"Dan Gillmor, in his San Jose Mercury News column of last Saturday, makes the case that in light of the attack on New York City, "...the logic of decentralization has never been more clear." He notes that the Internet's decentralized architecture performed well during and after the attack. He goes on to call for a similar Internet-style decentralization of populations away from cities, predicting that the attacks should or will precipitate a migration away from cities into more decentralized patterns of living.

He is right about data infrastructure, but he is wrong about cities, because cities are not cause but effect. (Full disclosure: I am a long-time resident of New York, and have spent the better part of two careers working in cities of various flavors.)

Cities are not isolated things so much as the large-scale intersection of countless small forces, forces which in aggregate give cities the kind of homeostasis and adaptability that have made them such surprisingly long-lived features of human life."

redux [02.28.01]
Context Magazine Location, Location, Location

"The Digital Age, though, has weakened the urban magnet. People no longer have to live amid service providers to have access to their services; many services can be effectively summoned electronically. Telecommunications, moreover, is bringing work back into the home. People now may work in a wired spare bedroom or in a home office in an executive ghetto such as Aspen, Colo.

Does this mean the diaspora of urban professionals now will push beyond suburbs and exurbs to remote hideaways, mountaintops, or places such as Venice, selected merely for their beauty? "

"For planners and politicians, the dawning Digital Age creates an urgent need to find policies that will create an acceptable level of social equity. For architects and urban designers, the complementary task is to develop an urban fabric that provides opportunities for social groups to intersect and overlap?perhaps using a laptop at the piazza café instead of a personal computer inside the gated condo."

redux [01.10.01]
Feed Remote Control

"I suspect that most of us have had similar encounters with technology, especially over the last decade -- moments when our media, for whatever reason, momentarily deliver us into some uncanny zone that lingers on the edge of the Real. Usually we sweep these experiences -- strange radio static, surreal computer shenanigans, the snafu synchronicities of the cell phone -- under the rug. But I don't think we should so readily dismiss the feelings that accompany these experiences, because they have their own truths to tell. For as media increasingly colonize social reality, they scramble the space-time boundaries of the self. And this always feels a little weird."

Wired News Mobile Phones Redefine Cities

""Anyone who is now designing a public space needs to find ways to allow people to exist in both the physical world of the 'town square,' as well as the 'information space' accessed through mobile phones, PDAs, and whatever else Nokia and Palm can throw at us over the next decade," Townsend said.

He said much of the behavior and structure of the city at an aggregate level is based upon individual behavior.

"So the introduction of this cute little device (mobile phones) would slip under the radar of urbanists, even though it fundamentally changes the way individuals interact -- which consequently alters the behavior of the entire system," he said."

Taub Urban Research Center Life in the Real-Time City: Mobile Telephones and Urban Metabolism

"While mobile telephones are sold as a technology that helps conquer constraints of location and geography, it is increasingly apparent that the time-management capabilities of this new tool are equally important.

As a result, the widespread use of these devices is quickening of the pace of urban life and at an aggregate level, resulting in a dramatic increase in the metabolism of urban systems. This quickening metabolism is directly tied to the widespread formation of new decentralized information networks facilitated by this new technology. As a result, new paradigms for understanding the city and city planning in a decentralized context are discussed."