found with the experientially-focused

consumer and web surfer of the late twentieth century.

52 Steve Woolgar’s study has been collected into a book in 2002, entitled ‘Virtual Society, cyberbole, reality.’

139

There are different sides of the same coin. Mitchell argued, during a two day

workshop and public lecture at the Getty Research Institute53 that online and physical

communities are inseparable and that it matters where you are logging on. According to him

the network infrastructure is beginning to restructure, fragment and combine elements of the

built environment in the same way rails and canals shaped the cities. Location is the valuable

resource in five different areas54: digital network linkage, smart spaces, expanded homes , the

economy of presence and the development of intensified spaces.

The last one should attract our attention for our topic in question. Benedikt provoked

the audience with a discourse about the poverty of virtual spaces compared to the

informational richness of physical spaces. Social function design needs to be transferred to

virtual spaces, and not mimic real spaces. The Platonic and the Aristotelian concept of

space55 are not appropriate to cyberspace as much as J.J. Gibson’s ecology of vision. All

views in cyberspace are there to be seen, there are no unauthorized views. Benedikt expects

virtual spaces to be suitable social community spaces in another 50 years (Punt M. &

Asberry, K.R., 1999: 65-66)

Above all, Turkle, Mitchell and Rheingold to name a few, are among many cyber-

theoreticians who rely on the fact that networking via net increases face-to-face interactions

among people of similar interests. This proposition becomes more valid now that wireless

technologies enable swift communication from anywhere in and outside the city.

William Mitchell describes the transformation of wireless technology in the hundred

years since Marconi in his new book (Mitchell, 2003: chs.1 & 2) --the scaling up of networks

and the scaling down of the apparatus for transmission and reception. It is, he says, as if 53 The title of is lecture was ‘Transarchitectures: Visions of Digital Communities’. 54 smart spaces are taken to mean the delivery of conectivity, expanded homes for reintegration of home and work space and the development of intensified spaces signify electronic fronts for architectural backs. 55 The Platonic space is empty whereas the Aristotelian space is thick with fields, shape is boundary.

140

“Brobdingnag had been rebooted as Lilliput”; Marconi's massive mechanism of tower and

kerosene engine has been replaced by a palm-size cellphone. If the operators of Marconi's

invention can be seen as human appendages to an immobile machine, today's hand-held

devices can be seen as extensions of the human body. This transformation has, in turn,

changed our relationship with our surroundings and with each other. The cellphone calls

from the collapsing World Trade Center towers and the hijacked jets on September 11 were

testimony to the intensity of this new state of continuous electronic engagement.

V.3.d. The city is as human as you are

Bodies are becoming like cities, their temporal cooordinates transformed into spatial

ones. Process and change are now explained by cybernetic transformation, making it more

and more difficult to distinguish between our organic and our technological selves. It is no

longer possible to be rooted in history. Instead, we are connected to the topography of

computer screens and video monitors. Like the vanishing vity, the body remains as the only

concrete proof of existence. Yet, scattered and fragmented under the weight of technology,

body and city can’t be recovered by means other than those that displace them: they must be

recorded or registered anew.

Defined as a disturbance in the relation between self and surrounding teritory,

psychastenia is a state in which the space defined by the organism’s own body is confused

with represented space. The term refers to the dissident surrealist Roger Caillois’ 1935 essay,

“Mimicry and Legendary Psychastenia,” in which the author suggests that the phenomenon of

insect camouflage or mimicry should be compared to a type of schizophrenia characterized as

a “depersonalization by assimilation to space.” Incapable of demarcating the limits of its own

141

body, lost in the immense area that circumscribes it, the psychastenic organism proceeds to

abandon its own identity to embrace the space behind. It does so by camouflaging itself into

the milieu. This simulation effects a double usurpation: while the organism successfully

reproduces those elements it could not otherwise apprehend, in the process it is swallowed by

them, vanishing as a differentiating entity (Olalquiaga, 1999: 2).

Psychastenia helps describe contemporary experience and account for its uneasiness.

Urban culture resembles this mimetic condition when it enables a ubiquitous feeling of being

in all places while not really being anywhere. However, this state can not only be explained

as an organism’s inability to distinguish itself from its surroundings, but also as the

organism’s skillfulness in fusing with those surroundings. Defined thus, psychastenia would

replace rigid hierarchies with easy transitions, representing an altogether new cultural

condition.

Phrased differently, what about a place that persists and changes over time? And this

is precisely what power struggles over place-making are all about, namely, who changes what

in alternative representations of any place’s present and future, and how do these changes

selectively appropriate or reject particular elements of any place’s historical past? Describing

and abiding by change seems to be one of the main challenges of mankind. However, the

focus point has slanted from space and time to speed and velocity in the city which recasts as

the mediated city (Virilio, 2002: 16). The relations in the city are superseded by inertia and

the main threat lies within everyday lives: Can we democratize inertia by cyber means?

This ever-expanding perimeter of the city reinforces the necessity for iconic symbols

of centrality and urban identity to define its difference. Debord, too, asserts that, “this society

eliminates geographical distance only to reap distance internally in the form of spectacular

142

separation.” Simultaneously, the city is increasingly proven to be a primarily conceptual

thing rather than a necessarily material one. These observations lead to the conclusion that,

“there is often little or no gap between the so-called ‘real world’ and the ‘virtual world’”

(Ostwald 1997: 128).

V.3.d.i. The future of evolution (memesis) for the cyber-city

Some day a historian in a distant future will discuss our age as one of the

most obscene ones in world history: that of the capsular civilization. Why?

Because the level of technology and production stands out sharper than

ever against the systematic, uncmpromising exclusion of a major, and still

increasing, part of mankind. The full awareness of the fact is shattering.

We did not know, we will say to the historian of the future, but s/he will

condemn us. (Leach, 2002: 278)

The Memesis statement says:

"As an analogy to the building blocks of biology, the genes, memes describe

cultural units of information, cognitive behavioral patterns that propagate and replicate

themselves through communication. From the 'bio-adapter' of language to the info-

sphere of global networks as the ultimate habitat for the human mind."

Richard Barbrook does not believe that there is such thing as an autonomous entity,

located inside the technology. “The Memesis statement” regards machines and information as

autonomous things outside our control. Yet, in reality, both technology and culture are

expressions of the social relationships between individual humans. It is human activity which

is crystallized into machines and information, not memes which create “mass crystal”. These

143

social relationships shifted by Internet and other technologies are what seems haunting for

many well-known social theorists of our era. Tom Sherman, based in a School of Art and

Industrial Design, sees the Internet as a site for freelancers where they can dump their cv’s

and projects and work like office-workers. Here, one has to extrapolate the shift in meaning

of an ‘office worker’ of the 21st century per se since Popcorn, the American trend goddess

foresees 60% of white-collared personnel in the US will be telecommuting as of 2020. This

foresight, be it that it turns into reality partially, will probably shift working paradigms and

conditions in the technopolis towards a more individualized setting, monitored by smart

mechanisms of neural networks in management centers.

V.3.d.ii. The memetic flesh in the cyber-city

Memetic flesh? That's the street scene in cyber-city: San Francisco, Ca. Not so much

an ars electronica, but an _Ars California_:an art of digital living. Certainly not a sociological

rhetoric of evolution or devolution, but something radically different. Memetic flesh as a

floating outlaw zone where memes fold into genes, where the delirious spectacle of cyber-

culture reconfigures the future of the molecular body. In Ars California, memetic flesh is

neither future nor history, but the molecular present. Pure California Gen(e)ing.

Now we just got off the Net where we experienced data delirium with Gerfried

Stocker's manifesto for memetic flesh, the one where he speculates about future memes:

stochastic minds, recombinant bodies, infoskin, molecular daydreams. When we read this

meme manifesto, our bodies of flesh, bone and blood sagged under the terminal evolutionary

weight of it all, but the electronic sensors embedded in our nanoskin just went crazy. Like

Alien 3, the electronic worms cruising the blood lanes just below skin surface heard this call

of a future technotopia, flipped on their sensor matrix to red alert, whomped through the

144

epidermal bunker, zoomed out into fresh air, and were last seen heading straight for the

California coast.

In SF, memes have abandoned the art academy, becoming popular culture for the 21st

century. Just listen to the street talk: a cool-looking city-wise Chicano in Killer Loop shades

plays Tex-Mex blues on his guitar while wearing a T-shirt that boasts: “I'm a Professional

Beta-Tester for Microsoft”; a businessman tucked away in an IBM suit in-lines by while

dealing mega-futures of Intel chips on his cellular phone; an African-American with a hi-tech

futures face gets into the elevator armoured in a red windbreaker listing the brand-name icons

for “The Corporate Alliance of America's Leading Cyber-Companies”; a nano-technologist

begins to tell prophetic tales of the next human migration, the one where floating slivers of

the human species will be carefully wrapped in huge nanofiber skins and allowed to float

away into deep space, seeding the future universe.

Dirty memes? That's what happens when memetic engineering escapes into the streets

of cyber-city, and its scent is picked up by viral artists. Like Elliot Anderson's multimedia

algorithm, “The Temptation of St. Anthony”, with its brilliant psychopathology of obsessive-

compulsive behavior, complete with 3-D ghostly images of emotional discomfort and

stuttering gestures, as the key psychic sign of digital culture. Or Matt Hackert's dead horse

flesh machines complete with belching flame-throwers and whirring chain saws and rip-

snorting drills, and all of this accompanied by the robotic sounds of the mechanical orchestra.

Or Lynn Hershman's memetic cinema with its application of object-relations programming to

the universe of Hollywood imagery. Or the viral robotics of Chico MacMurtie's “Amorphic

Robot Works” that encode in robo-genetics all the ecstasy and catastrophe of the ruling

cultural memetics. Neither technotopian nor technophobic, memetic art in the streets of SF is

145

always dirty, always rubbing memes against genes, always clicking into (our) memetic flesh.

(Kroker, A. & M., 1998: symposium notes)

On top of what Krokers’ claim above for their celebration of new technology coupled

with creativity, memetic clicks in the virtual city of the 21st century are so branded that it is

almost impossible to appreciate their authenticity. Brand culture engenders all localities to

mark a new definition for virtual communities.

V.3.e. Alternative community projects such as smart communities

Public Information Utilities (PIUS), The Freenet Movement and Host Computers

(Stephen & Marvin, 2002: 374)

Following some radical technology experiments in the 1980s, such as the Berkeley

Community Memory Project, community oriented telematics initiatives or electronic public

spaces are increasingly moving into the mainstream of urban public policy in the United

States. A wide constituency of activist groups, such as the National Public TeleComputing

Network (NPTN) and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), are, in

combination with local activist and special interest groups, proving increasingly powerful in

lobbying for national support for local, public telematics networks within Bill Clinton's

National information Infrastructure programme.

There are three main policy models here. First, current efforts in Santa Monica and

other Californian cities to develop Public Information Utilities (PIUs) between municipal

departments and citizens, allowing computer communications on key local issues, are one

146

model (see Guthrie and Dutton, 1992; Chapter 3). The Santa Monica Public Electronic

Network (PEN), for example, allows for electronic town meetings between citizens across the

city and elected representatives.

Second, electronic Freenets use commercial and municipal sponsorship to develop

freely accessible electronic civic telematics networks. These services, which offer electronic

mail, conferencing, information services, bulletin boards, and, often, wider Internet access,

are becoming increasingly common in North American cities (Winner, 1993); there were over

twenty-five at the end of 1994 and eight others are being developed in Western Europe.

Special equipment is often provided for people with various forms of disabilities to use

Freenet services. Many Freenets are actually set up with structures that are analogous to the

different physical elements of cities themselves.

Growing policy efforts are also being made to support the access of low-income

groups to Internet services. For example, the Public Utilities Commission in Ohio recently

ruled that $20 million of subsidy should be made for building computer access centres in low-

income communities and schools. Freenet-style projects are increasingly common outside the

USA. In Amsterdam, the Netherlands, for example, the Digital City project provides free

access to the Dutch paris of the Internet to all the city's citizens. By November 1994, some

7,000 users were registered, including most civic organisations in the city.

Finally, there is a wide range of simple bulletin board services (BBS), most delivered

by computer enthusiasts from their own personal computers. It is estimated that there are 300

BBS service s in Los Angeles alone. SF Net, a BBS service with 3,000 regular users in San

Francisco, has set up 20 coin-operated terminals in cafes across the city. These are aimed at

147

people without normal access to personal computers and modems.

Other electronic public spaces are being developed in the UK based on a network of

municipally controlled Host computers. The Manchester Host offers a wide range of

electronic mail, bulletin boards and database services to registered users through computers

attached to phone lines. While its services are charged - unlike those of Freenet excluded

groups are being supported through a network of 'Electronic Village Halls' in the city. These

are physical centres where training and Host services are supported for 'communities of

interest' - for example, the Bangladeshi community, women's organisations, disabled groups

and old people - and also distinct geographical communities.

Increasingly, the various urban experiments in developing electronic spaces are

themselves being interlinked via the Internet. Special networks linking electronic

communities and city-led World Wide Web experiments have recently emerged which

provide an integrated interface between these initiatives on a global, real time basis. The issue

at stake here, is the urban digital divide recognized and reflected in writings of Mike Crang in

the University of Durham. His research supported by the Economic and Research Council of

UK embarks upon how information technologies intersect with the time-spaces of the city for

both relatively priviledged and marginalized groups. His aim is to use such an approach to

offer new insights into the effects of the ‘digital divide’ on the life chances of communities

and neighbourhoods within urban Britain.

While this dichotomy is not resolved in the minds of many established scholars, more

practical minds like Cary Wintz of South Texas University pinpoints a quite significant

phenomenon. The urban settlers in underpriviledged communities also have curious

consumption patterns. It is true that more than half the population around ages of 15-60 living

148

in slums in urban regions of Turkey own cell phones. In only a few years, cell phones will

accelerate in technological improvement and meet the facilities provided via several state and

private web portals at the moment. Among these facilities are paying service bills, reserving

books and online shopping.

Wireless communication, though a more recent phenomenon, will transform all

paradigmatic logic about the wired city concept, introduced by William Mitchell in early ‘90s.

The space-time realm will be valid for communicators of all geographical spots. The term

wireless will be identical to urban erasing all gaps and holes in regional information networks.

The Smart Communities Program

The Smart Communities Program is a three-year federal program created and

administered by Industry Canada to help Canada become a world leader in the development

and use of information and communication technologies for economic, social and cultural

development.

Goal

The program’s goal is to help establish world-class Smart Communities across the

country so that Canadians can fully realize the benefits that information and communication

technologies have to offer.

Objectives

The program sets out the following objectives:

assist communities in developing and implementing sustainable Smart Communities

strategies;

149

create opportunities for learning through the sharing among communities of Smart

activities, experiences and lessons learned;

provide new business opportunities, domestically and internationally, for Canadian

companies developing and delivering information and communication technology

applications and services.

What is a Smart Community?

A Smart Community is a community with a vision of the future that involves the use

of information and communication technologies in new and innovative ways to empower its

residents, institutions and regions as a whole. As such, they make the most of the

opportunities that new technologies afford – better health care delivery, better education and

training and new business opportunities.

Communities around the world are responding to the needs of their citizens by

discovering new ways of using information and communication technologies for economic,

social and cultural development. Communities and countries that take advantage of these new

technologies will create jobs and economic growth as well as improve the overall quality of

life within their communities.

Smart Cities

Defining Smart Cities

Tentative Definition

At an abstract level, the smart growth agenda purports to be a wide-ranging and

holistic approach which can be typified as those urban regions seeking to utilise innovative/

‘smart’ information and communication technologies (ICTs), the creative and cultural

150

industries, and social and environmental sustainability to address various economic, spatial,

social and ecological problems facing many cities today, including urban sprawl, the revival

of downtown areas, the loss of community, and the maintenance of ‘new’ forms of economic

growth and sustainability56.

Part 1.

“Brilliance is breaking out everywhere.” That’s the clever lead sentence in a 1999

story on smart cities in Canadian Business magazine. The article described how cities

everywhere were jumping on the cerebral bandwagon to portray themselves as brain-city,

ready to take on all comers in the knowledge-based, new economy. And that article was just

one of over 60,000 items the Google search engine identified as matching the keyword

combinations smart cities and Canadian cities. Nor of course is this just a Canadian

phenomenon. Quite the opposite, driven by perceived transformations in the global economy,

cities around the world are promoting their hi-tech smarts to enhance their competitive status.

At the inaugural 1997 World Forum on Smart Cities, it was estimated that some 50,000 cities

and towns around the world were about to adopt smart city initiatives. That probably explains

why Google located 599,000 items under the basic keywords <smart cities>, without any

country limitation added.

Part 2.

Theoretical perspective can help to contextualize the unknown. The urban theorists

Siemiatycki has been most drawn to recently, are geographers and planners. Their focus on

urban space seems to provide a tangible setting for conceptualizing lived experience in cities.

So quickly, here are three quotes which will guide your exploration of smart cities.

56 Derived from D. Thorns, The Transformation of Cities (2002:223)

151

The first is by Edward Soja who wrote: “We must be insistently aware of how space

can be made to hide consequences for us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed

into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled

with politics and ideology.” Soja was writing specifically about the use of city space, but

there’s hardly an urban issue his statement doesn’t illuminate. For instance, in our case, Soja

raises the questions: are there any hidden consequences to the smart city movement? Are

there relations of power and discipline underlying the apparently inevitable and neutral

dynamics of globalization and technological innovation which underlie the smart city

movement? And lastly, is it possible that the smart city movement is more about politics and

ideology, than about nurturing more of the best and the brightest? These are some of the

things Soja contributes to one’s thinking and learning process about smart cities.

His second theoretical guide is Saskia Sassen. While some of her writing on global

cities has fairly been criticized for its economic and technological determinism, Sassen has

captured the interplay of globalization and urbanization. She describes global cities as the

“required central places where the work of globalization gets done.” They are the command

and co-ordinating hubs of far-flung global-reaching economic networks. But they are also

internally divided and polarized cities. Even winning the race for urban supremacy, Sassen

tells us, seems to leave many of the city’s residents as losers. “Recent research”, Sassen

concludes, “shows sharp increases in socioeconomic and spatial inequalities within major

cities of the developed world.” Sassen’s work leads us to reflect on whether a smart city

strategy is in the interests of all urban residents or only some.

And lastly Siemiatycki mentions Michael Peter Smith, and his most recent book

Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization. The book’s arguments and evidence reward

careful reading, but especially interesting is his characterization of the book’s goal: “A central

152

purpose of this book”, Smith writes, “is to place the study of urbanization and urbanism

within an agency-oriented theoretical perspective that concretely connects macro-economic

and geopolitical transformations to micro-networks of social action that people create, move

in, and act upon in their daily lives. It is a central assumption of this book that the

accumulation strategies of capitalist logics, structures and actors, to which many urban

analysts devote so much attention, are not the sole, or at times even the most important,

agencies in the constitution of urban life. As important, if not more so, has been the impact of

ordinary women and men - their consciousness, intentionality, everyday practices, and

collective action - on the social construction of urban life.” There’s lots to mull over there, but

for our purposes, Smith’s plea for “urban studies from below” suggests that the fate of smart

cities depends not just on transnational corporations and high end knowledge workers. It also

depends on the beliefs and actions of millions of urban residents - many very new to the city

as a result of global migration, and many working in jobs more reminiscent of early 20th

century conditions than those associated with a brave new world of hi-tech, hi-autonomy and

hi-rewards work. The city and its future is their making too, Smith usefully reminds us.

Part 3.

The Smart City message is hype-heavy. In the interest of time, he keeps his examples

brief. In his many speeches delivered on the subject by then-Minister of Industry John

Manley, his audiences heard exhortations like this: “In the knowledge and information

economy, Canada cannot afford to be content with second best. We must be the best. To

become a global mecca for investment, research and development, every lane on the

Information Highway must lead to our doorstep.”

153

The current Minister Allan Rock has picked up the rallying cry: “We are in fierce

competition with other countries to rank as one of the most innovative economies in the

world.”

In a speech titled Smart Growth for a Smart City: A New Economic Vision for Halifax,

Brian Crowley the President of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies began by saying,

“forget location, location, location as the keys to economic success because the three most

important things now affecting the future prosperity and development of human communities

are technology, technology, and technology.”

And Canadian cities have gotten the message: Promote yourself as information- and

communication-technology savvy or else. Many Canadian cities have now adopted slogans

promoting themselves as smart, or at the leading edge of hi-tech. Markham fancies itself as

“Canada’s hi-tech capital”; undoubtedly many other municipalities would beg to differ;

Edmonton’s web site describes a “smart city” where every link describing the city is equally

‘smart’ - Click on Smart Recreation and find out about the city’s sporting facilities and

events; Click Smart Culture and get information on the city’s dance, music, theatre and other

entertainment events. To give creativity its due, the most clever Smart City slogan so far in

Canada I think, belongs to nearby Lanark County. It goes: “Lanark County...Ten Seconds to

Tokyo; Ten Minutes to the Cottage...What a Life!”

The point in all this is, we are getting a pretty hard sell that the future of our country

and cities especially, depends on promoting themselves as the optimal place to engage in the

new economy.

154

Part 4.

We have been here before. The most venerable theme in the literature on the history of

Canadian cities is boosterism. This refers to our legacy of turning municipalities into

aggressive promoters of corporate interest and growth.

Guess which period of our urban condition, Warren Magnusson is describing in the

following passage: “Technical innovations were both a cause and an effect of the rapid urban

and industrial development...Each city was involved in a great competition with its rivals in

Canada and abroad. Success - which meant increasing prosperity, growing opportunities, and

the prestige and power of a metropolitan position - depended on attracting new trade and

industry. In turn, this meant establishing favourable conditions for business...It was agreed

that the [municipal] council had the responsibility to see that the community did not lag

behind its competitors.”

While this passage could stand as a description of the smart cities movement,

Magnusson was actually describing Canadian cities of the late 19th century. The major

technical innovation he refers to, by the way, was a miracle of time-space compression that

transformed cities. It was of course the railway.

The excellent historical literature on Canadian urbanization can be read as a cautionary

tale of what can go wrong when local governments become overly fixated on narrow

promotion of economic and technological advantage.

155

Part 5.

There have already been negative municipal consequences to our glorification of

information and communication technology. Such an invincible/triumphalist aura has been

attached to computer hardware and software, it’s not surprising that normal financial

management practices have a way of evaporating when the issue before municipal council is

IT. He offers up the following examples:

The biggest scandal in recent Toronto municipal politics involves a computer leasing

plan whereby the city overpaid by some $40 million dollars on a leasing deal with a private

company. The City of Waterloo has run into the same problem, with the same company.

His next exhibit comes from this Tuesday’s Montreal Gazette where he read the

following:

“Parking Montreal, the city’s first experiment with privatization, has

long sparked criticism since its inception in 1994. In 1999, it absorbed a

$625,000 loss for electronic “smart” meters that never materialized because the

company developing the technology went bankrupt.”

No more needs to be said about the hi-tech industry’s volatility to an Ottawa audience.

But just like railway-mania as the urban salvation of a century ago sometimes led

municipalities to buy in before exercising due diligence, the battle-cry of “Get Smart” linked

so emphatically to computerization, creates a climate where municipal officials are prone to

undue pressure to log on - or fear they’re losing out.

A last illustration of our vulnerability to hi-tech hype was of course the Y2K bug. How

many billions were spent in that battle? Was the enemy real or imagined? Could so much

156

money have been mobilized for spending so quickly by so many governments on any other

item than technology?

His point here is that the hyperbole and hype associated with IT can create an

overheated climate of necessity that actually produces bad policy. Nor, judging by the

examples just cited, is the direct involvement of private sector players necessarily salutary.

The promotion of smart cities often favours Triple P approaches: Public Private Partnerships

or full-scale privatization.

Part 6.

The private sector is really aggressive in promoting the smart city movement. To go

further, one may suggest that the industry has captured governments’ ear as the dominant

stakeholder in the policy field. The IT industry is highly organized and politically adept.

Nationally, it speaks through the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance (CATA), which is

the advocacy group for Canada’s knowledge based industries. The Alliance has developed a

six point program of recommendations for the federal government to advance Canada’s hi-

tech sector. Two of the recommendations call for reduced taxation on hi-tech industry, and

one advocates increased direct government spending on IT infrastructure.

Beyond the federal arena, much of the hi-tech industry’s lobbying action is at the local

level. The CATA has sent municipalities a clear signal. “In the 21st century”, the Alliance

proclaims, “prosperous communities will harness knowledge, technology and innovation to

grow business and improve quality of life.” (Markham Tech Action Town Hall promotion).

To make sure the message gets through, the Alliance is organizing ten Tech Action Town

Hall meetings in cities from Halifax to Vancouver.) In many cities too, the hi-tech sector has

established strong local lobbying organizations. In Toronto, for instance, the aptly named

157

organization ‘SMART Toronto’ describes itself as “a leadership organization representing the

economic interests of the Toronto Technology Region” (www.smarttoronto.org). Smart

Toronto’s mandate is to engage in lobbying, networking, and program delivery “to make the

GTA technology community stronger, promoting Toronto as an international centre for

technological innovation and opportunity”(www.smarttoronto.org).

Furthermore, it is clear the organization believes government has a role to play in

reaching this objective. At a recent Smart Toronto Roundtable, representatives from Bell

Canada and Rogers Communications called on government to take a more active role in

driving the adoption of broadband access. One approach they recommended was having

municipalities put as many services as possible - such as license and permit applications -

online to encourage wider public adoption of high-speed Internet service. Another executive

called on governments to spend as much on building the electronic highway as they did on the

asphalt highways.

There’s no guarantee of course that governments will take up the industry’s

recommendations. But one thing is evident: on hi-tech policy development, the industry has

favoured access to decision-making. What’s wrong with this picture? Is there no one outside

of industry, academia and government whose views should be solicited?

The same pattern of inclusion and exclusion seems to have been replicated in Industry

Canada’s selection of its 12 Smart Communities Demonstration Projects in the year 2000. The

Minister in earlier speeches referred to the selection panel as being “comprised of experts

from a range of fields...” By my tally, the fields represented by the 23 member selection

committee are as follows: 11 were from the IT business sector, 8 from the academic sector,

and one each from health care, media, municipal government and independent consulting.

The representation is overloaded on the corporate and educational side - and devoid of

158

representation of other key stakeholders such as unions, community-based skills training

organizations, student, womens’, immigrant and refugee organizations.

The message to be drawn from all this is: the smart city movement is not so much an

inevitable, self-evident policy response to the natural forces of economics or technology.

Rather it’s the policy preference promoted by interests that have the most to gain from such

state action. Writing about similar experiences in Birmingham, British sociologist Frank

Webster concluded with some irony that the development of hi-tech policies in keeping with

the imperatives of neo-liberalism, the market and corporate claims suggests that “the dull

compulsion of economics continues to exercise its dominant influence even in these post-

modern times.”

Part 7.

Universities are critical to the smart city enterprise. They may also never be the same

as a result. Universities of course are the educators of knowledge workers, and incubators of

innovation so central to the new economy. Check the web site of any self-respecting smart

city and one of the chief claims they make is their network of advanced post-secondary

institutions. In turn, this puts universities under unprecedented pressure to contribute directly

to the city’s hi-tech capacity. This is one of several factors over the past decade that has been

driving corporatization of the university. Consider the following brief examples:

The American Brookings’ Centre on Urban and Metropolitan Policy recently did a

study on Louisville as it too heads towards amalgamation of local city and county

governments. Titled, “Beyond Merger: A Competitive Vision for the Regional City of

Louisville” one of the report’s chief conclusions was that the city has been poorly served by

159

the University of Louisville. The reports author’s told Carol Coletta’s Smart City Report:

“The university enterprise must be tuned to the economic enterprise of the city” (16 Aug 02).

A second example also comes from Carol Coletta in her Smart City Report. It’s an

example of what she regards as a more successful Business-University partnership. Here’s her

posting of June 24th 2002, on her website.

“FedEx Technology Institute at the University of Memphis: Three Cheers for

University of Memphis President Shirley Raines and FedEx CTO Rob Carter for

recruiting Jim Phillips to run the FedEx Technology Center. Jim is the best thing that

ever happened to the University, and we are exceedingly lucky to get him. Jim’s long

record of success in the tech world, as founder of SkyTel, senior exec at Motorola, and

top man at IPIX means he knows everybody in the business. Watch this become a real

center of energy for the city.”

Clearly, contributing to society’s economic well-being is a legitimate and laudable role

for universities. But this is only one of many university missions, and it can be achieved in

many ways other than the direct university-corporate alliances advocated above.

Part 8.

The assumptions of the smart city movement may not be supported by facts. By way

of example, one of its hallmarks may be briefly discussed.

Are we really in a new economy dependent on hi-technology and knowledge workers?

Interestingly, a recent study by the Toronto Board of Trade on the State of the City, suggests

otherwise. The report presents data showing that the Toronto city region is home to North

America’s largest biomedical sector and second largest information technology and

telecommunications sector by employment, with workforces of 10,000 and 155,000

160

respectively. Out of a total Toronto area labour force of 1.4 million people, that’s less than

12% of the workforce. Admittedly, however, many employees in other sectors such as

financial services and public administration should also be counted. How much is that

percentage likely to rise? Should those employed in high-tech be offered priorities in the city?

And how about the others who are in not in high-tech work?

161

Part 9.

A pre-occupation with IT and knowledge workers can contribute to ignoring the needs

of more workers and economic sectors that don’t fit the smart city paradigm. Again, an

example from Toronto. The government had to shut down its municipal service, targeted

towards more vulnerable workers, including low-wage, non-union workers who were

disproportionately women, immigrants and racial minorities working in low-skill jobs. These

services had to be stopped due to budget cuts in the late 1990s. The city’s overall well-being

was dropped far below the agenda in no time.

Finally, Frank Webster the British sociologist, has another take on this. He wonders

why, when at best some 30% of Birmingham’s workforce could be characterized as hi-tech or

knowledge sector workers, how is it the local government there is so aggressively pushing its

strategy of Birmingham as an informational city to the seeming neglect of the city’s majority

workforce? One could argue the Birmingham council knows which way the future economy

is going, and is being pro-active in positioning the city for success, but Webster’s not buying.

Instead, he decides, in his own words “to voice an uneasy suspicion”, namely “that many

commentators from academe, business, politics and media, in effect write themselves into the

city today. That is”, he goes on, “much of the writing of the new urbanism about the city’s

dynamism, its flexibility, its stimulation, its cosmopolitanism, its cultures seems to be, well,

our story. We are indisputably part of a knowledge elite, and we tell our favourite tale as

regards the city of the future.” It brings to mind the wonderful comment by novelist Anais

Nin that “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”

162

Are smart cities a social construction and projection of the desires of an urban

knowledge elite? And what of those who are not part of the knowledge elite - what is their

city of the future vision? What are the possibilities and limits of what IT and Smart Cities can

do for them?

Part 10.

It’s important to stretch Smart Cities into a more holistic and inclusive strategy of

urban, economic and social vitality. Briefly, here are some bases this would have to cover:

Educational Funding. Clearly, reduced real spending on public and post-secondary

education is incompatible with Smart Cities. The dramatic decline in ESL programs in

Toronto area schools, for instance, seems particularly un-smart. Smart City proponents would

have greater credibility if they spoke out more often in defense of accessible, quality

education.

Wider Consultations. Smart City policies and programs need more community input.

As has been said, there are far more stakeholders needing to be heard than industry and

academia. The digital divide is more pronounced when it comes to who influences hi-tech

policy, than it is with respect to who uses a computer or could benefit from its use. This

should be addressed.

Wider Scope. It would help for Smart City proponents to address what non-

technological policies and programs would best position Canadian cities57 to be healthy and

strong. A Report by Toronto’s Social Planning Council in 2001 is suggestive here. The truth

of course is there is no magic wand, hardware or software to save the City. It will take multi-

layered initiatives building broad community capacity, reaching out to as many sectors as

57 These suggestions may be taken as valid for other cities worldwide.

163

possible, to create the necessary social, human and environmental capital necessary to foster

wide-spread growth.

Here is a modest Australian example that points in the right direction.

The City of Brisbane has adopted a 10 year Smart City vision aimed at addressing and

promoting the following: information access; lifelong learning; the digital divide; social

inclusion and economic development. What’s important here is both what’s on the list, and

their order. Securing stable economic development is not just a matter of hardware and

software. Brisbane suggests it’s a culmination of commitment to community and resources

(such as technology) based on access and support for all.

While there are clearly progressive elements inherent in the Smart Cities agenda, this

urban form does not necessarily lead to the creation of a ‘progressive city’, but rather more

closely mirrors the main elements of the ‘entrepreneurial city’ and reflects some of the

negative effects the development of new technological and networked infrastructures are

having on urban areas58.

Elements of Smart Cities

‘New urbanism’ and smart growth agenda

Technological innovation (especially ICTs)

Business-led urban economic development

Heritage and the cultural industries

Education/ knowledge/ social learning

Social capital / communities/ social inclusion

Social and environmental sustainability

58 This development has been described as ‘splintering urbanism’ by Graham and Marvin (2001) in their book.

164

Limits of the Entrepreneurial Smart City

Maintaining competitiveness, mobility of global capital, ‘spatial fix’

Serial reproduction of cities

Growing social polarization

The growing social polarization is reflected openly in the following statement: “In

cities, clusters and enclaves of superconnected people, firms and institutions, often rest cheek-

by-jowl with large numbers of people with non-existent or rudimentary communication

technologies and very poor access to electronic information” (Graham, 2001a: 190).

This statement does have recurring value for the beginning of the 21st century.

However, both underdeveloped and developing countries have seen technological leaps in

their poorer populations within the last few years. Most remarkable example for that leap is

Uganda with the highest number of cell phones per person in Africa. All other African

countries are climbing the ladder of mobility to reach sales figures of Scandinavian countries

very soon. As mentioned before, most facilities offered in the digital city projects are

accessible via cell phones. Hence, conclusions about virtual environments in cities should not

be drawn from using the Internet access or hardware statistics. Developing countries like

Turkey, or the Balkan states that are in the midst of their accession to EU also have made

incredible progress in terms of mobility in communication. The wired city phenomenon is no

longer the scale for accessing electronic information.

165

Towards More Progressive Smart Cities?

Emphasis on human urban capital (not new technologies on their own)

Shift balance of power between business, government and communities in cities59

Address issues of power and inequality in the city60

Strengthen social / collective learning and social capital

Respect diversity in cities61

Environmental sustainability as important as economic growth

It would be a mistake to dismiss the smart city as merely another utopian project of the

kind designed to excite public interest in the new technology, but without a grounding in the

real world. The smart city can provide a model for the future communications landscape

precisely because it works within the limits and capabilities of current technology. The

broadband networks capable of delivering the range of applications and services being

trialled, will soon be available. In Japan, NTT has announced plans to provide full fibre

access to its large and small business customers by the end of the century, and to residential

subscribers by 2015. In the light of such developments, the smart city is not so much a

Utopian vision, but a realistic attempt to define the future role of communications

technologies and services within our communities.

59 Zukin’s ‘public culture’ concept clearly explains this shift. 60 This effort is significant since isues of power are also sources of inequality and intervention. 61 The democratic cultural pluralism is discussed by Sandercock (1998).

166

V.3.f. cooltown: the ecosystem explained

The slogan attributed to cooltown is : A vision of mobility, connectivity,

community, and transformation based on open standard and user needs. However, it is

not so simple...

Welcome to cooltown, our vision of a technology future where people,

places, and things are first class citizens of the connected world, wired and

wireless - a place where e-services meet the physical world, where humans

are mobile, devices and services are federated and context-aware, and

everything has a web presence. In cooltown, technology transforms human

experience from consumer lifestyles to business processes by enabling

mobility. Cooltown is infused with the energy of the online world, and

web-based appliances and e-services give you what you need when and

where you need it for work, play, life (www.cooltown.org, accessed on

November, 8, 2003)

The cooltown vision of a responsive world of mobile services requires clear, creative

thinking about technology. For several years, HP Labs have been working at the intersection

of nomadicity, appliances, networking, and the web. Their model for this research is one of

open collaboration and partnership with others who share similar goals.

Creating a cooltown ecosystem requires vision and technology, but above all else it

takes a community of like-minded people who believe in open participation, investing in the

web, and creating real solutions that add value to people’s lives. Their goal is to help bring

that community together, to openly share ideas and implementations, and to make a real

contribution to the web and to the world.

167

168

cooltown in action

In cooltown, personalization can lead to richer, more efficient daily experiences. For

instance, a variety of useful objects can sense your presence and seamlessly cooperate to give

you enhanced customer service.

The smart device in your pocket becomes your personal remote control for e-services.

On command it can access - and capture - information wirelessly transmitted by devices

called beacons. These beacons broadcast a URL for the object or place, pointing you to a web

presence providing product information, entertainment, advertising, or a gateway to e-services

for the item or the location. Capturing information from a beacon on your mobile device is

like bookmarking the physical world. In effect, your pocket device becomes a remote control

for the world-at-large.

In cooltown, URL bookmarks can be gathered from online interactions, messaging

services, synchronization applications, etc. Once bookmarked, URLs can be sent to remote

web locations, or beamed directly to a variety of web appliances using a beaming technology

we call “e-squirt.” Using this technology, your mobile phone or handheld wireless device can

“squirt” the URL, enabling you to instantly put presentations on a screen, documents on a

printer, or music on a connected stereo.

cooltown’s human factor

In cooltown, every person, place, or thing can be connected to the web. Even a

wristwatch has the capability of becoming an intelligent web appliance, for example, as a

valuable extension of the schoolroom. In cooltown a student using an e-service downloads a

169

Spanish dictionary from her computer to her watch. Once the program is downloaded, the

young Spanish student is able to access the knowledge stored in everyday objects via beacons

- instantly translating that information into Spanish.

Emergency services are made more effective through the use of smart, connected

appliances. Technology saves lives by providing a vital link to emergency medical services.

Your personal portal becomes a critical access point for service providers who need to know

the status of your physical condition. The result: fast, informed medical attention via

biometric detection, personal portals, and medical e-services.

For firemen, a cooltown-enabled visor is actually a context-aware appliance with the

ability to display real-time building and victim information. The data displayed on the

fireman’s visor is provided by, and accessed through, a web-linking appliance. As he passes

through the rooms, the information is updated by the space manager, which maintains the web

presence for the house

Even the cat has a web presence. She is linked to the environment via a location

identifier that is emitted by a beacon embedded in her collar and acquired by the space

manager. The cat’s web presence is automatically located in that space and made available for

immediate use by the fireman’s smart, connected visor.

cooltown drive time

In cooltown, all vehicles can be mobile appliances, with their own presence on the

web. cooltown core technologies create a web presence for your car that is linked to the car’s

electrical, mechanical, and information subsystems.

170

The car is a rolling cooltown space, a physical location that also provides a

corresponding mobile web presence for the vehicle, the driver, and driving-related services.

To maximize safety and simplicity, the driver’s interface uses multi-modal voice browsing

that allows him to control interactions with the vehicle while he drives.

When cooltown technologies are used in combination with other open-building-block

capabilities such as wireless communications, GPS, short-range wireless networking, and

smart handheld devices, the car is no longer simply a means of transportation. It becomes a

participant in a vast ecosystem of automotive and transportation services. And the service

station becomes an island of connectivity, an e-oasis where a variety of helpful transactions -

from car repair to alternative transportation options - are effortlessly fulfilled.

Cooltown is more than a futuristic vision, it is also a pragmatic architectural approach

for researchers and developers to create cooltown services and environments and to

participate in a community of like-minded experts.

On a totally different note, such a town may prevent humane interactions of

individuals and offer them septic lives through which they experience technological fantasies

in space-time rather than sentiments in their virtual locations. Some people never lose the

experience of living as strangers in a city, always alien, while others find that they are only at

home in the neighborhood, fearful or aienated by the wider city. It is here that the boundaries

and dominations of the conflicting relational worlds of the city life generate real suffering

(Sandercock, 2000: ch.8). What is the sense of home in a city? In the city of today and future?

Massey calls for an ‘open intensity’ in the city that depends on its imaginitive richness, its

allure to outsiders and on the extent to which it becomes embedded in the public realm of city

dwellers. This open intensity may well be provided in virtual networks herein. Cooltown may

171

be regarded as an initial exercise for controlling the pace of everyday lives. Such a control

could also lead to haunting results.

V.4. Cities will be the life of the future.

What is realized in my history is not the past definite of what I was, since it

is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been what I am, but the

future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of

becoming. (Lacan, 1977: 8)

David Harvey’s main argument is that we should not retain the notion of community

as particularity or difference. We have to transcend those particularities and look for a

negotiation of universalities through which to talk about how the future of the cities should be

(Harvey in Jewson & McGregor, 1997: 85). This statement surely lies very close to

Schirmacher as he reinstates that the future of the city is important since the fact that the only

commonality is that there is no commonality.

Harvey goes on to state in ‘Spaces of Hope’ that classical utopia are not possible and

that we should be looking for alternatives. He agrees with More in the sense that to achieve

the alternative, one must destroy the existing state of things (2000: 15-16). His main questions

that belie his argument are: Is dialectical utopianism what we are looking for? How can we

integrate social process and spatial form in Utopianism? Some thinkers claim that 21st

century still has encrusted within a revolutionary force of populations, be it out of the misery

brought by the forces of globalization or the mesmerizing characteristic of sci-fi movies.

Do not think one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the

172

thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality

(and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses

revolutionary force (Foucault in Bentley, 1999: 15).

The answer may be hidden in details unconsidered. The conspiracy theories might

have played an unexpected cathartic effect whereby the Southern hemisphere has been the

main cause for eternal distrust of populations in the North. Thrift surmises that big answers

are not the solution to the messy world. There is nothing definite about the geographies of

global change and we do not have to be definite to change them (Thrift in Johnston et al,

1995: 42).

While statements such as ‘something unusual is happening today in the relation

between the real and the imaginary, reality and its representations’ (Soja, 1996: 242) may be

applicable today, they also would have characterised observations of 50 and 100 years ago.

The decline of cities, then, cannot be explained as a physical phenomenon attributed to the

growth of electronic media. Rather, one might wonder whether amidst a shifting paradigm,

we are witnessing an understandable, nostalgic reaction (Light in Crang et al. 1999: 124).

Among those scholars who stipulate the fact that what we are living through is a little

more than a nostalgic reaction is Stephen Graham (2001: 406). He focuses on a new spatial

imagination that needs to be formed on sociotechnical, geographical, political, legal and

discursive terms. However, one should remember that new networked technologies may not

always fit the networked mettropolis since it has multiple spaces and sites of differing

characteristics. The metropolis is incapable of being seen as a whole, not only in its virtual

scale, but also in its partially connected multiplicities. Besides, time-space adjustments in the

173

cities are generally planned according to the powerful. Places are characterised within these

attributions and may offer “systematic silences” (Painter in Graham, 2001: 412). It was back

in the 1960s when the spiral of silence theory was coined by Neumann for mistreated

minorites. Her dissatisfaction came from the fact that these minorities did not have a say in

the socio-political decisions or the political agenda. However, returning to our decade and

conditions for discussion, it is hard to presume that virtual platforms are controlled by certain

bodies or institutions. One must search for different reasons for why cyberspace has still not

been a futile arena for returning of the repressed in the global metropolis. The lack of

electronic literacy must have a huge impact in this respect and at least primarily explains why

socio-economically repressed has not learned to use the electronic matrices to their full

advantage.

V.4.a. Do we really want to preserve the city-state?

We enter into both a third era of war and a new stage of the city, or more

exactly of the post-industrial meta-city. The relatively recent end of

classical deterrence between the East and West, with its geopolitical

uncertainties, results in the urgent necessity of reinterpreting the doctrines

of military engagement, going all the way back to the most distant origins

of history. (Virilio, 2002: 8)

And so the era of illusion is about to make its debut. The topical character of the city

of free and equal men assembled in a public place is to be succeeded by a teletopical metacity

where the public image 'in real time' will probably supplant the quite real space of cities of the

republic. Virilio goes on to differentiate between dromocracy and democracy and rejects all

174

assumptions about these concepts having affirmative relations. He stipulates the following:

Harbingers of a serious conflict of interpretation between democracy and dromocracy, where

the post-industrial implementation of an absolute speed (that of electromagnetic waves) will

abolish the progress that arose from the accessibility to the public of relative speeds since

Greco-Latin antiquity (2002: 9).

Cities are becoming important political administrative units. If a city is a coming

together, a being together of strangers, (Young, 1990), what holds it together? How does a

city with a plurality of cultures, a highly differentiated city hold itself together? The cities and

regions of the future must nurture difference and diversity through a democratic cultural

pluralism. According to many scholars of the present era, social justice, difference,

citizenship, community and civic culture are the minimum foundations necessary to create a

new order of urban civility of the current new world disorder. However, it is out of that new

world disorder that social relationships in cities have had to relocate into computer screens to

create discursive non-spaces. Cyber-networks formed therein have allowed us to question

present city life to predict what awaits us in the near future.

Mobility has become one of the critical questions of contemporary life. Highway

traffic and data networks are facilitating a continuous flow of persons and information. Such a

transfer is supposed to take place in ever short intervals in spite of an imminent traffic

collapse.

Major construction projects, such as gigantic traffic interchanges, are supposed to

redefine the structure of our cities and our lives. Underneath the face of these requirements, a

175

desire is rushing along, manifesting itself intermittently, and creating alternative routes ripe

for exploration62.

The new geography of Internet, as the various examples of community building

around the globe illustrate, is a dynamic environment of many different places and spaces

used for many different purposes. The speculation of the writers of urban decline that new

technologies will accelerate this decline become less compelling in the light of

counterexamples occurring even now. Increasingly, users are harnessing technology to

strengthen spatial ties within their cities (Light in Crang at al., 1999: 128). The pessimists’

contributions are fun to read. Yet when they are situated in a broader debate within the history

of technology and daily life, their pessimism must be balanced against examples of how

individuals are using cyberspaces to improve city spaces. The skill of strategic actors is not so

much to preserve the city-state anymore. Rather, their role is to help to foster the conditions

in which debates about conceptions of the city can grow and expand into rich, integrative,

public realm discourses. In this way, the contemporary policy interest in cities can create an

opportunity for a remoulding of urban governance discourses and practices. These discourses

and practices need to be more in connection with the social dynamics and time-geographies of

city dwellers now (Healey, 2002: 1790).

Simultaneously, electronic privacy and interaction management technologies are

creating the possibility for new schisms and subdivisions. We do not have to believe pop-

apocalyptic prophecies of the imminent collapse of civic structures and the rise of the

sovereign individual (Sassen, 1996: back cover), but we certainly must recognize the growing

slippage of civitas and urbs. Another shift is with the definition of a community in the Oxford

Dictionary of English as a “body of people in one place, district or country”. Many scholars,

62 Ref. explo.org projects

176

Barry Wellman among the currently known, have been studying this phenomenon to

understand whether the term “community” has really culminated from electronic

communications. It would be more up to the point to state that traditional congruencies of

citizenship, public space and spectacle- long vital in the functioning of cities- have been

dislocated (Boyer in Mitchell, 2000: 97). The scope of today is that we learn to be citizens of

multiple, dispersed, overlapping communities through diverse electronically mediated means

by surfing into and participating in virtual public spaces.

Hereby, the other side of the coin comes from Michael Benedikt who expects virtual

spaces to be suitable social community spaces in another 50 years (Punt M. & Asberry, K.R.,

1999: 65-66). His argument may be opposed as he does not come up with a clear definition

for ‘social community spaces’ and whether their electronic versions would have to coincide

with habitual public spaces. Mitchell's approach is hopeful (rather than hype-ful), a world

away from the glib futurology that dominated writing about technology over the past decade.

"I see technology as a human process that continually opens up possible futures," he

concludes. "The point is to provide a critical guide to those futures, and to spark debate about

the decisions that will produce those futures.”(Mitchell, 2003: 48) His pragmatic approach

calls for extrapolation of virtual projects that already exist to find out whether they play any

role in shaping of the future societies.

V.4.b. Everybody needs their own fantasy in the real-time city

SEE APPENDIX (interview with Rheingold). The related explanations as well as the

direct responses from Rheingold show that populations, quite hastily turning their attention

towards personal time and space, are demanding personalized equipment and software. This

creates an urge for new technology producers and improves market conditions for higher

quality and services. However, the counter-forces in the market also need to take measures in

177

order to sustain uninterrupted and timeless fantasies. The surveillance systems are also in

power and inevitable progress and will continue to be so.

According to Townsend (2000: 85-90), temporal and spatial relations in cities are

being rewritten by new mobile communications. As decentralization in decision making

increases, speed and indirectly efficiency and capacity are augmented in new urban systems.

The “real-time city”, in which system conditions can be monitored and reacted to

instantenously, has arrived. How these conditions may be favorable for happy minorities and

how they may cause constraints for city planners will be futher explored in the upcoming

parts of this chapter.

Fantasy requires some kind of resistance to status-quo and ordinary goings on of the

world. In this regard, we must engage in resistance by developing the idea of a technological

culture- an idea grossly underdeveloped at present time. Nevertheless, the ideals of

technological culture remain underdeveloped and therefore outside of popular culture and the

practical ideals of democracy. This is also why society as a whole has no control over

technological developments. This is probably one of the gravest threats to democracy. Even

among the elite, in government circles, technological culture is somewhat deficient. The hype

generated by the publicity around the Internet is not counter-balanced by a political

intelligence that is based on technological culture. For instance, in 1999, Bill Gates not only

published a book on work at the speed of thought, bu also detailed how Microsoft’s

Falconview software would enable the destruction of bridges in Kosovo. Thus it is no longer a

Caesar or a Napoleon who decides on the fate of any particular war, but a piece of software.

In short, the political intelligence of war and society no longer penetrate the technoscientific

world (Armitage, 2001: 89).

178

It is therefore imperative to overcome the tyranny of distances through the fiber-logic

of the information super-highway. This would result in creation of hyper-environments where

individual preferences form the technological culture. For some, such a technological culture

is demanded only by opponents of cyberdemocracy. Whether this demand will be realized in

city format depends on the future conditioning of the human environment.

Are we talking about a network of displaced individuals looking over tower

residences? Or rather technological networks, a term coined by Bruno Latour, as nets thrown

over spaces? Here, technological networks may be taken to mean social networks that

construct a relation between human knowledge, human practices and nonhuman resources -

the latter being the stuff from which the objects themselves are made. For example the

relations of architects, clients, contractors and bankers comprise a network of building

producers. Fantasies are likely to arise from displaced individuals belonging to both type of

networks. However, the technological network, compared to the former, has more alternatives

in space-time.

“Nothing is possible”, Lefebvre insistently urged, “without the desire and demand for

the impossible”. Thus, “imagination” must strive “to seize power”. His thesis of de-alieanated

“total man” (which, notwithstanding its gendered connotations, represented a whole,

unfettered human being), “can only be conceived of as a limit to the infinity of social

development”.

Fantasy has become a social practice characteristic of global metropolitanism.

However, these fantasies, too become caught in the socio-spatial dialectic of the fast world,

the result being the further confusion of spatial and temporal boundaries and the collapse of

many of the conventions that formerly distinguished fantasy from reality (Knox in Johnson et

al., 2002: 339).

179

To go nowhere, even to ride around in a deserted quarter or on a

crowded freeway, now seems natural for the voyeur-voyager in his

car. On the contrary, to stop, to park, are unpleasant operations, and

the driver even resents going somewhere or toward someone; to

visit a person or to go see a show seems to require superhuman

effort (Virilio, 2000a: 13).

Above Virilio refers to human tendencies for creating a ‘sense of belonging’ wherever

they go or surf. Lives become highly personalized as spending time outside of residential or

work areas requires extra effort and promises no peace or bonus. Many scholars, on top of the

list being Wakabayashi (2002: 6) with his Japanese urban knowledge, have dwelled upon this

tendency. The best way to develop a general outlook on this tendency would be to call it

‘placedness’ in both virtual and physical cities. Three forms of subjects live in the city: The

centered subject, the postmodern subject and the situated subject (Frug, 1999: 111). The

centered subject is now adapted by local governments. However, postmodern subjectivity

(1999: 109) could stimulate interesting outcomes in the city. Task forces, ad-hoc

organizations could be formed to examine aspects of metropolitan life now largely left

untouched: the need for better working conditions in offices, the need for health and

retirement benefits for people who work in homes, the need for consumer protection and the

like.

Touching upon daily life activities in the city is Norman Nie and Lutz Erbring in

Internet and Society (2000: 50-80), who report that Internet usage results in decreased

community activities in the city. Also appearing in Valovic’s Digital Mythologies (2000: 110)

is the turn-of-the-century remark that the new “digitalitis” is creating the social isolation that

180

it is said to overcome. Cyberhoods and virtual communities spell the death of real

communities. Or is that so?

Cyber advocates like Mitchell (2000: 90) stress the fact that so called “virtual

communities” work best when they are allied with the possibility of occasional face-to-face

encounters, and that online interaction actually stimulates demand for more familiar sorts of

meetings and meeting places. Howard Rheingold’s online community the WELL proves his

claim.

Placed at this transition by changes beyond our control, the human communication

environments have no choice between two “gestures” (V. Flusser's “Geste”): the paradigm of

face-to-face communication, including local integrated social density, anonymity and

pseudonymity as specific urban qualities on the one hand, or the paradigm of interface

communication, including instant local-global-relations, global digital mediasphere and

placeless, so called virtual spaces. These two gestures have to be coordinated as a new

transsocial, cultural practice of being in a glocal (R. Robertson) mediascape. These processes

do not only start a mediamorphosis (R. Fidler) of the spatio-temporal interplay through which

humans use to coordinate their short and long ranges of individual, cultural or social action.

The mediamorphosis seems to overtake the central modern heritage: the functional

differentiation of urbanity (Fabler, 2000: 18). To refer to these terms on more practical means,

30 people communicating on an identical 3-D simulation of San Marco are actually from 30

different nationalities and most of them, probably, have never been to Venice. Their avatars

somehow seem to converge in real-time chat around one of the discussion zones of

cybertown, only a click away from their mouse.

181

V.4.c.Does citizensip really matter?

One would say first that it is just that in Athens the poor and the people count more

than the nobles and the rich: for it is the people who make the navies work and who give to

the City its power. And this counts as well for the pilots, the rowing masters, the second-in-

command, the lookout, and those who build the ships. It is to all of these that the City owes its

force, much more than to the hoplites, or nobles, or gentlemen.

In maritime democracy, contrary to Lacedemonian democracy, the power of Athens is

first of all that of its vessels and not solely of its citizen-infantry - consider the importance of

Piraeus and the fortification of “long walls” between Athens and its port. Democracy, the

constitution of the Athenians, is therefore also dromocratic, since those who run the navy

govern the city. Contrary to traditional autocratic regimes, the division of public power is

comparable to that of the power of physical displacement. (Virilio, 2002: 8)

The value of a network connection in the global city is determined by bandwidth. In

the city of bits (note Mitchell), the “bandwidth-disadvantaged” are the new have-nots. The

absence of network communication, known as “zero bandwidth”, defines what it is to be a

digital hermite, the marginalized outcasts of cyberia (Mitchell,1995: 25). In this cyberworld,

lines on the ground will matter little: a new logic has emerged. The great power struggle of

cyberspace will be over network typology, connectivity and access – not the geographic

borders and chunks of territory that have been fought over in the past (1995: 26).

According to Mitchell, in the consequent tension between centralizing and

182

decentralizing forces, the initial development of an advanced telecommunications

infrastructure is likely to favor existing urban centers (with their high and profitable

concentrations of information work). Kevin Robins strongly disputes the “post-geography” of

Mitchell’s city of bits. He takes a lead from Paul Virilio, who is concerned that the apparent

collapse of geographical space is a fundamental threat to human liberty. In Virilio’s terms, the

compression of distance associated with the rise of the global village represents an

“intellectual and spiritual enclosure” (Robins, 1997: 198). So even in the global city,

geography matters, and inequalities will continue to plaque the human condition.

Robins is right in indicating that the issue of creating a more democratic and plural

culture should not be reduced to a technological issue. However, this is easier said than done.

Howard Rheingold pinpoints one of the principal political dangers implicit in virtual

communities: the false utopian promise of the technological fix, and the potential erosion of

democracy. Rheingold quotes Langdon Winner to highlight the danger of belief in a

technologically-driven utopia:

...there is none more poignant [political ideal] than the faith that the computer

is destined to become a potent equalizer in modern society...

In a contest of force against force, the larger, more sophisticated, more ruthless,

better equipped competitor often has the upper hand (Rheingold, 1993: 397).

Hereby, an important warning is issued by Rheingold: that there is nothing

intrinsically democratic about electronic technologies. He goes further in his warnings and

emphasizes the effects of commercializing cyberspace and the penetration of the means of

social control, thus foreshadowing the static on the Disinformation SuperHighway (DSH). In

183

his discourse, a channel for authentic communication could just as easily become a channel

for manufacturing commercial desire (1993: 295-6). We might then anticipate the

replacement of democracy with a global mercantile state that exerts control through the

media-assisted manipulation of desire. Thus, he asserts that the most insiduous attack on

democracy might come not from political dictatorship, but from the marketplace.

And yet, despite prognostications of a sedated and controlled populace, optimistic

visions of cyberdemocracy persist. Many observers have discovered good government in

virtual communities, especially in the democracy of the WELL (Whole Earth Lectronic Link).

In other examples, Dallas Dishman showed how coming out was easier for gay men on

Internet, and how it allowed isolated individuals to find community (Dishman in Dear, 2000:

214). On a geopolitical scale, David S.Benhaum makes a forceful argument about how

important the new technologies have been in the liberation of the former Soviet block

(Benhaum, 1997: 122-173). He observed that the protests in Serbia are the “first mature

example” of the Internet playing a role in a popular uprising against an authoritarian regime.

Benhaum argues that the experience of using the Internet bolsters people’s confidence

so that they can take care of their own affairs and govern themselves. One example may be

the way in which a global anti-land mines coalition was expeditiously formed via the Net,

leading to a United nations resolution, and a Nobel peace Prize for the coalition’s leader.

There are also times democracy does not endure. After a rape in cyberspace, the

LambdaMOO community faced the difficult problem of inventing self-governance from

scratch (Dibbel, 1993: 237-61). They could come to no consensus, so a community wizard

finally imposed more formal structures of governance. The community was never the same

184

after that.

A city project which impregnates civic culture and manages to achieve broad

consensus is at hand in this study (Borja and Castells, 1997: 8). Castells develops this project

with a certain necessity in mind: social action and political projects are essential in the

betterment of a society that clearly needs change.

More haunting signals come from Virilio in his ‘Desert Screen’ (2002: 8-15). His

argument consists of a metastasis: the advent of the rights of citizens and the rise of the

political-citizen as soldier citizen, a free man who could initiate an anan and therefore give up

his life for his rights, the no-man's land of neighbouring territories being the place of non-

rights, the space of exile, of ostracization. Regional conflicts prevailing since the end of the

Cold War cover the city territory as strategic areas of power and form a new type of

citizenship. The reflections may also be observed via www where groups claim rights for

their living environment through secret missions circulated in cyber-town meetings. Israeli-

Palestinian conflict has been and continues to be the best prototype for such cyber-soldier-

citizen efforts.

On a totally different note, the move towards a networked society creates interesting

possibilities for governments more used to dealing with hierarchies of local solidarities. No

longer are communities local, all-encompassing, and stable. Instead, people have multiple,

shifting sets of glocalized ties. The local becomes only one kind of ‘special interest.’ Even

more than in the past social mobilization will be apt to develop over non-territorial issues, be

it shared affect (‘ecology,’ ‘Islam’) or shared material interests (Wellman et al, 2003: 123). It

is e-citizenship in a network society that matters now.

185

V.4.d.Accident can be good. Crash can be fascinating

After the globalization of telecommunications, one should expect a

generalized kind of accident, a never-seen-before accident. It would be just

as astonishing as global time is, this never-seen-before kind of time. A

generalized accident would be something like what Epicurus called “the

accident of accidents” [and Saddam Hussein surely would call the “mother

of all accidents” -trans.]. The stock-market collapse is merely a slight

prefiguration of it. Nobody has seen this generalized accident yet. But then

watch out as you hear talk about the “financial bubble” in the economy: a

very significant metaphor is used here, and it conjures up visions of some

kind of cloud, reminding us of other clouds just as frightening as those of

Chernobyl... (Virilio, 1995a: 42)

How about the impact of these accidents? Virilio goes on with the same irony. When

one raises the question about the risks of accidents on the information (super) highways, the

point is not about the information in itself, the point is about the absolute velocity of

electronic data. The problem here is interactivity. Computer science is not the problem, but

computer communication, or rather the (not yet fully known) potential of computer

communication. In the United States, the Pentagon, the very originator of the Internet, is even

talking in terms of a “revolution in the military” along with a “war of knowledge”, which

might supersede the war of movement in the same way as the latter had superseded the war of

siege, of which Sarajevo is such a tragic and outdated reminder.

186

To use a dramatic example, in the war in Sarajevo cameras were set up at dangerous

crossroads, waiting for events to happen, waiting for someone to be killed or mutilated. One

reporter said, because the spot is treacherous, the chances are good that a few hours of

patience by a cameraman will be rewarded with compelling images of a life being

extinguished or incapacitated. Thus the wounded in their hospital beds can watch video

replays of the very moment when they were shot. They may retain painful personal memories

of the incident, but when faced with constant viewings of it, their actual experience becomes

increasingly disembodied, and they become outside observers of their own history. Boyer

(1996: 127) argues about the disappearance of cities as symbolically bombed into

nothingness; crime scenes and crash events increase in number to represent nothingness in the

city. Image and reality are symbiotic in her claims. It is with the war in Iraq that live killings

and shootings have been edited out to show central boulevards of Baghdad, completely

isolated and away from the whole scene. This time the narcotic feeling created by stable

cameras within seconds were transmitted as background images for war-time coverage. The

tape rewound infinite number of times displayed the kind of reality that never existed in the

city.

Throughout history, humans have created unique physical spaces in which to live,

work and socialize. But the digital age has completely transformed the places in which we

conduct our affairs, according to William J. Mitchell. We don’t congregate at the town bank

any more for financial transactions. We visit ATMs or bank online. Interactions that once

required people to face each other now take place via computer, often across vast distances.

Mitchell (2003: 15) describes the disappearance of familiar public structures like phone

booths, as well as the migration of work from office to just about anywhere a wireless

connection is possible. As technology becomes imbedded in our lives and literally disappears

187

into the woodwork, Mitchell sees the possibility for new kinds of extended communities.

Network technology has enabled “discontinuous, asynchronous global agoras,” says Mitchell,

exemplified by the most recent Gulf War protests. Organizers used digital space (email lists

and websites) to help orchestrate public gatherings, which in turn generated images fed back

to the Internet, spurring interest in country after country, time-zone after time-zone. Mitchell

believes that such networks open up new methods for human assembly and political

organization, but also increase the risks to individuals of surveillance. In other words, it is not

only a matter of smart cars that already know where we are destined, but rather a matter of the

same car being hyperlinked so that it travels through safe streets and helps human survival.

The suggestive power of virtual technologies is without parallel. Next to the illicit

drugs-based narco-capitalism which is currently destabilizing the world economy, a

computer-communication narco-economy is building up fast. The question may even be

raised whether the developed countries are not pushing ahead with virtual technologies in

order to turn the tables on the under-developed countries, which are, in Latin America

especially, living off, or rather barely scraping by, the production of illicit chemical drugs.

When one observes how much research effort in advanced technologies has been channelled

into the field of amusement (video-games, real virtuality goggles, etc.), should this

instantaneous subjugating potential - and it has been applied successfully in history before -

which is being unleashed on the populations by these new techniques remain concealed?

Something is hovering over our heads which looks like a “cybercult”. We have to

acknowledge that the new communication technologies will only further democracy if, and

only if, we oppose from the beginning the caricature of global society being hatched for us by

big multinational corporations throwing themselves at a breakneck pace on the information

superhighways.

188

According to Guattari: “The most differentiated and the most undifferentiated coexist

amid the same chaos that, with infinite speed, plays its virtual registers one against the other

and one with the other (speed of light, big bang, the impossibility of crossing absolute zero).

Hannah Arendt throws in a thought-provoking juxtaposition: “Progress and catastrophe are

the opposite faces of the same coin.”

Even though few decades have passed since the above reflection, one can not help

recall the oil and territory wars holding a similar motive concealed by their mercy-stricken

leaders. Paul Virillio in Speed & Politics says that “speed is the hope of the West” (47). If so,

it is also the West's greatest curse, for in our incessant demands for more and more speed we

create the conditions of possibility for the implosion. According to Baudrillard, our social

structures can no longer provide the speed we demand, indeed that the earth can no longer

sustain it, and that the inevitable result of our coming to the end of a long cycle of controlled

explosion will be a quick and catastrophic shift to an implosive social system.

Spaces that we seeek to create in modern society can quickly be taken away from

us and used to control us (Virilio, 1997:35).

Virilio’s unfolding and wholly intentional reactions to the emergence of dromocratic

condition are actually concerned with ‘the importance of interruption, of accident, of things

that are stopped as productive’ (Virilio, 1997:44). As he told Lotringer: “It’s entirely different

from what Gilles Deleuze does in Milles Plateaux. He progresses by snatches whereas I

handle breaks and absences. The fact of stopping and saying -let’s go somewhere else- is very

important for me”.

Virilio’s theoretical position and social sensibilities concerning technology thus

remain beyond the realm of even the social sciences. According to Armitage, he does not

189

depend on intellectual “explanations” but on “the obvious quality of the implicit”. He stresses

that the watch does not tell the time, but tells you where you are63.

“It is true that the innovation of the ship already entailed the innovation of

the shipwreck. Aristotle’s conception that there is no science of the

accident should be rejected!! Each accident is a reminder of future

collisions. What comes after the accident?What is meant by the pleasure of

rendez-vous at a distance? Radio and TV makes us feel on the brink of war

the whole time.”64

Hereby, one may refer to a third line of urbanism that takes its starting point from the

conviction that modern cities not only offer the articulation of utopian desires, but also

provide possibilities for catastrophes. From where we stand at the moment, unable to pay

confidence to the very moment itself, this bipolarity seems more applicable to city-life than

any other assumptions. The utopian aspect of a modern city could be traced back to Weber

and Marx. Weber’s main standpoint is that the occidental city is a place where the ascent from

bondage to freedom is possible by means of monetary acquisition. This point seems to need a

little more sharpening and update.

Risk society examined by Ulrich Beck where everybody is expert is far beyond the

informational society of Castells. Such a society alarms that the separation of personal and

experiential knowledge is declining. Creation of discursive space where cities can articulate

wider voices than these experts is needed. Then city’s challenge to the state in the age of

European integration would be: to adapt to the conditions of multiple orders of sovereignty, to

63 This is possible via GPS-global positioning system 64 This statement carries the basic motive of Virilio’s exhibition, entitled “Unknown Quantity” and held at Fondation Cartier / Paris in 2002.

190

strike up new relations with the state and supra-state both vertically and horizontally. To

become an active agent in the emerging knowledge society, a real basis needs to be given to a

discursive democracy of participation (Isin, 2000: 247).

One line of argument herein could be ability to create private spaces in cyberspace, so

that each city inhabitant feels at home. The technological means to create private places in

cyberspace are available, but the right to create these places remain a fiercely contested issue.

Mithell asks: “Can you always keep your bits to yourself? Is your homepage your castle?”

(1995: 52) Even though some Internet advocates claim that there is always a possibility for

alternative castles, the issue of representation comes into view. David Harvey in The

Condition of Postmodernity talks about spacetime compressions creating crises of

representation: he allows that each revolution in communication technology caused an

annihiliation of space by time, and produced a crisis of representation in its wake. One way to

transcend this proposition is by looking at the booming incline of cell phone users all over the

planet, especially in developing countries where urban digital divide is at its peak. All aspects

of soft cities are accessible via cell phones. Wireless technologies spread before one can track

their cloning structure, so in less than a decade representative concerns will, most probably,

leave their dominance to questions regarding genetic make-up.

The on-line world does not accord with Habermas' description of the normative ideal,

where people can talk as equals, rational argument prevails, the goal is consensus, and the

group decides the wisest direction to take. Mark Poster comments that “rational argument

rarely prevails on the net, and achieving consensus is widely seen as impossible. These are

symptoms of the fundamentally different ways identity is defined in the public sphere and on

the Net” (Poster, 2001: 171-189). Politics has never been an area that is free of emotion and

191

violent conflict, and attempts to discuss it rationally frequently end in heated argument. One

comes to view this as a more complete model of human communication that accepts our full

nature, rather than a departure from the public sphere65. Thus in this area, the Internet has

proved itself to be more inclusive, more accepting of the human psyche, than either

Habermas' historical normative model or Rheingold's interpretation of it (Telli, 2002: 137).

The explosive tendencies of information both on site and across cyberspace, makes

government more accountable and more transparent, but also heightens public expectations

and increases popular demands, putting inordinate pressures upon local institutions. The

uncertainty of change and doubts about who is actually “in charge” also leads to a perilous

instability and a thunderous reaction from the extremes of the left and the right (Savitch,

2002: 187). Individual concerns seem to win over policies of alienation habitual to

governments and there are more and more opposers in number who escape filters in their

cyber-masks. Those who would be accepted as powerful opinion leaders in the near past live

their lives and careers in traumatic suspicion and peril; mega-cities provide the most efficient

matrices for the ‘hard-to-imagine’ conspiracies to actually take place in unexpected space-

time.

In the post-fordist global metropolis, telecommunications redefine how space is

perceived. The city becomes fragmented and polarised- a patchwork of different types of

spaces is formed; some real and some electronic. Four main policy areas have emerged in that

era: national policy programmes for urban telematics development; teleports and competitive

economic policies, inter-urban networking initiatives and experiments with electronic public

spaces (Graham & Marvin, 2002: 74) A type of reconcentration within decentralization is the

case, for instance, in edge cities like Los Angeles. The geographical settlement also allows

65 True for aus.politics and many other news groups

192

this phenomenon. Technoparks built at the edge of industrial cities towards the end of the

20th century are collective architectures housing micro-research & development offices of

technological giants.

On a different outlook, there is a fatalist viewpoint for the future of electronic cities

that is pessimistic, perhaps excessively so. Sorkin concludes his article Scenes from the

Electronic City by stating The question is whether or not we’ll have any choice” (Sorkin,

1992b: 77) He thereby suggests a determinist outcome. Perhaps time will prove Sorkin right.

Yet to suggest we might have no choice is to accept the technological determinist position.

The Internet is in its early stages and has an enormous number of potential future directions. It

would be a self-fulfilling prophecy if critics who assume the worst avoid participation in

network development just at the time they could have the biggest impact.

While we cannot be sure about all that the next decades will bring, they will all have to

bring new markets and new governments into alignment. Savitch has a more hopeful prospect

for cities. According to him, contrary to how some writers describe globalization, it need not

be out of control. Indeed we have already seen a spate of regional and interregional

organizations regulating parts of the global economy. Cities have begun to form transnational

confederations that foster information sharing, economic cooperation and technological

assistance. Supra-national and regional governments will have to play a greater role, working

incrementally though steadily in making adjustments. Not the least, localities will have to be

more accountable if they are to satisfy citizens, maintain popular legitimacy and cope with

daily pressures (Savitch, 2002: 188). One can not help agree with his view on reconcentration

in cities. However, his focus on traditional local authorities includes only a slight change in

functions and working patterns. This perspective is not adequate for the diverse city initiatives

193

in question; they are almost impossible to monitor.

Virilio has a totally alternative scope as he surmises that with the realization of

dromocratic type progress, humanity will stop being diverse. Not only that, but it will also

tend to divide only in hopeful populations66 and despairing populations, blocked by the

inferiority of their technological vehicles, living and subsisting in a finite world. He concludes

by pointing out that speed is the hope of the West towards becoming infinite. One significant

issue he misses out is the mobilization of those despairing populations to find alternate places

to stay among or in close touch with hopeful populations. This mobilization brings to mind

the supersaturated populations and octapus geography of huge cities in the world.

Here is the apocalyptic picture: By 2025, 60 percent of the world’s population, which

is increasing by 90 million per year, will be living in cities (Decker, 2000: 248). There are

now 57 cities with populations of over 5 million, of which 44 are in the developing world.

These cities concentrate environmental hazards in acute form generating the majority of

greenhouse gases, today’s urban centres consuming three-quarters of the world’s energy and

creating three quarters of the world’s pollution. Cars now emit more pollution than industrial

production. The climatic changes caused by emissions from the very instruments of

modernism – environmentally-controlled buildings and motor cars – will cause massive life-

threatening floods and droughts. The irony thus revealed is of cities that, on the one hand, are

the cradle of our civilisation within which cultural patterns are determined, while, on the

other, they threaten the physical welfare of the world’s population. The view of the global

village at the start of a new century reveals at least 600 million people now living in life-

threatening urban environments with the divide between rich and poor continuing to widen.

66 Who are allowed the hope that they will reach in the future the speed that they are accumulating, which will give them access to the possible – that is to the project, the decision, the infinite.

194

At worst, cities loom as ghettos of economic greed and ecological disaster and, at best, the

promise of urban centres as sources of inspiration and beauty, places of social, cultural and

intellectual development and joy, now appears precarious. Virilio (1995a: 103) has labelled

this impact towards the end of the 20th century as ‘total mobilization and motorization’. One

probably has to add in a 21st century concept to this label: <C[h]yb[p]ernation>

This concept embarks upon a few separate phenomena. The fact that the first part of

the word is an altered and regenerated version of the word ‘c[h]yb[p]er’ and at the same time

refers to cyberrealities is the hallmark of the argument. Nation refers to the collective will of

citizens comprising a certain territory and recalls the geograhical boundaries of a multiplicity

of cities at the same time. The city is a focus or node of social transportation and

communication, which mediates the relationship betwen other societies, communities, nations

and/or other social groups. Taken as a whole, c[h]yb[p]ernation also has a literal meaning:

Becoming hyper- free and mobile on the fourth living dimension created by the ICT. It is as a

result of this c[h]yb[p]ernation that excess speed of tele-technologies appear. At that instance,

Virilio (2002:10) asks: “Far more threatened by the 'excess speed' of tele-technologies than

by the excess wealth of an apparently triumphant capitalism, will democracy finally prevail as

some imagine, or on the contrary, is it simply going to disappear?”

It is curious that while CyberCities narrate the dematerialization of physical space and

chronological time, space has become a dominant issue within postmodern criticism. Edward

Soja in Postmodern Geographies argues that the nineteenth century’s affair with progress

valued time over space, allowing the latter to hide things from us, to be used as a veil drawn

over the surface. David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity talks about spacetime

compressions creating crises of representation: he allows that each revolution in

195

communication technology caused an annihiliation of space by time, and produced a crisis of

representation in its wake. Fredric Jameson notes in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of

Late Capitalism that the cultural conditions of postmodernity have created the need for

cognitive maps to link our ideological positions with our imaginations, and hence they enable

social transformations to take place.

In all three accounts, the postmodern body is surrounded and bombarded with

incoherent fragments of space and time, for in the cyber-city we seem to be continuously in

motion be it driving the freeways, shopping at the mall, or pushing carts through supermarket

aisles. It has been argued that electronic telecommunications have reformulated our

perception of space and time, so that we experience a loss of spatial boundaries or

distinctions. All spaces begin to look alike and implode into a continuum, while time has been

reduced to obsessive and compulsive repetitions. The result is an inability to map our

contemporary terrain, to envision space and representational forms, and thus to weave things

together, to conclude, to be able to act (Boyer, 1996: 19). Is there any way out of this maze?

The space of the possible increases. The future is open: objectively open. This

openness may produce doubts as well as reformulations like cybercities. It is critical to

broaden our understanding of what cities and cyberspaces can be. A city stands for the

disparate experiences people have in a physical space; no two people have the same

experience of a single city. Similarly, people’s experiences online differ, and no to people

have the identical experiences in the varied geography of the Internet. Just as a city does not

mean one thing to all people, the Internet and cyberspace, while singular words, are not

monolithic things. Any theory that attempts to overlay a simplistic, unidirectional

interpretation on interactions online is likely to find a counterexample (Light in Crang et al

196

1999: 128).

Critics such as Mike Davis rightly attack the exclusions of electronic spaces.

Cyberspace is heavily dominated by elite groups, yet often presented as if open to all; its

privatized spaces presented as if they are public. Concerns about the commodification of

space are justified, as cyberspace is increasingly home to commercial networks, commercial

sites and commercial transactions. Simultaneously, cybercritics point to the decline of place-

based relations, as factor in urban decay, linking these to the rise of electronic

communications. Yet to call this critique the whole story would be like looking at cities only

in terms of their shopping malls, or only looking only at the malls’ trade literature and never

examining how people actually behave there. These visions of cyberspace have not accounted

for the increasing number of non-profit and grassroots organizations meeting online and in

person to reinvigorate physical space (Light in Crang et al 1999: 126). The cost of these

projects should also be viewed closely and expensive ones should be resisted. City networks

should be built on grassroots level for developing countries to prevent exclusionary settings

(Gillespie in Graham, 2001a: 413). The new urbanism movement does not address crises of

difference and inequality since idealized urban forms of the past do not lead to correct

institutional, social and cultural results.

To draw a line between these lines of thought, one may refer to more moderate

interpretations. Online relationships may be strong and may continue offline (Rheingold

1993, Turkle 1995). Besides, these relationships need not always be action-based, but may

also provide mechanisms for exchange of ideas. The tele-political enslavement introduced by

Virilio may once again be overcome by means of tele-technologies. Previous chapters have

been devoted to community networks and their working structures. According to Harvey, the

197

notion of community should not be retained as particularity or difference. We have to

transcend those particularities and look for a negotiation of universalities through which to

talk about how the future of the cities should be.

Boyer argues about the disappearance of cities as symbolically bombed into

nothingness; crime scenes and crash events increase in number to represent nothingness in the

city. Image and reality are symbiotic in his claims. The form of the matrix brings to the city a

systemic order that hides its heterogeneous nature and the disjunctive positions we hold

within it. Olalquiaga claims that, confronted with their own technological images, the city and

the body become ruins. Paradoxically, while the analogy allows for the discussion of the

disappearance of the city from our postmodern social and cultural agendas, the very

immateriality of this electronic matrix and the world of virtual reality that it projects defies

the grounding of that analogy. And it is exactly this crossroads that construct the open space

created within cyber-cities.

The media-sphere is the communication and transportation environment of messages

and people, which is composed of various media. Therefore, a city is a multimedia system –

the city itself and the wider sphere surrounding it are organized as media-sphere, which

consists of many kinds of media in a strong sense. With this current system in mind, the

following question comes to mind: Will we really be able to characterize cities of the 21st

century as systems of interlinked, interacting, silicon- and software saturated smart, attentive

and responsive places (Mitchell, 2000: 68)? If so, how will our encounter be with those cities?

If one faces an encounter within the local-global distinction, critics like Aurigi and

Graham (2000: 501) point out the danger within the virtual urbanism movement. Their idea

198

twirls around the global notion that cities are merely products for international consumption is

being emphasized at the expense of the “local idea” that cities are places of representation,

politics, interaction and experience. This global notion is part of a very old tension and the

virtual city may be taken to be a high-tech and technologically modern embodiment of it.

However, the same argument may also be turned around for favor of the high technology

being used to create a more current and lasting definition for the local interstices of the global

city. The concept of “world citizen” is easily located within the mechanism of virtual cities.

The demonstrators in Seattle during the meetings of the World Trade Organization (1999),

communicated via cell phones to flash spots in the city long before the police could detect.

The local police basically relied upon centralized decision making and resources; the

demonstrators were able to gain a decisive advantage. Their plans for gathering on the spot

took place in various web portals and their demonstrations were carried to Geneva in 2001

where the first idea for World Social Summit flourished to discuss their demands with world

leaders. This should also be a significant signal for city planners. They need to develop new

knowledge and tools for understanding the implications of these new technologies

(Townsend, 2000: 102); otherwise they might lose touch with the reality of city streets.

Once again, we go back to our last statement in the introduction of this thesis. Time to

take a long sigh of relief for there is still [accidental] hope! As of today, the world citizen is

able to make space, providing a link between metaphorical space and politics in the fourth,

yet to be defined, public sphere67 of the 21st century.

67(previously mentioned in the introduction alongside three currents of urban thought) Four public spheres:

1.people act from space as their identities, experiences and interests are materially intertwined with space.

2.people act on space by working to own it 3. people act in space – physical space supplies a temporary

container for the abstract concept of the public sphere. 4. people make space, providing a link between

metaphorical space and politics (Isin, 2000: 267)

199

CHAPTER VI

Methodology

This study has a prospective ambition unlike many that are based on literature review.

Even though it does not tend to deconstruct the existing philosophical arguments reflected in

prominent writings, ideas belonging to the present time are recollected and the symbiotic links

are redefined to criticize cyberplatforms with hyper-structures that supersede real time and

space.

Other than the textual skeleteon, I have cross-examined all types of cyberplatforms

with urban theme68 that have been formed since the advent of the Internet. This process

involved introspection of the fiber-logic of the respective portals as well as analysis of their

living dimensions. In some cases, I have corresponded with web administrators or creative

designers to obtain project-related empirical data. They have generally been very helpful and

to the point. Hard-core evidence may hardly be drawn by web-monitoring, but the evolving

patterns of portals and projects provide invaluable insight. Among the most intriguing

examples for digital city projects, The Digital City of Amsterdam (DDS) has been my

prominent source of inspiration. That on one side, the fact that DDS has turned into an e-

commerce site quite swiftly and irreversibly, has redirected my attention towards Canada, US

and Japan. These countries have made assumptions clear that advanced telematics are

significant for tackling cyberspace as a sophisticated political sphere. Related case studies

have been provided in the flow of the chapters.

Out of the empirical evidence drawn and comments followed by designers as well as

users, it can be postulated that web environments with real-life typologies attract more

members in their development stage. However, as members get to know each other and their

68 This activity is specific to this study and may also be named “cyber-ethnography”.

200

virtual neighborhoods better, new-comers and the dull netizens are excluded. This brings to

the fore micro-communities with fewer members rather than extended virtual communities

that would discuss general issues surrounding their city. The avatars carry characteristics of

the members and enjoy regular face to face contacts. In time, sites of entertainment and

leisure become the most popular for small groups. The town hall where all members frequent

becomes the old-fashioned Times Square where only first time visitors stop by.

201

CHAPTER VII

Conclusion – the city of the future

According to Virilio, the fortified city was a political space of habitable inertia, the

political configuration, and the physical underpinning of the feudal era. The essential question

arrives right at this point, “why did the fortified city disappear?” His rather unconventional

answer is that it did so due to the advent of ever-increasingly transportable and accelerated

weapons systems. For such innovations exposed the fortified city and transformed siege

warfare into a war of movement. Additionally, the flow of the urban citizenry was not

governed appropriately and therefore habitable circulation of the masses was at hand. Unlike

Marx, then, Virilio postulates the transition from feudalism to capitalism was not an economic

transformation but a military, spatial, political, and technological metamorphosis. For Virilio,

the histories of socio-political institutions such as the military and artistic movements like

Futurism show that war and the need for speed are the foundations of human society.

However, he does not argue that the political economy of wealth has been superseded by the

political economy of speed. Rather, he suggests that in addition to the political economy of

wealth, there has to be a political economy of speed.

The Internet offers exciting new possibilities for urbanism (Castells, 1989; Drewe,

1999; 2000; Graham & Marvin, 1996; 2001). It replaces many "dirty" connections that used

to require enormous expenditures for fuel and infrastructure. While the dreams of some

techno-urbanists of replacing physical transport with electronic telecommuting have not come

to pass, the electronic web has indeed begun to merge with the transportation network. Here

we face the paradox of the contemporary city - we do everything we can to connect virtually

and by car, but we are disconnected physically on the pedestrian scale (Dupuy, 1991; 1995).

202

Nevertheless, as we replace lengthy car journeys by electronic connections, the more valuable

the pedestrian city becomes, though we have lost it in many places around the world.

Many problems of urbanism are ones of scale. A city needs to be connected on all

scales. The particular type of connections that function at different scales are very different.

Furthermore, since pathwise connectivity is most economical on a plane surface (the ground

level), this means that different types of connections are going to compete with each other

(Dupuy, 1991; 1995). A city has to balance all these connections. Like in any other problem

of competition, the larger/stronger connections have the advantage, and will naturally displace

the smaller/weaker connections. There exist fundamental physiological and psychological

reasons for why pedestrians require small-scale connections on the ground level. Unless

protected, those paths are at risk from other, stronger networks.

The connective interface between people, green spaces, urban spaces, and built

surfaces is just as important as the interface between cars and people. We connect most

strongly on the most intimate scales (Mikiten et. al., 2000; Salingaros, 1999). That's the

reason we love our cars -- we touch their interiors, which in turn surround our body. Urban

spaces (with or without green components) were meant to surround us with an inviting,

comfortable boundary, but we have recently made them alien and hostile. Without a spatial

intimacy connecting us to the smallest scales, urban space is ineffective. Following the

dictates of a puritanical architectural modernism, we scorned spatial intimacy in today's cities

as something "unmodern", and eliminated it.

Human anatomy has scarcely frustrated Le Corbusier's dream of having wealthy

people enter their car in the garage of their suburban home, and exiting it in their office's

203

parking garage69. His vision of a city without a human scale has very nearly come to pass.

Nevertheless, even in today's most disconnected, dysfunctional anti-city, people walk daily to

and from their car. It is impossible to eliminate the pedestrian realm altogether. Since these

short pedestrian paths are not supposed to exist, they are left geometrically ill-defined. The

once glorious pedestrian city has contracted to dreary concrete parking garages and asphalt

parking wastelands.

If we can get over the ideological blinders imposed on the world by otherwise well-

meaning but false ideas about "modernity", then we can begin to understand how the urban

fabric forms itself and changes dynamically. We can then build new cities that incorporate the

best characteristics of traditional cities, while utilizing the latest technology to facilitate

instead of frustrating human interactions. At the same time, we can regenerate older cities,

which already contain physical structures that would today be impossible to duplicate

economically. Those buildings and urban spaces are being sacrificed to an intolerant design

dogma, to be replaced by faceless and lifeless rectangular slabs, cubes, and parking lots.

Pathological components of the city can be selected against. Either an

underconcentration, or overconcentration of nodes strains the infrastructure and resources of

the city. Two extremes are suburban sprawl, and skyscrapers. Individuals desire the first,

whereas governments and corporations want the second. Neither is acceptable. The first of

these urban typologies uses up most of the automobile fuel in the city for the simplest

transportation needs. The second typology concentrates non-interacting people into one

building, drawing resources from the rest of the city. The urban forces generated by the

overconcentration of a skyscraper tend to erase the urban fabric in a significant area around it.

69 On the other hand, the working class was supposed to get along with public transport.

204

Skyscrapers feed off the rest of the city, and require more infrastructure and larger

expressways to maintain them.

The electronic city offers help in two distinct ways. Firstly, it replaces many dirty

connections of the older city, freeing up infrastructure and fuel consumption. It makes

pedestrian pockets in the city much more attractive and practicable than ever before.

Secondly, its very structure offers us a template to follow in rebuilding the urban fabric. I

mentioned that the Internet follows the same structural laws as the traditional city. This

should be enough reason to finally discard the misguided, simplistic twentieth-century models

of urbanism that did so much to damage our cities. If we need to connect the electronic city to

a physical city, then the physical city must follow the same structural laws. The quest for how

an entirely new type of living contemporary city is to be constructed is still to be answered.

The commercial prototypes are answers to only specific necessities in life such as business

life, health or education. They are service packs rather than living environments.

According to the existing debates, the explosion of the Internet provides either a new

medium for an expanded, enhanced community (Wellman, 2001: 297) or a refuge for social

isolates avoiding real-world relationships (Nie, 1999: 50-80). Observations that Internet-

induced isolating, alienating individualism is replacing community typically generate more

popular acceptance than empirical support. Initial reports indicated that long-term and intense

Internet users would indeed replace community activities with solitary cyberspace activities.

Many authors are concerned that Internet use may encourage spending more time alone,

communicating with strangers, or forming relationships with weak ties, displacing the higher

quality face-to-face relationships of family and friends (Thompson and Nadler, 2002; Putnam,

2000).

205

Once the place-based approach is integrated with interest communities, as in Netville

(suburb of Toronto) and the hybrid model, the WELL, ties with family, neighbors and friends

are strengthened. This is empirically supported in Wellman’s work. One also has to draw a

line between introverts and extroverts while treating cyber-appearances and habits.

Cybercommunities, especially those that may be categorized as CyberCities to much of our

concern, mainly hold the participation of extroverts whose social interactions and ties are

empowered. One must encounter, at this point, Avital Ronell’s remarks for the disappearance

of community. After reinstating that there is no proper place, she opens doors for the new

community via virtual reality and calls it ecstatic, but fragmented. The citizens of the cyber-

platforms recently created have created a fragmented sense of belonging and their egos are

shattered. This may, however, be to their advantage since they would have colorful cyber-

characteristics and may have long endurance vis-a-vis their counterparts.

Especially taking into account ‘smart mobs’ (Rheingold, 2003: 47), who are dynamic

groups of people with new wave electronic devices at hand and who can act together

cooperatively even if they are complete strangers, an intriguing future may be at hand. So

called new wave wireless, mobile, portable computing devices promise a future where people

spontaneously interact and exchange ideas in a manner that transforms how we work, play,

trade, govern, and create.

Throughout this study, the digital divide phenomenon has not been dwelled upon for

one specific reason. Technological transfer takes place in different trajectories from the North

to the South. In other words, wireless technologies provide new channels of inclusion rather

than alterity in developing countries as well as for disadvantaged populations clustered within

a more developed whole. The opportunities that may arise in this realm are countless. One of

the pioneers in the field is “machm-it.org”- a non-profit association in Germany who have

206

various applications for integrating the unemployed into their e-learning programs. For the

time being, it seems like the wireless application protocol eases physical life conditions.

However, third generation cell phones are called as such for a reason. The third generation

users will use, have started using, rather, their interface as a multi-media environment. This

introduces the notion of tele-citizen, a step forward from netizen. The body extension

becomes as small as a cell-phone that is also compatible with kiosks, desktop computers as

well as latest architectures. The real-time city becomes the space-time cyberia where social

relations are not in forms of contact, but networks.

The bumpy sidewalks, long queues, heavy traffic, excessive noise and all other aspects

of the late 20th century metropole become part of a tale, long heard. Simulated environments

are still replicas of the existing ones, but much easier to modify according to changing needs

and life-styles. Professions, such as architecture, city planning and design have perpetuatingly

become part of an interface habitat. What is neglected during daily life can not possibly

endure among the rejectionist virtual communities. Lessons are gradually taken from artificial

reality to be applied to earthly life conditions. Virtual city models have actually been

constructed for a reason. It is certainly not for pure enjoyment, entertainment or fantasy. The

desire to look for another dimension introduces a new phase of interaction: hyper-reality. It

should not be surprising to see physical environments designed according to their virtual

equivalents, that recently used to be their subsets. As time supercedes space, virtual city

diversities supercede discontinuities caused by lags in real-time.

As mentioned much earlier in this study, Reality is no longer defined by time and

space, but in a virtual world, in which technology allows the existence of the paradox of being

everywhere at the same time while being nowhere at all. For hyper-simulated environments to

serve as alternative habitats, do netizens need to be connected all the time? The simplest

207

answer to that is the above mentioned wireless technologies and the opportunities they offer.

However, there is more to it than that. Even though virtual communities face decline after

short notice, they force face-face contacts highly concentrated levels of interest. These

contacts are symbiotic in the sense that they lead to deeper contacts that feed into permanent

hyper-connections. The city metamorphoses into loci of virtual data, eternally linked in a cyle

of unknown nature. In fact, the metaphorical nature becomes technology or vice versa.

On the other hand, the number of potentially connected nodes within urban

environments has significantly increased in the last couple of years, and includes GSM/GPRS

wired PDAs, Wi-Fi enabled laptops, 3G mobile phones, ADSL connected game consoles and

entertainment PCs, Bluetooth tablet PCs, Videophones, Interactive TVs, real time

environment sensors, large databases, GPS oriented cars and GPS traceable trucks and buses.

New layers of territory-related data and information are created in a daily basis, like

municipal geographic information, Internet city guides, interactive maps and routes and 3D

worlds. To cope with this increased complexity, a new technology must add another layer of

distribution and data management to the current web based information distribution paradigm.

In fact, as computers and networks become ubiquitous and interlinked, they will turn out to be

another invisible urban infrastructure, like electric grids and sewage systems that will sustain

daily life.

So what kind of a city are we looking at in the 21st century? Or rather what is, today, a

real city? The answer should transcend the dialectics of real and fantasy. Jorge Luis Borges

has an answer of his style: He claims that one can dream of an existence to make it exist.

Xanadu, in this sense, is a cybernetic utopia, reflecting as non-place. The cyber-city projects

mentioned in the earlier sections of this study embody likewise concern and reflexivity. There

will probably be counter-arguments for how instantaneous communication and perpetual

208

connection are required for sustainability of these projects and that these are conditions that as

of today, only around 1/5 of the world can sustain. Technological speed has won over cultural

paradigms since World War II.

The developing and underdeveloped countries has exceedingly high levels of

penetration in mobile technologies. Certainly, facilities such as e-government, e-health, e-

municipality ease lives of netizens, but have no function in constructing critical platforms for

civic action. Furthermore, conspiracy theoreticians argue that e-transformation targets bound

societies whose main concern is paying taxes and obeying rules of their states. Internet is,

without a doubt, an alternative public space where attempts to control are contrasted in full

force by mechanisms of open access. The only way a monitoring system can be achieved is

by blocking P2P exchange. Considering the fact that this will never be possible, crowds will

continue to escape from oligopolistic hegemony and form alternative cyber-environments

where they can remodel their physical city settlements in endless combinations. In this regard,

these environments have high potential of becoming prototypes for improving physical

environments.

On a more comparative scale, a few things can be said about the present state of

various nations with regards to politics of speed. Canada can be assumed at the far end of the

scale with her smart city movement. Even though many policy-related mistakes have been

made, the Canadian citizens have undebatable sovereignty as consumers, if not netizens.

Private industries have government at hand for policy and practice; therefore pressures from

communities and civil bodies have to be taken into account. However, in a nation like

Turkey70, where the sources of sovereignty are seemingly democratic, netizens will have to

70 Turkey may be assumed to be close to the middle on the scale with her young generation and technological up-keep. It is not really worth discussing who balances the scale with Canada on the far end, since political and technological measures are open to ambiguities.

209

invent smiley avatars as an extension of their critical, wireless, but repressed minds – yet, for

another decade.

210

VIII. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appadurai, A. 1997. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of

Globalization. Minnesota University Press.

Armitage, John. 2001. Interview with Paul Virilio. C-Theory (89) http:

www.ctheory.com/article/a089.html, accessed on March 12, 2003

Arthurs; ed. 2002. Crash Cultures: Modernity, Mediation and the

Material. Bristol, GBR: Intellect Books. 2002

[http://site.ebrary.com/lib/bilgi/Doc?id=10019960&page=8]

Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-places: An introduction to supermodernity.

Verso. NY.

Augé,Marc.http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/teaching/wfp/ABGESCHLOSSENE

/nimmrichter/Auge.html, accessed on Feb 15, 2003

Baran, S & Davis, D. 2000. Mass Communication Theory:

Foundations, Ferment and Future. Wadsworth Publishing. Stamford, CT.USA.

Baudrillard, J. 2002. evening lecture at the European Graduate School

intensive summer seminars. Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Baudrillard. 1996. The Perfect Crime. London. Verso.

Baudrillard. 1995. The virtual illusion: or the automatic writing of the

world. Theory, Culture and Society 12: 97-107.

Baudrillard, Jean .1994. Simulacra and Simulation, Sheila Glaser (trs),

The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

Benedikt, M. 1993. Cityspace, Cyberspace, and The Spatiology of

Information. University of Texas at Austin lecture series.

Benhaum, David S. 1997. The Internet Revolution. Wired. April. 122-

173

Bentley, I. 1999. Urban transformations: Power, people and urban

design. Routledge.

Bingaman, Amy; ed. 2001. Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change

and the Modern Metropolis. Routledge. Florence, KY, USA.

[http://site.ebrary.com/lib/bilgi/Doc?id=5003369&page=244]

211

Borja, J. and Castells, M. 1997. The Local & the Global: Management

of Cities in the Information Age. Earthscan Publications.

Borner. 2001. Collaboration in Building Future Digital Cities; abstract

of paper presented in conference in Kyoto Research Park Oct. 20, 2001

http://www.digitalcity.gr.jp/meetings/2001panel, accessed on November 24, 2003

Boyer, C. 1996. Cybercities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic

Communication, New York: Princeton University Press.

Bridge, G and Watson, S. 2000. A Companion to the city . Blackwell

Publishing. Oxford, UK

Bright, Julian. 1995. The smart city: Communications utopia or future

reality? Telecommunications. (International ed.).Dedham: Sep 1995. Vol. 29, Iss. 9:

175

Bumin, Kursat. 1990. City in Search for Democracy (trans. title

Demokrasi Arayisinda Kent). Ayrinti Publications. Istanbul, Turkey

Calvino, I. 1978. Invisible Cities. Harvest Books.

Castells, M. 1989. The Informaional city. Blackwell Publishers. 1989.

Castells, M. 1994. Flows, networks, identities in Critical Education in

the New Infomation Age. Rowman & Littlefield.

Castells, Manuel and Hall, P. 1994. Technopoles of the 21st century.

Routledge.

Cattan, N. 1995. ‘Attractivity and Internationalisation of Major

European Cities: The Example of Air Traffic’ Urban Studies, 32, 303-312.

Crang, Mike. 2000. ‘Public Space, Urban Space and Electronic Space:

Would the Real City Please Stand Up?’. Urban Studies, Feb 2000, Vol 37, issue 2.

Crang, M., Crang, P. & May J.; eds. 1999. Virtual Geographies: Bodies,

space and relations. Routledge, London & New York.

Crawford, Chase & Kaliski. 1999. Everyday Urbanism. The Monacelli

Press. New York

Davidson, C.; ed. 1996. Anywise. Anyone Corporation.

Davis, Diane. 1997. ‘Laughter or chortling into the storm’. Pretext:

Electralite. 1997. 1.1. University of Texas, Dallas, USA.

Dear, Michael. 2000. The Postmodern Urban Condition. Blackwell Pub.

Oxford, UK / Massachusetts, USA.

212

Decker, T. 2000. The Modern City revisited. Routledge. London &

New York.

Debord, Guy. 1981. “Preliminary Problems in Constructing a situation”

in Ken Knabb. Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley. USA.

Delaney, J. 1992. “Ritual space in the Canadian museum of civilization:

consuming Canadian identity” in R. Shields (ed.) Lifestyle Shopping, Routledge.

London: 136-148.

Der Derian, James, ed. 1998. The Virilio Reader. Blackwell Publishers.

Oxford, UK / Massachusetts, USA.

Dibbel, J. “A Rape in cyberspace” in Derry, M (ed.) 1993. Flame Wars:

The discourse of Cyberculture. Durham: Duke University Press.

Drewe, P. 1999. "In Search of New Concepts of Physical and Virtual

Space", paper presented at the Conference: Cities in the Global Information Society:

an International Perspective (University of Newcastle, Newcastle-upon-Tyne,

November 22-24, 1999). Published in: M. Schrenk, Editor, Beitrage zum 5. Symposion

"Computergestützte Raumplanung" -- CORP 2000, Volume 1, Vienna University of

Technology, pages 37-44.

Dreyfus, H.L. 1993. "Heidegger in the connection between nihilm, art,

technology and politics", in Guignon, C. (Ed.)Heidegger, Cambridge University Press,

Cambridge.

Dupuy, G. 1991. L'Urbanisme Des Réseaux, Armand Colin, Paris.

Dupuy, G. 1995. Les Territoires de l'Automobile, Anthropos, Paris.

Eade, John and Mele, Christopher; eds. 2002. Understanding the city:

contemporary and future perspectives. Blackwell publishers.

Eradam, Yusuf . 2004. “Cult cities, their icons and bodyguards” paper

delivered at the Ege University 9th International Cultural Studies Symposium [cityin

(culture) in city], Izmir, Turkey, May 5-7, 2004.

Ercan, Fuat. 1996. “World City or international city: The case of

Istanbul” in Toplum ve Bilim winter 1996 iss. 71. Birikim publications: pgs. 61-96

Fabler, Manfred. 2000 Towards a new urbanism: reimagining the

cultural metropolis and reconstructing cultural knowledges conference June 29-July

1, 2000 Humboldt University Berlin, http://www2.rz.hu-

berlin.de/amerika/projects/newurbanism/nu_pt_fassler_a.html; accessed on November

24, 2003

213

Fishman, R. 1994. Urban Utopias in the 20th century: E. Howard, F.L.

Wright & Le Corbusier. MIT Press.

Foucault M in McWhorter. Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the

Politics of Sexual Normalization. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University

Press, 1999. Pp vii-260.

Friedmann, J. 1987. Planning in the Public Domain. Princeton

University Press.

Frug, Gerald. 1999. City making: Building Communities without walls.

Princeton University Press. Princeton and Oxford

Fuchs, Brennan & Chamie; eds. 1994. Mega-City Growth and the

Future United Nations University Press. Tokyo, New York & Paris.

Fynsk, C. 1993. Heidegger: Thought and Historicity. Cornell Un. Press.

Gamard, P. H. 1993. “Engaging the freeway as urban space: Finding

legibility and order in the high-speed landscape”, MA thesis submitted to the School

of Architecture, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA.

Gareau, Joel. 1991. Edge City: Life on the new frontier. New York,

Doubleday

G.B. Government Office for London. 1996. Four World Cities: A

Comparative Analysis of London, Paris, New York and Tokyo. London: Llewelyn

Davies Planning.

Gibson, W. 1984. Neuromancer. London: Grafton.

Goddard, J.B., Gillespie, A.E. (1987) Advanced Telecommunications

and Regional Economic Development. In: Robson, B. (ed.) Managing the City: The

Aims and Impacts of Urban Policy, 84-109. London: Croom Helm

Goddard, J.B., Gillespie, A. 1988. Advanced Telecommunications and

Regional Economic Development. In: Giaoutzi, M., Nijkamp, P. (ed.) Informatics and

Regional Development, 121-146. Aldershot: Avebury.

Graham, Stephen. 2001a. Splintering Urbanism: Networked

Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities & the Urban Condition. Florence, KY, USA:

Routledge [http://ste.ebrary.com/lib/bilgi/Doc?id=2002840&page=432]

Graham, Stephen. 2001b. Bridging Urban Digital Divides? Urban

Polarization and ICTs. Urban Studies Vol. 39 no.1.

214

Graham, Stephen and Marvin, S. 2002. Telecommunications and the

City: electronic spaces, urban places. Routledge.

Gregory, D. 1995. “Lefebvre, Lacan and the production of space” in G.

Benko and U. Strohmeyer (eds) Geography, History and Social Science, Dordrecht:

Kluwer. Gregson N. Netherlands.

Hales, Peter Bacon. 2001. “Virtual Cities: Redefining the Urban

Experience in the physical and the virtual at the turn of the millenium” in EJAC 20 (1)

pgs. 5-21.

Hall, Peter. 1998. Cities of Tomorrow. Blackwell Press.

Hannigan, John. 1998. Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern

Metropolis. Routledge.

Healey, Patsy . 2001. ‘On Creating the city as collective resources’ in

Urban Studies Vol. 39, No.10. 1777-1792.

Heidegger, M. 1994. Bremer und Freiburger Fortraege (1949),

Klostermann, Frankfurt.

Hetherington, Kevin. 1998. Expressions of Identity: Space,

performance and politics. Sage. London.

Hollands, Robert. 2002. “Will the Real Smart City Please Stand Up?”.

paper delivered at Thinking Smart Cities Seminar, Carleton University, Canada.

Huggett, Nick, ed. 1999. Space from Zeno to Einstein: Classic Readings

with a Contemporary Commentary. MIT Press

Hummon, David. 1992. “Community Attachment: Local Sentiment and

Sense of Place.” Pp. 253-278 in Place Attachment, edited by Irwin Altman and Setha

Low. New York: Plenum.

Isin, Engin; ed. 2000. Democracy, Citizensip and the Global City.

Routledge.

Jewson, Nick and MacGregor, Susan; eds. 1997. Transforming Cities:

contested governance and new spatial divisions. Routledge.

Johnston, Taylor & Watts. eds. 2002. Geographies of Global Change:

Remapping the World. Blackwell Publishing.

Kallinikos, J. 1995. “The architecture of the invisible: technology as

representation”, Organizations, Vol. 2 No. 1.

215

Keyder, Caglar; ed. 1999. Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local.

Rowman & Littlefield. USA

Komninos, Nikos. 2002. Intelligent Cities. Spon Press.

Kroker, A. & M. 1998. The Memesis Symposium

Kundera, Milan. 2002. Slowness: A Novel. Perennial Press

Landry, C., Bianchini, F. 1995. The Creative City. London:

Demos/Comedia.

Leach, Neil; ed. 2002. The Hieroglyphics of space. Routledge.

Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford, Blackwell.

Lefebvre, H. 1996. Writings on Cities. Blackwell.

LeGates, R. & Stout, F.; eds. 1998. The City Reader. Routledge.

Lovink, Geert. 1998. “The Future of Evolution”, Memesis Symposium.

Lovink and Riemens. 1998. “The Monkey’s tail: the amsterdam digital

city three and a half yers later” in INURA (eds) Possible Urban Worlds: Strategies at

the end of the 20th century. Berlin: Birkhauser- Verlag.

Martinotti, G. 1993. Metropoli: La nuova morfologia sociale della città

(Saggi). Il Mulino

McBeath, Graham and Stephen Webb. 1997. “Cities, Subjectivity and

Cyberspace” in Sallie Westwood and John Williams (eds), Imagining Cities - Scripts,

Signs, Memory, Routledge, London.

Mikiten, T. M., Salingaros, N. A. & Yu, H. S. 2000. “Pavements as

Embodiments of Meaning for a Fractal Mind” Nexus Network Journal 2, pages 61-72.

Miles, Malcolm; Hall, Tim and Borden Iain ; eds. 2000. The City

Cultures Reader. Routledge.

Mitchell, William. 1998. City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn.

MIT Press.

Mitchell, William. 2000. E-topia: Urban Life, Jim, but not as we know

it. MIT Press / Cambridge, MA / London, England.

Mitchell, William. 2003. Me++: The Cyborg Self and the networked

city. MIT Press / Cambridge, MA / London, England.

More, Thomas. 1995. Utopia: Latin Text and English translation.

Cambridge University Press.

216

Moore, Steven A. 2001. “Technology, Place and the Nonmodern

Thesis” Journal of Architectural Education . Feb 2001. Vol. 54. ıss. 3 p.130

http://search.epnet.com/direct.asp*an=5495539db=aph

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. The Inoperable Community. Ed. Peter Connor.

Trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney.

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press

Nie, N. 1999. “ZEITGEIST—Telecommuting and the Future of the

Social Sphere,” American Demographics 21(7), 50–80.

Nottridge, Harold. 1972. The Sociology of Urban Living,

Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Novak, Markos. Transmitting Architecture: The Transphysical

City http://www.aec.at/ctheory/a34-transmitting_arch.html, accessed on March

25, 2004.

Olalqiuiaga, Celeste. 1999. Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural

Sensibilities. University of Minnesota Press. Minnesota, US.

Oncu, A. & Weyland, P.; eds. 1997. Space Culture and Power:

New Identities in Globalizing Cities. Zed Books.

Plato. Space: Timaeus:

http://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/physis/plato-timaeus/default.asp, accessed on

March 1, 2005.

Poster, M. 2001. What’s the matter with internet? University of

Minnesota Press.

Punt M. & Asberry, K.R. 1999. ‘Reviews: Symposium-

Transarchitectures: Visions of Digital Communities’ in Leonardo vol.32 iss.1 p65;

Academic Search Premier

Reich, R.B. 1991. The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves

for 21st-Century Capitalism. New York: Random House.

Rheingold, Howard. 2002. Smart Mobs: The next Social

Revolution. Perseus Publishing. Boulder, CO, US.

Rheingold, Howard. 1993. The virtual Commuity:

Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading: Addison-Wesley

Publishing Company, p.288.

Robins, Kevin and Aksoy, Asu. 1999. “Istanbul rising: returning the

repressed to urban culture”. In European Urban and Regional Studies, 2, 3, 223-235.

217

Robins, Kevin. 1997. The New Communications Geography and the

politics of optimism, Soundlings 5, Spring, p.198.

Rose, G. 1993. Feminism and Geography. Oxford. Polity Press

Saint-Simon Henri. 1975. “Sketch of the New Political System” in

Keith Taylor (ed.), Henri Saint-Simon 1760- 1825: Selected Writings on Science,

Industry and Social Organisation, Croom Helm, London, p. 203.

Salingaros, N. A. 1999. “Urban Space and its Information Field”,

Journal of Urban Design 4, pages 29-49.

Salingaros, Nikos. 2003. Connecting the Fractal City. Keynote speech,

5th Biennial of towns and town planners in Europe (Barcelona, April 2003).

Sandercock, Leonie. 2000. Towards Cosmopolis. Wiley & Sons.

Australia.

Sassen, Saskia. 1996. Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of

Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press

Sassen, Saskia. 1998. Globalization and its Discontents. The New Press,

NY.

Sassen, Saskia. 2001. The Global City: NY, London, Tokyo. Princeton

University Press.

Savitch, H.V. 2002 “What is new about globalization and what does it

portend for cities?” in Int. Social Science Journal. June 2002. Vol. 54. iss. 72. pg. 179-

189.

Schirmacher, Wolfgang. 1993. Die Stadt als Geviert: Fragen einer

Philosophie der Architektur. In N. Hellmayr (ed). Satzzeichen. Graz.

http://www.egs.edu/Art_Life/wolfgang/stadt.html. Accessed on February, 5 2005.

Sennett, Richard. 1994. Flesh and Stone: The Body and the city in

western civilization. Faber & Faber, UK.

Shanmugavelan, M. 2000. IT in developing nations. Intermedia 28 (1).

29-31.

Shields, R. (1991) Places on the Margin. London, Routledge.

Siemiatycki, Myer. 2002. “Smart Cities”, paper delivered at Thinking

Smart Cities Seminar, Carleton University, Canada.

Smart Communities project , http://smartcommunities.ic.gc.ca/,

accessed on Feb 14, 2003

218

Smith, D.A., Timberlake, M. 1995. Conceptualising and Mapping the

Structure of the World's City System. Urban Studies, 32, 287-302.

Soja, Edward. 1990. “Heterotopologies:a remembrance of other spaces

in Citadel-LA” in Strategies, 3: 6-39.

Soja, Edward. 1994. Postmodern Geographies: The Assertion of

Critical space in critical Social theory. Verso. London & New York

Soja, Edward. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los-Angeles and other

real-and- imagined places, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Soja, Edward. 2000. Postmetropolis: Critical studies of cities and

regions. Blackwell.

Sorkin, M. 1992a. Scenes from the Electronic City, I.D. Magazine May

70-77

Sorkin, M. 1992b. See you in Disneyland, in Sorkin, M. (ed.)

Variations on a Theme Park: The American City and the End of Public Space. New

York: Hill and Wang.

Star-logo project of the MIT Media Lab,

www.media.mit.edu/starlogo.home.htm, accessed on January 15, 2004

Stephenson, N. 1992. Snowcrash. New York: Bantam.

Sudjic, Deyan. 1992. The 100 Mile City. Andre Deutsch. London.

Telli, Asli. 2002. “Cyber-Involvement: Are Developing Countries Net

Aware?” Proc. Crossroads: Cultural Studies Conference, Tampere, Finland, 138.

Townsend, A. 2000. “Life in the Real-time City: Mobile Telephones

and Urban Metabolism”. Journal of Urban Technology vol. 7 no.2 p. 85-104.

Tsagarousianou, Tambini and Brian, eds. 1998. Cyberdemocracy:

Technology, cities and Civic Networks. Routledge. London.

Umaschi Bers, Marina. 2001. “Identity Construction Environments:

Developing Personal and Moral Values Through the Design of a Virtual City”.

Journal of the Learning Sciences Vol. 10 Issue 4, p365-416.

Virilio, Paul. 1986. Speed and politics. Semiotexte. Columbia

University. New York.

Virilio, Paul. 1994. The vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose. British Film

Institute.

219

Virilio, Paul. 1995a. The Art of the Motor, trans. Julie Rose. The

University of Minnesota Press.

Virilio, Paul. 1995b. “Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!”. Le

Monde Diplomatique, August 1995 in C-theory, trans. Patrice Riemens. ARTICLES:

A030. Date Published:8/27/1995. www.ctheory.net/text_file?pick=72

Virilio Paul. 1997. Pure War. Revised Edition. Semiotexte. New York

Virilio, Paul. 2000a. A Landscape of Events, trans. Julie Rose.

Massachusetts Inst. Of Technology.

Virilio, Paul. 2000b. The Information Bomb. trans. Chris Turner. Verso.

November 2001.

Virilio, Paul. 2002a. Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light.

Continuum. July 2002

Virilio, Paul. 2002b. Ground Zero. Trans. Chris Turner.Verso. New

York. October 2002.

Wacquant, Loïc. 2001. Preface to Loïc Wacquant, Os Condenados da

cidade, Rio de Janeiro, Revan [lecture inscribed for preface]

Wakabayashi, Mikio. 2002. “Urban space and Cyberspace: Urban

Environment in the Age of Media and Information Technology” in International

Journal of Japanese Sociology no.11 pgs. 6-18.

Wallenstein / The utopian perspectives. 2003.

http://www.soc.nu/utopian03/uwc2001/wallenstein.html, accessed on September 15,

2003

Ward, Brian. 2000. “Speed” in M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3,

no. 3, <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.html> accessed on February 6,

2002

Wellman, B. Hampton, H. de Diaz, I. & Miyata, M. 2003. “The Social

Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism” in Journal of Computer

Mediated Communication 8 (3) April 2003

Wellman, B. 2001. “Physical Place and Cyberplace: The Rise of

Personalized Networking,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

22(2), 227–252.

Westwood, Sallie & Williams, John; eds. 1997. Imagining Cities:

scripts, signs and memories. Routledge.

220

Wilson, W.J. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the

Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wilson, W.J. 1996. When Work Disappears: The World of the New

Urban Poor. New York: Knopf.

Young, Iris. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton

University Press.

Zukin, Sharon. 1995. The cultures of cities. The Blackwell Press.

221

Tables (embedded in text)

Table 1: Revised Sense of Place Typology from David Hummon

Table 2: Basic statistics from the Digital City of Amsterdam

Table 3 : What do digital citizens do?: use of various functions

Table 4: What do digital citizens do?: fields of interest

Interviews

Mathieson, Rick interviews Howard Rheingold, http://www.cooltown.org/mpulse/0203-

rheingold.asp, [Feb.14.2003]

222

IX. APPENDIX

Smart Mobs (Rick Mathieson interviews Howard Rheingold)

Q: What do party-going teenagers have in common with al-Qaeda terrorists?

R: According to futurist Howard Rheingold, they’re among a growing list of groups -

including environmental activists, political demonstrators, even celebrity stalkers - who use

new mobile technologies to organize collective action on a scale never before possible.

In his new book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Rheingold applies

principles of computer science, economics and anthropology to uncover a profound

sociological shift embodied by what he calls “Generation Txt” - young, mobile netizens who

use cell phones, pagers, and PDAs to coordinate protests, stage raves, and even overthrow

governments. All just by sending text messages.

Rheingold knows a revolution when he sees one. In 1993, he wrote The Virtual

Community before most people had even ventured onto the Internet. Over the course of the

last two years, he traveled around the world to explore the outer fringes of the mobile Web,

and how it’s creating new bonds between human beings - for better and for worse.

From Helsinki to Los Angeles, he says, teenage “Thumb Tribes” use pagers and cell

phones to coordinate parties or form social networks that meet in both real-world and

electronic spaces.

In 1999, the protestors at a World Trade Organization gathering used dynamically

updated Web sites and cell phones to coordinate demonstrations during the “Battle of

Seattle.”

223

And a million Filipino citizens toppled the repressive regime of President Joseph

Estrada through public demonstrations organized by text messaging.

Call it Swarming, Posse Pinging, or even Dialing for Doers. By whatever name,

“smart mobs” represent a fundamentally new form of social connectivity that empowers the

“mobile many” to do both good and evil - and will define the decade ahead.

Q: How did the smart mob phenomenon emerge as such a powerful social force?

R: I’d say the earliest signs of its influence first appeared with the high school kids, in

different parts of the world, from Japan to Finland, who engage in what’s called ‘flocking’ -

which is simply showing up at the same time, at the same place, from eight different

directions - because you’ve all coordinated using texting.

There’s a group in Finland called Aula who have created a combination of a desktop

virtual community, a mobile social network, and a real-world space in the middle of Helsinki,

where people meet and mingle in both virtual and physical locations, simultaneously.

Everyone stays in touch through text messages because they know when their friends - people

on their buddy list - are in the physical facility.

In general, I think the phenomenon of ‘mob-logging,’ or mobile blogging, is a really

interesting example of people, spread out all over the world, using mobile devices and the

Web to get information out.

Q: Eventually, smart mobs will beget a smart fabric of ‘smartifacts’ - intelligent,

connected things and environments. In an era of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act,

what are the dangers of a world where everything is connected to everything else?

224

R: A world in which you are connected infinitely is a world in which you are also

surveilled infinitely. And so, the question of liberty and privacy has been erased by the

technologies as we know them today. It really needs to be addressed now.

Since we have both a political infrastructure and a technological capability for the

state to spy on just about everybody at all times, this is something that we should deliberate

carefully before it can become a fact.

And to that point, where does control of privacy lie? Does it lie with the state or the

individual? And how is that affected by technology? Those are very important questions

about how people will live in the future that are not really well considered now. You have to

know about both technology and regulation as well as politics to understand what people are

talking about in the decisions that are being made about the proliferation of mobile, intelligent

devices.