City of Bits–Will the network kill the city?
a response to Seattle City of Bits
Seattle, Washington
October 3, 1998

"The body net will be connected to the building net, the building net to
the community net, the community net to the global net. From gesture
sensors worn on our bodies to the worldwide infrastructure of
communications satellites and long-distance fiber, the elements of the
bitsphere will finally come together to form one densely interwoven
system within which the knee bone is connected to the I-bahn."–William
Mitchell, City of Bits

"The city has no existence beyond being a cultural ghost for
tourists."–Marshall mcLuhan, 1967

Architects, urban planners, digital content, and technologists met on a
gray and rainy Saturday morning at the University of Washington, Seattle
for an event titled "Seattle City of Bits" (See:
http://www.amphioncom.com/seattlecityofbits/) to discuss "the future of
cities: Space Place and the Infobahn. How is information technology
going to change the physical city?"

The feature presentation, which was coherent and mind provoking, "City
of Bits," was given by William Mitchell (professor of Architecture and
Media Arts and Sciences and Dean of the School of Architecture and
planning at MIT.) Mitchell opened by excusing his recent book (which
bears the same title. See:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City\_of\_Bits/) as too conservative. The
explanation was that it was written before the advent of the World Wide
Web, as we perceive it today. He presented his book as a wake up call
for architects and urbanites to rethink the urban and to realize the
important relation between technology and the essence of the City. This
call was one of the main themes of his lecture. In a series of
binary-opposed slides, he showed how The City transforms to a collection
of smart places: An Oasis of bits distribution and manipulation; A place
where the telecommunication infrastructure is connected to human beings.
As a water-well provides a social focal point for an agrarian community
in a physical desert, the satellite radio-signals reception dish
provides a virtual well in a virtual desert. Mitchell showed how the
Indian City of Chandigarh (see: http://www.nic.in/chandigarh/) is
becoming part of the Silicon Valley through Tele-Technologies and how
the twelve hour time difference is used in a smart bit production and
projection scheme. This and other places are labeled by Mitchell as
smart genuine spaces: A renewal of the Roman notion of the spirit of the
place with a twist since Today, the spirit of the place is software. We
need to ask what distinguishes a genuine smart place from a dumb
counterfeit space? Mitchell fails to make the important distinction
between bit consumption and bit production. A smart place must be more
than a digital transmission and reception node. Actually, the satellite
dish does not receive digital bits (As argued by Mitchell). It receives
analog radio waves that are converted to bits streams. This tool in
itself is not capable to smarten up a place. Any TV reception dish or
cable set-top box is essentially doing similar decoding. A place gets
smart when bits are manipulated in a manner that adds value to the
information they convey. This is for example, the difference between TV
reception and Video conferencing. In a following slide set, he showed a
picture of downtown Honk-Kong. In it, we see the municipal horseracing
field–a Hippodrome, surrounding by the City's impressive high-rises.
The adjacent slide showed a commercial for a Tele-betting phone-hookup
terminal. The point made was that while the hippodrome is historically a
crucial place where the Honk Kong's influential "movers and shakers"
meet face to face to schmooze, the digital device, and other
technologies de-centralize the race by enabling remote participation: A
Tele-Hippodrome.

It was Paul Virilio in his ground braking "Art of The Motor" who first
pointed on the concept of the hippodrome and of the race as vital
infra-structural phenomena in the discourse of the city. Mitchell was
mute regarding the changing role of the architect due to this
dromospheric urban paradigm shift. By reading Virilio it is clear that
the new architect should plan intra-structures (no this is not a
spelling error): Basis for tele-structures that host tele-activities.
The new architect of the non-place should be an expert of manipulation
time. And The real question that we must ask is when does the race stops
being a race? We can remove the live audience and offer it tele-visional
cover; we can move the bookies and have electronic Of Track Betting. We
can remove the stadium and have the horses race on a mechanically
controlled walking surface, as humans in Today's Gyms. We can remove the
horses and use computerized genetically engineered virtual horses, and
so on and so forth. Is this still a race? Mitchell fails to mention that
the city and the race have a central role as a density of energy and
activity in time. The race cannot happen without time constraints and
audience. Without excitement, there is no race. And we know that since
Greece most of what we do is part of "The Race": the stock exchange,
progress, space exploration, etc., Using similar logic we should ask:
When does the city stop being a city?

The importance of time design in today's Architecture was emphasized by
another symposium speaker–Peter Bosselman (Professor of Urban Design
and Director of the Environmental Simulation laboratory of UC Berkley).
See: http://www4.ced.berkeley.edu:8004/research/simlab/. Bosselman
emphasized the architect's responsibility for combining several temporal
perspectives in city planning due to our temporal sense is set to a
great degree by the configuration of artificial objects in space. In
another slide series, Mitchell showed a traditional downtown bank
facade. The adjacent slide showed an ATM. Architecture plays an
important role of establishing a sense of dignity, respectability and
stability to the physical bank. But what shall architectural firms who
specialize in banks planning do as national banks merge, on-line banking
catches on, and branches across the States close down? This is quite a
gloomy prospect for the architectural profession. What are architects
suppose to do, start designing ATMs?

Another featured speaker, Linda Stone (Director of Microsoft's Virtual
Worlds Group) actually suggested that Architects should train themselves
in the emerging disciplines of new-media and digital-design and gave an
example of two of her software program managers who are trained
architects. However, not all architects can afford the luxury or wish to
re-train themselves and get a job as software products designers and
managers.

Mitchell's slide show led to the question whether or not we are on the
threshold of an anti-urban era. For this New World order, Mitchell
provided some practical guidelines for the Architect: First, the
architect must think whether a planned structure needs to be physically
constructed, or should it be virtually deployed. Second, we must
re-think the concept of the city: The physical city has land resources
we consider in planning, the virtual one has other resources that must
be taken into considerations. The traditional city has transportation
infrastructure. The virtual city: a telecommunication infrastructure.
Since the digital revolution drastically changes the relation between
workspaces and residential spaces, a relation which is in the heart of
every urban formation, the architect must plan neighborhoods around the
physical centers of activities that are likely to survive a fate similar
to the local bank brunch. Mitchell seem to suggest that suburban
neighborhoods should be planned around pre-schools, elderly housing
projects, restaurants and sports clubs. For him, these locations are
immune to the virtualization of work and leisure activities since they
require physical proximity. What we have here is a sign for a retreat
and cover your base strategy. Architecture must not retreat to the gated
"communities" of suburbia. The new factuality of non-locality has the
potential to allow for the opening of the neighborhoods and the suburbs
to heterogeneous and diverse comminutes and activities.

Mitchell ended his lecture by suggesting five strategies for
cyber-architecture:

1. Dematerialization: Can the function of a planned physical structure
be achieved in a virtual environment?

2. Demobilization: Can any physical journey be supplemented by digital
telecommunication? Is a planned transportation infrastructure needed in
face of the telematic alternatives? Mitchell argues that the byte does
not pollute as the bus. However, this is not correct since we must also
consider informational pollution. Information pollution, as suggested by
Paul Virilio, is a negative side effect of information transmissions and
consumption. The industrial revolution produced industrial pollution.
The digital telecommunication revolution produces this new form of
pollution. It is caused by control of the global virtual environment by
post-industrial technologies and corporations that exhausts the
space-time intervals that once organized the world. For example, the WWW
suffers from advertisement and sponsored content pollution, the global
e-mail network from Spam mail and e-mail viruses. One may claim that
defining pollution require a definition of the contrary purity and
cleanness but this criticism does not hold since Information pollution
is also produced as a necessary accidental side effect to any
technological progress and procedure. A Chernobyl of the information age
is possible.

3. Dstandardization: The digital product can be easily customized and
personalized to suit the needs of diverse personal tastes. Standards
were needed for the industrial age mode of production, where physical
objects are produced in a mass production line. The digital revolution
enables a different mode of production. Instead of producing and than
distributing a standardized product, the digital product can be
distributed (through the global net) and than personally produced to
suit the customer specifications through smart appliances. This is a bit
tricky point that needs further investigation and clarification of
terms. The software engineering community consistently calls for greater
standardization of software interfaces, broadcasting protocols and
digital content. In our opinion, this strategy should really be called
re-personalization of the mainly non-personalized character of mass
media content.

4. Intelligent Control: Smart appliances should enable dynamic pricing
and real-time service acquisition of digital information.

5. Sft-transformation: The process of cybrnauting of the traditional
city beyond the industrial age. The point is that actualizing the
strategies 1-4, can be done in a non-intrusive manner: The technological
infrastructure can use existing physical tunneling (As in the Helsinki
2000 project that will be discussed below), using software which is, at
least in theory, more easily modifiable than physical objects. This
strategy also means that the physical can be preserved and left
unpolluted due to the deployment of the digital railways of tomorrow.
This argument must be extended to include information pollution and lead
to a new science of digital ecology.

The next lecture: "Change of City Concepts," was given by Immo Teperi
(Architect and Co-Founder of Arcus Software, Director of 3-D modeling
for Helsinki Arena 200). Mr. Teperi talk dealt with our concept of "The
City." Is it relevant only to physical cities? Is it adequate to virtual
cities? For Teperi, a city is a place to exchange objects and ideas.
Using mainly materialistic concepts, Teperi emphasizes the historical
role of the city is a place for The Sale to happen. Teperi showed slides
and elaborated on the theoretical and practical aspects of the Helsinki
Arena 2000 project. See: http://www.helsinkiarena2000.fi/.

With populace of around 5 Millions people and with about 2.5 Million
cellular-phones, Sweden is one of the countries where cellular
technology enjoy tremendous penetration. The Helsinki Telephone Company,
as other telecom giants around the globe, struggles to stay relevant and
profitable in face of these rapid changes. The Helsinki solution is to
use the City's copper wire infrastructure to deploy a high-speed digital
network infrastructure. The project is financed by the Phone Company to
become the major multimedia content available on this network. The
project consists of a three dimensional model of the Helsinki downtown
area and a database. The project target audience is local residents, and
it supposes to allow on-line shopping, many to many video conferencing
services and location personalization features. The 3D model is,
surprise, navigable in real time from a first person perspective, by any
user, including rendering of trees, weather conditions, and the local
bus system. Teperi showed 3D snapshots of the city from various angles
and a walk-through conceptual video. Any US computer journalist would
have difficulties to conclude that this project is something more than
pure vaporware since none of the cool functionality was demonstrated and
no beta release dates were announced. Nevertheless, for our purposes
here it is more important to examine the theoretical presumptions and
the design principles that were discussed by Teperi.

As the lecture went on, it became obvious that Teperi is a strong
believer in representation and materialism. For Teperi, there seem to be
three types of cities: 1. Real cities, 2. Virtual cities (which does not
exist and are unreal) and 3. Virtual real cities. You can guess to what
topology Helsinki arena 2000 fits. There is no advantage in
distinguishing between the real and the virtual form the point of view
of reality. But it is still beneficial to use these terms, to examine
why Teperi thinks his project is indeed a virtual real city. For him, a
virtual real city is a virtual place which offers "real services" for
"local people." He fails to see that when the physical location
disappears, the term "local people" looses all grounding. It is also
quite apparent that our physical cities have an important dimension of
cosmopolitan importance. By this representational thought, we should
just copy the desirable aspects of the physical city to the virtual. The
proposed virtual Helsinki copies the seasonal weather, local time,
public transportation, navigational interface, stores, churches and
buildings appearance and locations. You get the picture. The fact that
the users can decide to fly in a real-person rendering perspective and
walk-through is presented by Teperi as an interface design problem since
this may cause dislocation and disorientation. Nevertheless, some of us
want to fly! Do we? The bad "functions" of the "real" Helsinki are not
copied–Graffiti, Cigarette Buts, Environmental pollution, and noise are
missing from the database and from the bits of this "city of bits." We
do get the local weather that seems to change between light gray, deep
gray, and deep snow. This sterile devil's-island look alike can function
as a perfect correctional facility for banished urban Graffiti artists,
Hackers and other misdemeanors. Add local Phone Company sponsored ads,
some shopping malls and all hell breaks loose. What are the merits of
this 1:1 simulated map design principle in virtual environments? First,
Teperi tells us that we need town planners and architects to provide
central planning for the duplicated functions and services, or else "the
city is boring." For town-planners, this is the most natural approach to
virtual planning. It seems that for many architects, the virtual is
concurred when they simply transform stones to bits. However, as
Mitchell emphasized in his presentation, the virtual environment
pre-conditions are totally different from the physical. If architecture
should play a vital role in defining the virtual, and if it wants to
escape trivialization, it must come to terms with the new medium. It
must understand that one of its objectives are to discover and to invent
(since the virtual is an inherently flexible medium) these
pre-conditions; it must deal with the new relations between digital
space-time intervals and the precedent of the real-time interval. Lets
talk about the weather. The weather have strong influence on our urban
mood and is a natural phenomenon we can hardly predict or control. The
city weather effects the planning of our daily urban activities. But in
the virtual, weather is not a constant - we can let the virtual city
dweller set his own desired weather or time of day. This is a classical
option for software personalization. Even better, we can design our
virtual town without considering weather, by spending our energy on
planning other creative environmental conditions that will have similar
or even greater effect on our virtual dweller's experience. For Teperi,
a virtual city must have a town planner and a master plan that will
assign meaning and functions to its structures. But in a virtual city,
each building does not have to preserve its form and structure.
Buildings can perform several functions. For example, a rave party can
be held in the Helsinki Church while others participate in religious
ceremony there, without the two groups interfering with each other. Real
estate is not real estate in the traditional sense since we have an
infinite cheap space to build at. The virtual real estate will be
determined by the popularity of a digital place (think about the current
"portal" trend). The popularity of the place is related to the number
and quality of its functions for the town's man.