They were stringing together some local, fragments of what was fast becoming a worldwide, broadband, digital telecommunications network. Just as Baron Haussmann had imposed a bold spider's web of broad, straight boulevards on the ancient tangle of Paris, and as nineteenth-century shrink the windy distances of the North American frontier, these post-whatever construction crews were putting in place an infobahn -and thus reconfiguring space and time relationships in ways that promised to change our livesforever. Yet their revolutionary intervention was swift, silent, and (to most eyes) invisible.
More and more of the instruments of human interaction, and of production and consumption, were being miniaturized, dematerialized, and cut loose from fixed locations.
The texts that follow reimagine architecture and urbanism in the new context suggested by these observations - that of the digital telecommunications revolution, the ongoing miniaturization of electronics, the commodification of bits, and the growing domination of software over materialized form. They adumbrate the emergent but still invisible cities of the twenty-first century. And they argue that the most crucial task before us is not one of putting in place the digital plumbing of broadband communications links and anyway), nor even of producing electronically deliverable "content," but rather one of imagining and creating digitally mediated environments for the kinds of lives that we will want to lead and the sorts of communities that we will want to have.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Pulling_Glass/index.html
The Net negates geometry. While it does have a definite topology of computational nodes and radiating boulevards for bits, and while the locations of the nodes and links can be plotted on plans to produce surprisingly Haussmann-like diagrams, it is fundamentally and profoundly antispatial. It is nothing like the Piazza Navona or Copley Square. You cannot say where it is or describe its memorable shape and proportions or tell a stranger how to get there. But you can find things in it without knowing where they are. The Net is ambient -- nowhere in particular but everywhere at once. You do not go to it; you log in from wherever you physically happen to be. In doing this you are not making a visit in the usual sense; you are executing an electronically mediated speech act that provides access - an "open sesame."
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Electronic_Agoras/SpatialAntispatial.html
My software surrogates can potentially do much more than provide origins and destinations for messages; when appropriately programmed, they can serve as my semiautonomous agents by tirelessly performing standard tasks that I have delegated to them and even by making simple decisions on my behalf. (As the citizens of the polis relied upon their helots, so the users of the Net will increasingly depend upon their programmed agents.) It is a hacker's no-brainer, for example, to create a software receptionist-less politely known as a Bozo filter - that screens incoming electronic mail by checking the origin addresses, throwing away junk items, and sorting the rest in priority order. A slightly smarter agent might automatically contact other agents to reconcile diaries and arrange needed meetings at convenient times. (My agent will call your agent.) Another might sleeplessly monitor the stock markets for me, buying and selling according to some programmed strategy. Yet another might continually scan the wire service news to pick out items likely to interest me, and it might have the capacity tointerrupt and alert me immediately when something really important shows up. And a more maliciously conceived one might be programmed to roam the digital highways and byways looking for trouble-for opportunities to corrupt the files of my enemies, to plunder valuable information, to eliminate rival agents, or to replicate itself endlessly and choke the system.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Electronic_Agoras/FocusedFragmented.html
The tilt toward electronic asynchrony will have increasingly dramatic effects upon urban life and urban form. In the familiar, spatial, synchronous style of city, there is a time and a place for everything. Gathering spots like restaurants and cafÚs are open, and people come together in them, for well-defined periods. Workers carry out their tasks during standard business hours, and there are predictable rush hours as they travel to and from their workplaces. Buses and trains have schedules, appointments and meetings are arranged for specific moments, theatrical performances, television programs, and university classes are slotted for particular times. Just as each city has its characteristic spatial organization, so it has its own daily, weekly, and seasonal rhythms-very different for New York, Rome, Delhi, and Tokyo. As there is prime real estate, so there is prime time. But now extrapolate to an entirely asynchronous city. Temporal rhythm turns to white noise. The distinction between live events and arbitrarily time-shifted replays becomes difficult or impossible to draw (as it often is now on the television news); anything can happen at any moment.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Electronic_Agoras/SynchronousAsynchronous.html
The bandwidth-disadvantaged are the new have-nots. It's simple; if you cannot get bits on and off in sufficient quantity, you cannot directly benefit from the Net.
The consequences of this are brutally obvious. If the value of real estate in the traditional urban fabric is determined by location, location, location (as property pundits never tire of repeating), then the value of a network connection is determined by bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. Accessibility is redefined; tapping directly into a broadband data highway is like being on Main Street, but a low baud-rate connection puts you out in the boonies, where the flow of information reduces to a trickle, where you cannot make so many connections, and where interactions are less intense. The bondage of bandwidth is displacing the tyranny of distance, and a new economy of land use and transportation is emerging-an economy in which high-bandwidth connectivity is an increasingly crucial variable.
So some very contentious public policy issues start to pop up. The American telephone system was set up to provide "universal service" reaching not only to profitable markets for telecommunications services, but also to poor communities and to remote and sparsely populated areas where the costs of providing service are high and the customers are few. As part of the package, telephone companies became regulated monopolies, and unprofitable services were cross-subsidized by profitable ones. But will the fast lanes of the information superhighway - the switched, broadband, digital networks that will be required for the most advanced services - be deployed with the same lofty goal? Or will they serve only the affluent and powerful, while rural communities languish at the ends of information dirt tracks and economically marginalized neighborhoods get redlined for telecommunications investment?
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Electronic_Agoras/NarrowbandBroadband.html
Once we have both a "real" three-dimensional world and computer-constructed "virtual" ones, the distinctions between these worlds can get fuzzed or lost. Ivan Sutherland's original head-mounted stereo display used prisms to insert simulated three-dimensional objects into real scenes. And through video projection of computer displays onto real desktops, or (as in some advanced military aircraft) through superimposition of computed stereo displays onto actual scenes, the proscenium dividing the "real" world from the "virtual" can be made to disappear. You can find yourself on stage with the actors, trying to distinguish the scenery from the walls.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Electronic_Agoras/VoyeurismEngagement.html
Imagine that your wristwatch communicates continuously with your pocket computer; the computer's electronic clock provides the time information, so the watch reduces to a simple, conveniently located display with no internal time-keeping mechanism or adjustment buttons to push. Similarly, by connecting to the computer, your camera can get the information that it needs to time-stamp and date-stamp images. One central electronic clock takes the place of the three that would otherwise be needed, and all three devices are kept perfectly synchronized. The computer itself might grab information from the NIST atomic clock radio broadcast so that it never needs to be set.
Now extend the idea. Anticipate the moment at which all your personal electronic devices - headphone audio player, cellular telephone, pager, dictaphone, camcorder, personal digital assistant (PDA), electronic stylus, radiomodem, calculator, Loran positioning system, smart spectacles, VCR remote, data glove, electronic jogging shoes that count your steps and flash warning signals at oncoming cars, medical monitoring system, pacemaker (if you are so unfortunate), and anything else that you might habitually wear or occasionally carry - can seamlessly be linked in a wireless bodynet that allows them to function as an integrated system and connects them to the worldwide digital network. You will be able to use your PDA to program your VCR, listen to pager messages through your Walkman, display coordinates from the Loran on your smart spectacles, download physiological data from an electronic exercise machine into your PDA, and transmit the output from your camcorder to remote locations via your wireless modem. As you jog in a strange city, you might record your route on your PDA, then have your Walkman give you directions back to your hotel. You get the idea.
By this point in the evolution of miniature electronic products, you will have acquired a collection of interchangeable, snap-in organs connected by exonerves.Where these electronic organs interface to your sensory receptors and your muscles, there will be continuous bit-spits across the carbon/silicon gap. And where they bridge to the external digital world, your nervous system will plug into the worldwide digital net. You will have become a modular, reconfigurable, infinitely extensible cyborg.
Expect that electronic organs, as they become ever smaller and more intimately connected to you, will lose their traditional hard plastic carapaces. They will become more like items of clothingsoft wearables that conform to the contours of your body; you will have them fitted like shoes, gloves, contact lenses, or hearing aids. Circuits may be woven into cloth. Microdevices may even be implanted surgically; electronic pacemakers and cochlear implants are now commonplace, neuromuscular simulation systems seem a promising way to repair spinal cord damage, there is intensive research into the possibility of implanted silicon retinas for the blind, and it is certainly not hard to imagine electronic ear studs, nose rings, or tattoos. Some chips are tiny enough to be injectable and have already been used for tagging and tracking wildlife and identifying pets.
Once you break the bounds of your bag of skin in this way, you will also begin to blend into the architecture. In other words, some of your electronic organs may be built into your surroundings.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Cyborg_Citizens/NervousSystemBodynet.html
An operating table; a surgeon's scalpel moves precisely across the surface of an eyeball to make a delicate incision. But the scalpel is teleoperated, and the surgeon is hundreds of miles away, grasping a force-feedback device and watching the output from a medical imaging system on a video monitor.
Actually, this scene is a simulation, and the scalpel is merely cutting into a grape. But by the early 1990s robotic surgery and telesurgery had been active research topics for some time, and there had been many such experiments. Tissue removal had been practiced on chicken breasts, brain surgery on watermelons. And there had been some successful practical applications of robotic devices to surgical tasks requiring positional certainty and rapid performance: in March 1991, at Shaftesbury Hospital in London, the world's firstactive surgical robot was used to perform prostate surgery onalive patient, and in November 1992 Robodoc-a specialized robotic arm-helped replace the arthritic hip of a sixty-four-year-old Sacramento man. Specialized telemanipulators were becoming an increasingly important part of the cyborg organ repertoire.
Conversely, if robotic devices are constructed at insect size, they can also be used to get closer than we otherwise could and thus to manipulate things that are too small to be grasped by the fingertips. Rodney Brooks contrived a cockroach-sized robot at MIT in 1988, then set to work on piezoelectric motor-powered ant robots about a millimeter across. These might, he suggested, be used to crawl into arteries and unclog them, reconnect severed neurons, or skate across eyeballs to perform retinal surgery. Tiny telemanipulators and robots seem particularly well suited to laparoscopic surgery, in which instruments and cameras are inserted through very small incisions in the body while the surgeon watches a video monitor, perhaps from a remote location. Johannes Smits of Boston University, inventor of a micromotor device, has suggested that minute electromechanical bugs could also act as miniature spies: "Imagine what you could do with an ant if you could control it. You could make it walk into CIA headquarters."
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Cyborg_Citizens/HandsTelemanipulators.html
A vehicle that knows where it is, and can pull information relevant to its location out of a database of geographically coded information, can do a lot more than display maps. For example, it might look up interesting facts in online guidebooks and read you a commentary on the passing scene. With slightly more sophisticated programming, it could learn what you particularly cared about-the highlights of local history, perhaps, or census information, or the agricultural products of the area-and, like a knowledgeable and attentive companion, it could offer only observations likely to interest you. If you were driving a delivery truck, looking at real estate, canvassing for a political cause, or performing some other specialized task requiring information about passing buildings and their occupants, the system could supply it. For travelers it could deal with some immediately practical concerns -directing you to the nearest gas station or to the closest inexpensive Chinese restaurant, or finding you a bed for the night. And it could tell you what's on and what's open in your immediate neighborhood.
Silicon-smart vehicles can also calculate efficient routes from their current locations to specified destinations. Finding the shortest path through a street network is a straightforward software task (though doing so efficiently can get a bit tricky when the network is large), and whatever information is available about current traffic conditions can be factored in. The chosen route might simply be displayed on a dashboard screen, but it can almost as easily be output as a sequence of instructions from a robotic back-seat driver -"Next left," "You just made a wrong turn," and so on. Integration of some simple speech-recognition capabilities can even allow the driver to ask "What now?"
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Cyborg_Citizens/BrainsArtificialIntelligence.html
Today, institutions generally are supported not only by buildings and their furnishings, but also by telecommunication systems and computer software. And the digital, electronic, virtual side is increasingly taking over from the physical. In many contexts, storage of bits is displacing storage of physical artifacts such as books, so that the need for built space is reduced. Electronic linkage is substituting for physical accessibility and for convenient connection by the internal circulation systems of buildings, so that access imperatives no longer play such powerful roles in clustering and organizing architectural spaces. And-as when an ATM screen rather than a door in a neoclassical edifice on Main Street provides access to a bank-computer-generated graphic displays are replacing built facades as the public faces of institutions.
It is time to update Churchill's bon mot. Now we make our networks and our networks make us.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Recombinant_Architecture/FacadeInterface.html
Gutenberg's revolution created places where printed information was concentrated and controlled. But electronic, digital information has a radically different spatial logic. It is immaterial rather than bonded to paper or plastic sheets, it is almost instantaneously transferable to any place that has a network connection or is within range of a bit radiation source, and it is potentially reprocessable at any reception point-thus shifting much of the editorial and formatting work and responsibility from the producer's centralized plant to the consumer's personal hardware and software. Even more importantly, elimination of the need for access to printing presses and paper supplies has removed traditional barriers to entering the publishing business; anyone with an inexpensive computer and a network connection can now set up a server and pump out bits.
The likely result is a radical change in the sizes and locations of information supply points. When the Chicago Tribune Tower was constructed, it stood as the proudly visible center of a vast collection and distribution system and an emblem of the power of the press. Every day the news flowed in and the printed papers flowed out to the surrounding metropolis. But on the infobahn, where every node is potentially both a publication and consumption point, such centralized concentrations of activity will be supplanted by millions of dispersed fragments.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Recombinant_Architecture/BookstoresBitstores.html
Under traditional arrangements, the cost of getting to an audience tends to be high; a show has to fill expensive theater seats or attract sufficient advertising to pay for production costs and air time. So the entertainment industry has increasingly become a game for very big players who compete for mass audiences. But as high-bandwidth networks proliferate, and as network navigation software grows in sophistication, the costs of reaching and aggregating audiences should diminish sharply. There will be opportunities to produce and distribute low-budget entertainment for very small audiences and to identify and reach scattered audiences with the most specialized of interests and tastes. The infobahn may become a vast, global Broadway lined with thousands of virtual theaters.
So the social superglue of necessary proximity between performers and audience is losing its old stickiness, and the traditional architectural types and social conventions (going to the theater, cheering for your local team in the ballpark) that we associate with performance are coming unstuck. Speech, music, scenes, and text can now be transmuted into bits and entered into the network almost anywhere.
Of course there have always been alternatives to making such permanent, rigidly organized places of learning. Preindustrial societies had their itinerant teachers and holy men who spread the word wherever they could find audiences. By providing printed books and efficient mail service, the Industrial Revolution made correspondence schools possible. Two-way radio allowed a teacher in Alice Springs to instruct children living on remote cattle stations scattered across the great Australian outback. In the era of the Wilson government, broadcast television and videotapes (in conjunction with reasonably good, old-fashioned mail service) created the possibility of Britain's Open University. Today digital telecommunication is producing a powerful resurgence of this alternative tradition; being online may soon become a more important mark of community membership than being in residence. (When the Aga Khan gave MIT's commencement address in 1994, he was not given the traditional honorary degree to make him symbolically part of the community, but rather a modem-equipped laptop computer and an MIT e-mail address.)
By combining electronic viewing and diagnostic devices with appropriate telemanipulators, medical practitioners can begin to make themselves telepresent. Consider, for example, a pathologist examining tissue samples or body fluids under a microscope in order to render a diagnosis; with a telepathology system consisting of a video camera mounted on a motorized microscope, this task can be performed remotely. And with fancier teleoperators, head-mounted stereo displays, and sufficiently precise tactile feedback devices, telesurgery becomes a serious possibility. A typical telesurgery system consists of master and slave units: the remotely located surgeon wears a helmet (the audiovisual master) that controls a stereo video camera (audiovisual slave) observing the surgery, and holds force-reflecting pseudotools that control a surgical robot.
Continuous care - involving constant monitoring and regular medication - might also be provided remotely. (Many of the necessary technologies were originally developed for battlefield use but can readily be adapted for more peaceful purposes.) Houses and beds can contain sensors for tracking the conditions of their occupants and telecommunications for transmitting the information to distant monitoring sites. Electronic scales can log body weight. Noncontact, microwave vital-signs monitoring systems can measure heart rate, respiration rate, temperature, and blood pressure. Smart air-conditioning systems and inquisitive toilets might automatically take samples and perform analyses. Implanted wireless devices might be used for remotely controlled release of precise amounts of medication. Houses seem destined to evolve into increasingly sophisticated components of health care systems.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Recombinant_Architecture/HospitalsTelemedicine.html
But electronics can now perform many of a prison's traditional functions without cells and walls-discipline and punishment sans slammer. Under the Electronic Supervision Program, some American offenders are sentenced to home detention and fitted with anklet transponders linked to telephone modems. A central monitoring station is automatically alerted whenever the wearer moves more than a specified distance from the modem - just as Fontana's unfortunate young detainees were confined to the vicinity of San Michele's altars.
By the early 1990s, trading floors everywhere were tumbling into obsolescence: the British and French stock markets had transformed into almost entirely computerized operations, the Toronto exchange was planning to shut down its floor, and the Korean and German exchanges were moving in the same direction. Many stock transactions-perhaps the majority of them-had become computer-to-computer rather than person-to-person affairs. The US Treasury announced plans to introduce electronic bond auctions, in which Wall Street dealers would submit bids electronically instead of phoning them in to government clerks, who scribbled them down.
Increasingly though, merchants will find that they can dispense with sales floors and sales staff altogether and just maintain servers with databases of product specifications, prices, availability information, images, and simulations. The phone-order business becomes the network-order business. This arrangement potentially cuts overhead, taps into bigger markets, and lends itself to further automation at many levels. Product information can be adjusted instantly as supplies and prices change. Consumers might either "window shop" by remotely accessing such virtual stores, or they might delegate the task to software shopping agents that go out on the Net with shopping lists, inspect the specifications and prices of the merchandise on offer, and return with reports on the best available matches and prices. Closure of a sale can immediately trigger a delivery order at a warehouse, update an inventory database, and initiate an electronic money transfer. So, as the Internet has opened up to commercial use, as commercial online services have grown, and as switched video networks have emerged, schemes for cybershopping have proliferated.
Gobs of "back office" work can, for example, be excised from downtown towers and shifted to less expensive suburban or exurban locations, from which locally housed workers remain in close electronic contact with the now smaller but still central and visible head offices. These satellite offices may even be transferred to other towns or to offshore locations where labor is cheaper. (Next time you pay your credit card bill or order something from a mail-order catalogue, take a look at the mailing address. You'll find that the envelope doesn't go to a downtown location in a major city, but more likely to an obscure location in the heartland of the country.) The bedroom communities that have grown up around major urban centers also provide opportunities for establishing telecommuting centers-small, Main Street office complexes with telecommunications links to central offices of large corporations or government departments. As a consequence, commuting patterns and service locations also begin to change; a worker might bicycle to a suburban satellite office cluster or telecommuting center, for example, rather than commute by car or public transportation to a downtown headquarters.
Another strategy is to create resort offices, where groups can retreat for a time to work on special projects requiring sustained concentration or higher intellectual productivity, yet retain electronic access to the information resources of the head office.
Robert Reich's policy tract The Work of Nations made a compelling case that advanced economies increasingly rely on highly skilled "symbolic processors" who deal mostly in information. Others have pointed out that, while information-work organizations once could accumulate and retain in fixed locations, over long terms, most of the expertise that they needed to carry on their businesses, this becomes increasingly difficult in an era of economic globalization and rapid political, social, and technological change. Now it is often better strategy to form multipartner, geographically distributed alliances of various specialist groups (consultants, suppliers, subcontractors, and so on) as needed for particular projects, then to disband and regroup as old projects end and new ones begin. We are entering the era of the temporary, recombinant, virtual organization-of business arrangements that demand good computing and telecommunications environments rather than large, permanent home offices.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, as the telecommunications revolution was rapidly gaining momentum, some urbanists leaped to the conclusion that downtowns would soon dissolve as these new arrangements took hold. Melvin Webber, for example, predicted: "For the first time in history, it might be possible to locate on a mountain top and to maintain intimate, real-time and realistic contact with business or other associates. All persons tapped into the global communications net would have ties approximating those used today in a given metropolitan region." There is some evidence that these theorists were right.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Recombinant_Architecture/WorkNet-Work.html
Efficient delivery of bits to domestic space will, in addition, collapse many of the spatial and temporal separations of activities that we have long taken for granted. Many of our everyday tasks and pastimes will cease to attach themselves to particular spots and slots set aside for their performance - workplaces and working hours, theaters and performance times, home and your own time - and will henceforth be multiplexed and overlaid; we will find ourselves able to switch rapidly from one activity to the other while remaining in the same place, so we will end up using that same place in many different ways. It will no longer be straightforward to distinguish between work time and "free" time or between the space of production and the space of consumption. Ambiguous and contested zones will surely emerge.
Thus there will be profound ideological significance in the architectural recombinations that follow from electronic dissolution of traditional building types and of spatial and temporal patterns. Opposing ideologues have lost no time in pressing upon us their tendentious visions of this restructuring.
Simultaneously, the fresh requirements of the infobahn age suddenly kick in. Buildings and parts of buildings must now be related not only to their natural and urban contexts, but also to their cyberspace settings. Increasingly, they must function as network interfacesloading docks for bits. They must be equipped with electronic sensors and effectors, onboard processing power, sophisticated internal telecommunications capabilities, software, and capacity for getting bits on and offmuch like computer screen space that can be programmed for many different uses. Instead of living rooms, we will have domestic spaces that can be programmed for work, education, and entertainment. In place of today's centralized schools and hospitals, we will have systems for projecting specialized expertise into many different placesfrom airplane seats to isolated rural community centers-wherever and whenever it is required. Instead of building huge suburban theme parks filled with different rides, entertainment moguls will construct networks of much smaller, reprogrammable, simulation rides. Rooms and buildings will henceforth be seen as sites where bits meet the body-where digital information is translated into visual, auditory, tactile, or otherwise perceptible form, and, conversely, where bodily actions are sensed and converted into digital information.
Building these programmable places is not just a matter of putting wires in the walls and electronic boxes in rooms (though that is a start). As the relevant technologies continue to develop, miniaturized, distributed computational devices will disappear into the woodwork.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Recombinant_Architecture/ProgrammablePlaces.html
Somewhere along the line, our conception of what a computer is began to change fundamentally. It turns out that these electronic boxes are not just big, fast, centralized and their mainframe successors had led us to believe. No, they are primarily communication devices -not dumb ones like telephone handsets, that merely encode and decode electronic information, but smart ones that can organize, interpret, filter, and present vast amounts of information. Their real place for human interactions and transactions.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Soft_Cities/RealEstateCyberspace.html
The technology of distributed interactive simulation (DIS) systems grew out of SIMNET, and by the early 1990s it was being hyped as the latest thing for the theme park industry. Pretty soon you could line up to play BattleTech, Virtuality, or Fightertown -interactive games unfolding in networked simulator pods that immerse you in tacky but fairly convincing virtual worlds.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Soft_Cities/Face-to-FaceInterface.html
The virtual communities that networks bring together are often defined by common interests rather than by common location: Unix hackers, Amiga enthusiasts, Trekkies, and Deadheads are scattered everywhere. But the opposite can also be true. When networks and servers are organized to deal with information and issues of local concern to the people of a town or to the students, staff, and faculty of a university, they act to maintain more traditional, site-specific communities. So, for example, the City of Santa Monica's pioneering Public Electronic Network (PEN) is available only to residents of Santa Monica, to people who work in the city, or at thirty-five public-access terminals located within the city boundaries. And the Athena educational network was put in place on MIT's Cambridge campus to serve the MIT community.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Soft_Cities/OntheSpotOntheNet.html
Only limitations in bandwidth and processing power inhibit taking the next step-the realization of whizzier World Wide Webs, superMUDs, and other multiparticipant, urban-scale structures consisting of hyperlinked, three-dimensional, sensorily immersive spaces. And these limitations are temporary. The online environments of the future will increasingly resemble traditional cities in their variety of distinct places, in the extent and complexity of the "street networks" and "transportation systems" linking these places, in their capacity to engage our senses, and in their social and cultural richness.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Soft_Cities/NeighborhoodsMUDs.html
But a free-net's superimposition of the virtual onto the physical, while sensible enough, is not a logical or technical necessity. In fact, one of the most interesting questions for twenty-first-century urban designers to ask is, "How should virtual and physical public space relate to one another?"
Consider the obvious options. There is complete dissociation of the two if the electronic public space is accessible only from personal computers in homes and businesses. Another possibility is to associate access points with civic architecture: put an electronic information kiosk in the lobby of city hall or in the public library, for example. The Berkeley Community Memory and Santa Monica PEN systems have demonstrated a more radical strategy by placing rugged workstations in places like laundromats and at congregation points for the homeless; these workstations thus begin to play a public role much like the traditional one of fountains in the public places of Rome. The artist Krzysztof Wodiczko has gone a step further by suggesting that the physically homeless and displaced might carry electronic "alien staffs"personal devices that connect them to cyberspace and sometimes construct public representations of self by providing information to others about who they are and where they come from. These are public rather than personal digital assistants.
Since physical distance means little in cyberspace, the possibility also exists to "condense" scattered rural communities by creating public spaces that serve large, thinly populated areas. The Big Sky Telegraph, which has been running in Montana since 1988, successfully pioneered this idea. It began by linking one-room and two-room rural schoolhouses across the state, and it has focused on education, economic opportunity, and economic self-sufficiency.
In economically disadvantaged communities, where adequate public facilities of a traditional kind do not exist, the possibility of providing public cyberspace may become an important community development issue. Increasingly, communities and their planners will have to consider tradeoffs between investing scarce resources in creating or upgrading parks and community buildings and putting the money into effective electronic networks.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Soft_Cities/BeingThereGettingConnected.html
Potentially, each node in a computer network is both a production and a consumption site for information products, and the channels carry a complex, multiway information trade.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Bit_Biz/Economics101Economics0and1.html
Most importantly perhaps, one person's use of a file or some application software need not interfere with or prevent another's use of the same resource. Land is different: if I build on a lot, then you cannot. So are automobiles: if I have the family car, then you do not. So, even, are books and videotapes: if I check out a copy of some work from the library, then other users cannot. By contrast, the digital resources that are available in cyberspace do not have to be scarce resources. And it is a queer kind of property that can be valuable without being intrinsically scarce.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Bit_Biz/TangibleGoodsIntellectualProperty.html
But bits often have value precisely because they tell us something about the material world and can usefully guide our actions in that world. In fact, the electronic linkages of cyberspace largely serve (as Manuel Castells has put it) to "connect agriculture and manufacturing with the consumption of goods and services, and with the management of organizations and institutions of society." The emerging result seems to be a complex interaction between established, geographically located urban and regional economies and the increasingly powerful effects of long-distance, almost instantaneous information flows within worldwide virtual communities.
Geographers, economists, and planners will have to gather data and do some careful analysis to sort out what is really going on, but here are some plausible guesses. First, there are growing forces acting to decentralize economic activity. Managers and professionals are increasingly able to scatter across the globe while reintegrating their activities through telecommunications. The mobility of capital has been heightened. A world economy can now function in real time. Firms can maintain unity of management while decentralizing production and participating in markets worldwide. At the same time, there are some vigorous centralizing forces. Production processes remain ultimately dependent on appropriation and transformation of matter, so industrial locations are still largely determined by local availability of raw materials and access to labor markets. Furthermore, the initial development of an advanced telecommunications infrastructure is likely to favor existing urban centers (with their high and profitable concentrations of information work) over small towns and remote areas. In the end, these opposing forces will have complex and socially differentiated effects on urban and regional development processes and on industrial, commercial, and residential locational patterns. There is no simple formula.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Bit_Biz/MovingMaterialProcessingBits.html
And as more and more business is transacted in cyberspace, it seem inevitable that we will see increasing use of agents that automatically seek out offers of goods and services, negotiate prices, and make purchases. Let your agents do the walking!
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Bit_Biz/HelotsAgents.html
But it is very difficult - sometimes impossible - to create effective border checkpoints in cyberspace. Now, digital images and videos can be posted on bulletin boards that arephysically located anywhere in the world and downloaded by anyone, anywhere, who has a network connection. If they are downloaded through the Internet, the multiplicity of possible transmission paths, and the use of a packet-switching protocol - which means that files are sent in fragments to be reassembled at the receiving end makes transmissions particularly difficult to intercept.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Bit_Biz/JurisdictionsLogicalLimits.html
While spatially defined power erodes in cyberspace, though, another kind of power arises to take its place-that of the system operators (sysops).
So a new logic has emerged. The great power struggles of cyberspace will be over network topology, connectivity, and access-not the geographic borders and chunks of territory that have been fought over in the past.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Bit_Biz/TerritoryTopology.html
At a larger scale, whole cities may be designated as state or national capitals-special places for government business. In most modern systems, the politicians who assemble in these places represent specific territories from whence they come.
Clearly the technological means are now emerging to replace these spatial and architectural arrangements with electronics and software, and it isn't hard to construct plausible arguments in favor of such a substitution. For a start, political assemblies could become virtual, with representatives connecting by computer network instead of sitting together in chambers. This is not such a big step; assembly chambers are already equipped with electronic systems for recording votes, and most of us watch the proceedings - if we watch them at all - on C-Span or on local cable. Such a rearrangement would be bad for things like fancy Washington restaurants, but it would keep politicians closer to their constituents, and it would save on transportation and accommodation costs.
Electronic feedback can even be swift enough, potentially, to support real-time (or at least very fast) direct democracy on a large scale. Populist demagogues like Ross Perot have proffered visions of sitting in front of your two-way television, watching debates, and bypassing the politicians by immediately, electronically recording your response. The network presents the packaged alternatives. Vote with your remote!
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Bit_Biz/ElectoralPoliticsElectronicPolls.html
Life in cyberspace generates electronic trails as inevitably as soft ground retains footprints; that, in itself, is not the worrisome thing. But where will digital information about your contacts and activities reside? Who will have access to it and under what circumstances? Will information of different kinds be kept separately, or will there be ways to assemble it electronically to create close and detailed pictures of your life? These are the questions that we will face with increasing urgency as we shift more and more of our daily activities into the digital, electronic sphere.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Bit_Biz/SurveillanceElectronicPanopticon.html
As these soft cities develop, we will need to consider not only their urban design-the places and interconnections that they provide, and their look and feel - but also their civic character. We will have to figure out how to make cyberspace communities work in just, equitable, and satisfying ways.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/Bit_Biz/ThePoliticalEconomyofCyberspace.html