Architects will increasingly confront practical choices between providing for bodily presence and relying on telepresence … Technoromantic theoreticians will egg them on to Gibsonian gestures of dematerialization and radical renunciation of traditional architectural means, while materiality chauvinists will provide ringing denunciations of a world that they see going to hell in a handheld device.
Buildings themselves will become computers – the outcome of a long evolution … They are getting electronic nervous systems – network connections, cabling in the woodwork, and information appliances. As the speed at which bits zip around a building approaches that at which they are moved inside today’s computers, as different sorts of specialized sensors and input devices harvest bits at arbitrary locations, as processors are embedded wherever they happen to be needed, and as all the various displays and appliances are integrated into building-wide, digitally controlled systems, it will become meaningless to ask where the smart electronics end and the dumb construction begins; computers will burst out of their boxes, walls will be wired, and the architectural works of the bitsphere will be less structures with chips than robots with foundations.
The poor could be left with the obsolete and decaying urban remnants and isolated rural settlements that the more privileged no longer need. Surely the most fundamental challenge in building the bitsphere will be to deploy access according to principles of social equity – not in ways that heighten the privilege of the haves and further marginalize the have-nots.
Though immersion in electronically propelled bits will progressively reduce our reliance on bodily presence and material exchange … there is no reason to think that this novel condition will make us indifferent to our immediate surroundings or suddenly eliminate our desire for face-to-face human contact in congenial settings. We will still care about where we are, and we will still want company. So cities and towns will probably find opportunities to restructure themselves – to regroup housing, workplaces, and service facilities into reinvigorated small-scale neighborhoods (both urban and rural) that are effectively nourished by strong electronic links to a wider world, but simultaneously prize their differences from other places, their local institutions and hangouts, and their unique ambiences and customs.
Cyberspace development – much like real estate development – will probably progress through a complex and evolving blend of public policies and investments with private-sector responses to emerging opportunities.
If equality of opportunity and symmetry of participation are valued, then all classes of users (not just privileged groups and institutions) should be able to create as well as receive information; this means that the infrastructure has to provide two-way digital pipes and allow anyone to set up a server. If bottom-up community development efforts and entrepreneurial enterprise are to be encouraged, then the infrastructure must have a carefully crafted open architecture; it should allow a wide range of hardware companies, software developers, network service providers, content providers, and users to produce and integrate components which extend and add value to the system.
We will need rules for this emerging game. Like more familiar social and political units, international bitsphere communities will urgently require appropriate constitutions, institutions, public policies, and laws; perhaps there will be a specialized law of cyberspace, as there is now a law of the sea. At the same time, established, territorially defined nations, states, regions, and cities will have to adapt their pre-bitsphere structures and customs to the new context, one in which borders no longer have their old meaning, rights and powers may not be defined by spatial boundaries, property cannot be protected in traditional ways, and much of the economic, social, and cultural action has been attracted to the upstart venues of cyberspace.
The 21st-century bitsphere will require a growing number of virtual gathering places, exchanges, and entertainment spots for its plugged-in populace. Just as architects have traditionally designed schools, hospitals, and other service facilities to meet the needs of surrounding local areas, bitsphere planners and designers will structure the channels, resources, and interfaces of educational and medical service delivery systems for much more extended constituencies. Commercial, entertainment, educational, and health care organizations will use these new delivery systems and virtual places to operate, cooperate, and compete on a global scale.
We are entering an era of electronically extended bodies living at the intersection points of the physical and virtual worlds, of occupation and interaction through telepresence as well as through physical presence, of mutant architectural forms that emerge from the telecommunications-induced fragmentation and recombination of traditional architectural types, and of new, soft cities that parallel, complement, and sometimes compete with our existing urban concentrations of brick, concrete, and steel. For designers and planners, the task of the 21st century will be to build the bitsphere – a worldwide, electronically mediated environment in which networks are everywhere, and most of the artifacts that function within it (at every scale, from nano to global) have intelligence and telecommunications capabilities. It will overlay and eventually succeed the agricultural and industrial landscapes that humankind has inhabited for so long.
The Internet demonstrates the possibility of a multilayered, heterogeneous, decentralized system in which the constituent communities organize themselves, run their local affairs, and pay their bills in many different ways … These models will be debated, extended, and transformed. The fundamental questions of cyberspace’s political economy will urgently be contested. Who plays, who pays, and how is this decided? How is trade to be conducted, and how is intellectual property to be managed and protected? What is the role of agents, and what sorts of regulation might these software slaves require? How should communities define their boundaries, and how might they maintain their norms within these boundaries? What are the legitimate forms of power? How might political discourse be constructed? These are questions worthy of an online Aristotle.