Chapter 5: Soft Cities

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. Whatever approach is taken to deploying network capacity for public purposes, though, simply making computers available and providing some kind of electronic access to civic information and discourse is not enough to create successful public cyberspace. Just as parks and squares must be pleasant and welcoming to a diverse population in order to function effectively, so must the interfaces to public areas of cyberspace.

Chapter 5: Soft Cities

A space is genuinely public … only to the extent that it really is openly accessible and welcoming to members of the community that it serves. It must also allow users considerable freedom of assembly and action. And there must be some kind of public control of its use and its transformation over time. The same goes for public cyberspace, so creators and maintainers of public, semipublic, and pseudopublic parts of the online world – like the makers of city squares, public parks, office building lobbies, shopping mall atriums, and Disneyland Main Streets – must consider who gets in and who gets excluded, what can and cannot be done there, whose norms are enforced, and who exerts control. These questions, like the complementary ones of privacy and encryption, have become the foci of crucial policy debates.

Chapter 5: Soft Cities

The construction technology for virtual cities – just like that of bricks-and-mortar ones – must provide for putting up boundaries and erecting access controls, and it must allow cyberspace architects and urban designers to organize virtual places into public-to-private hierarchies … The technological means to create private places in cyberspace are available, but the right to create these places remains a fiercely contested issue. Can you always keep your bits to yourself? Is your home page your castle? These are still open questions.

Chapter 5: Soft Cities

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. But no matter how extensive a virtual environment or how it is presented, it has an underlying structure of places where you meet people and find things and links connecting those places. This is the organizing framework from which all else grows. In cyberspace, the hyperplan is the generator.

Chapter 5: Soft Cities

Control of code is power. For citizens of cyberspace, computer code-arcane text in highly formalized language – typically accessible to only a few privileged high-priests – is the medium in which intentions are enacted and designs are realized, and it is becoming a crucial focus of political contest. Who shall write the software that increasingly structures our daily lives? What shall that software allow and proscribe? Who shall be privileged by it and who marginalized? How shall the writers of the rules be answerable?

Chapter 4: Recombinant Architecture

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. Keyboards and mouse pads will cease to be the only bit-collection zones; sensors will be everywhere. Displays and effectors will multiply. In the end, buildings will become computer interfaces and computer interfaces will become buildings.

Chapter 4: Recombinant Architecture

When telecommunication through lickety-split bits on the infobahn supplements or replaces movement of bodies … and when telepresence substitutes for face-to-face contact … the spatial linkages that we have come to expect are loosened … Urban compositions can begin to float free from one another, and they can potentially relocate and recombine according to new logics. Perhaps it is not too romantic to imagine that unique natural environments, culturally resonant urban settings, and local communities that hold special social meaning will increasingly reassert their power … Increasingly, [buildings] must function as network interfaces – loading 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 off.

Chapter 4: Recombinant Architecture

Shall we allow home-based employment, education, entertainment, and other opportunities and services to be channeled to some households and not to others, thereby technologically creating and maintaining a new kind of privilege? Or can we use the infobahn as an equalization mechanism – a device for providing enhanced access to these benefits for the geographically isolated, the homebound elderly, the sick and disabled, and those who cannot afford wheels? … Going out, going to work, going to school or to church, going away to college, and going home are economically significant, socially and legally defining, symbolically freighted acts. To change or eliminate them, as electrocottages and cybercondos promise to do, is to alter the basic fabric of our lives.

Chapter 4: Recombinant Architecture

Instabilities and ambiguities in space use … challenge traditional ways of representing social distinctions and stages of socialization … Categories lose their clarity, and rites of passage require redefinition, when the uses of built space are no longer permanently assigned and depend from minute to minute on software and the fleeting flow of bits.