You might like to take a look at this link & figure it out for yourself.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Monday, June 25, 2007
Virtual City
Introduction
The more realizations are happening at the local level, at the level of local administrations and that the democratic potential or the possibility of bringing citizens and administrations or politicians nearer from each other it could be easier to set up in such a local context. Local developments could provide us with interesting elements regarding the introduction of multimedia in the public sector in general. Digital cities were then seen as laboratories of the integration of multimedia technology within the public place.
Digital cities, at the beginning, strictly defined as web sites that give access to city’s administrations. These local developments could provide us with interesting elements regarding the introduction of multimedia in the public sector in general. Digital cities were then seen as laboratories of the integration of multimedia technology within the public place. This feeling was confirmed by Michel Hervé (1997).
For Emmanuel Eveno (1997), the importance of communication within cities is linked to the definition of the city itself. Cities are places where people gather and communicate.
All these arguments confirm our initial choices of digital cities as a relevant place to observe changes induced by the development of multimedia applications. Regarding the democratic potential of these local developments that has been announced in numerous discourses, it seems that, even if the link between city and democracy is quite clear (Eveno, 1997).
Definition of digital cities and proposition of a typology
The term 'digital city' has several meanings, sometimes very different. There is actually no common definition of that concept and authors seldom adopt a strictly identical sense. 'Digital city' is used to qualify the rapid growth of information and communication technologies that is currently transforming advanced industrial cities as well as to designate on-line services —mostly services available through the World Wide Web— managed by municipal government, businesses, citizens or users and which either present local content or use the urban metaphor to facilitate users understanding.
In the reviewing of the literature, we observe that some authors do not approach the problem of this lack of common definition and do not specify what they really mean by the notion of digital city. In addition, we note a great diversity of terms used to indicate sometimes very similar experiences: Digital City, Virtual City, Wired City, City of Bits, Web-City, Webbed City, Electronic Town, Digital Town, ... On the other hand, some may use the same term in two opposite senses. Therefore, it is very difficult to elaborate an accurate definition of the digital city and, consequently, to constitute a rigorous basis of comparison.
Dutton, Blumler and Kraemer (1987a) underscore this issue when they distinguish two main meanings for the 'wired city' concept: ' The term ‘’wired city’’ is used in two different ways. At a conceptual level, it refers to a normative forecast of the future of communications —a prescriptive statement about how communications technology should be institutionalized and used. In this context, the wired city has been broadly defined as a community in which all kinds of electronic communication services are available to households and businesses. (...) At a concrete level, the wired city concept refers to experiments and projects involving the use of advanced information and communications technologies for the provision of services to households and businesses. Defined broadly, nearly any new development in computing and telecommunications might be called a wired city project if used to provide services to business and households of a community.
Defined narrowly, wired city projects refer to new developments in cable and telecommunications that affect the public communications systems of a community '.
According to this somewhat outdated definition —it was actually elaborated in the mid-eighties and originally applied to the rapid growth of cable television during the seventies—, the 'wired city' concept appears as an extremely wide notion which could include a service provided to the public —as, for instance, a city council’s website— as well as a much wider urban planning project aimed at integrating new information and communication technologies in the city, well as a much wider urban planning project aimed at integrating new information and communication technologies in the city.
On the one hand, we list those who consider the digital city as an online interactive physical space of one city.
Among them, Graham and Aurigi (1997) mention ' an emerging range of new, Internet-based, local initiatives known as ‘’virtual cities’’ ' developed ' to widen local participation in telematics and to engineer the emergence of new ‘’electronic public spaces’’, which, at the local level, will complement or replace the undermined physical public space of cities. '
On the other hand, there are those who use this expression to designate the wide urban restructuring process lead by current developments in telecommunications that have important implications for both physical form and social and economic life of contemporary cities.
To sum up, it seems that the concept of digital or virtual cities –or whatever the exact name it takes– concerns two main types of situation:
a project of developing a telecom infrastructure in a city, which is close to the wired cities concept of the 70’s
a set of services mainly available on the Web site and that are more or less linked with the concept of city.
Web site refers to the real city (grounded digital city) but this is not necessarily the case as observed (non-grounded digital city).
A possible typology of digital cities
Actors of the public sphere
The actors of the public sphere are the public administration, the citizens, the associations and the voluntary bodies, the commercial or private companies, and consultants, research centres or universities. All these actors may intervene in the management of the public sphere and according to the different cases; their importance in the sphere is different. Beamish also proposes a kind of typology, but of community networks more than strictly on digital cities. In her typology, she includes the actors of these networks as well as their main resources or the resources that they bring into the technical artefact: hardware, software, infrastructure, access possibilities, content, ... .
Grounded/non-grounded
The concept of grounded/non-grounded is the same as the one used by Graham and Aurigi (1997) where non-grounded refers to Web sites - the authors seem to exclude other technologies - which ‘use the familiar interface of a ‘‘city’’ as a metaphor to group together wide ranges of Internet services located across the world’ .Grounded cities on the contrary ‘relate coherently to the development of specific cities (...) and concentrate on integrating Web content located within the physical space of one city'. Non-grounded cities seem to be very close to virtual communities as they group together people who share the same interests but are not necessarily based in the same area. Some cities may be grounded as well as non-grounded, i.e. using the metaphor of the digital city to attract people and propose different kind of services to people who do not originate from the real city but be initiated by local authorities and also provide local content. The situation is then not necessarily binary.
Openness and closing
The ‘openness’ or closing of the city refers to the ‘nature’ of the inhabitants and to the frontiers of the city. The question here is who can live in the virtual city. Is it open only to the inhabitants of the city or can other people from other places be considered as inhabitant? What defined the status of inhabitant and the one of visitor?
Access
The notion of access refers to the fact that people have to pay or not to access to the services offered or the information provided in the digital city. It also concerns the types of accesses and access places available in the real city.
Content/Services
The content of the digital cities is another element of the typology. At that level, we may consider three main types of services: information - communication - transaction. Information refers to the research of information in database (relation many-to-one) for example or simply through navigating on the Web site with or without using search engines. In this category, the user is relatively passive. The transaction category consists of functions for which the user is handling some tasks himself and sometimes must pay for them: ordering a ticket, tax forms, application for day care. Communication includes communication through e-mails (relation one-to-one) or forums (relation many-to-many).
Dominant metaphor
In some of the digital cities, the metaphor of the city is clearly used. Sometimes other related metaphors like quarters, streets and so on are also used.
Target public
In her typology on community networks, Beamish includes the target group of these
networks: individual, school, youth, specific groups like homeless, elderly, women,
... This characteristic could also be used here. The target public on the digital cities can be: the inhabitants of a specific city, the members of a community, the tourists or visitors of a city, the local SMEs, the community groups or non profit making associations, people gathered by a common interest, …
History of the development of digital cities
According to Marie d'Udekem-Gevers (1998), the concept of digital cities comes from the United States, from political visions developed there and from local spontaneous initiatives. Digital cities found their history in two main types of initiatives because they embedded two ideas: the Community and the City.
Community refers to the relations and social links between people that share the same interests or values and City refers to administrative relations, to the links between citizens, policy-makers and the local administration.
Within the Community perspective, digital cities are very close to the free-nets and on-line communities that first developed in the United States in the 70’s. But the idea of using the technology to bring together communities is not new and already emerged in the 60s and 70s with the emergence of local radios and TVs.
In some cases, virtual communities and digital cities may be seen as an extension of the local community radio, television and newspaper concept (Simon, 1995). The initial idea of this move was to use new media to provide local content, often made by citizens themselves, to encourage user participation (Pailliart, 1993), to (re) create asocial link and allow the set up of communities (Pailliart), and to offer a place forfree expression.free-nets and on-line communities may be seen as theextension of this 'free' move initiated by free radios and community TV. This is these network communities that usually originated from members of grass-roots movements in numerous towns in the USA and in Canada (Pierson, 1999) allow 'interaction and communication between
citizens' (Casalegno and Kavanaugh, 1998, p. 70).
US Initiatives: Wired cities and electronic service delivery projects
Apart from the existence of free-nets and on-line communities, the 60’s idea of digital cities came from the USA (d'Udekem-Gevers, 1998) where the concept and the metaphor of 'wired cities' emerged (Dutton and alii, 1987a). At that time already, ICT were used in discourses as an answer to urban problems, especially to social problems. These discourses and the subsequent programmes lead by Lyndon Johnson (Dutton and alii, 1987a) were based on different infrastructures: telephone, cable, institutional and community-owned networks which would allow telecommunications applications that 'might improve city living and stimulate variable patterns of regional development' (Dutton, Blumler, Kraemer, 1987a, p. 5).The dominant infrastructure at that time was the coaxial cable. At the end of the 80’s, there was a shift towards 'more integrated communication facilities' (1987a, p. 7) with advanced satellite, microelectronic and fibre-optic technologies. Nowadays, the rapid emergence and diffusion of Internet and the Web technology has played a major accelerator role in the phenomenon of wired/digital cities.
In the late 80's and early in the 90's, many American local governments took initiatives to improve the delivery of political participation, to provide access to a common computer database and offer e-mail facilities via terminals in public places. These were the continuation of the 'public information utility' promoted in the 60's (Graham & Marvin, 1996). Internet 'generated renewed enthusiasm for electronic democracy' (Docter and Dutton, p. 126).
The European context: The' market' of digital cities
In Europe mainly, the digital cities concept came back at the front of the scene following the discourses and projects on the Information Society. The Delors White Paper introduced the idea and the following Bangemann report proposed teleworking (application 1), distance learning (application 2), a network for universities and research centres (application 3), telematic services for SMEs (application 4), road traffic management (application 5), air traffic control (application 6), healthcare networks (application 7) and electronic tendering (application 8), the transeuropean public administrations network (application 9) and mainly the city information highways
(application 10).
Besides their own objectives, the 10 Bangemann initiatives had to follow somegeneral objectives like ‘strengthening industrial competitiveness and promoting thecreation of new jobs, promoting new forms of work organisation, improving quality of life and quality of the environment, responding to social needs and raising the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of public services’ (Bangemann, 1994, p. 24). As the other applications, cities and administrations were mainly seen as potential markets.
The idea was to connect public administrations and to improve their efficacy and to connect households to multimedia applications and entertainment services. The Bangemann report stated vigorously that 'the information society has the power to improve the quality of life of the European citizens, increase the efficiency of our economic and social organisation and reinforce its cohesion' (p. 6). Cities were said to play an important role in the awareness process of the citizens and local administrations were said to have an important leverage effect by becoming mass users of the technology. But these initiatives, according to the Bangemann report, were to be launched as real commercial initiatives.
At the beginning, the EU adopts a technology push approach. Projects involving cities were included in technical research programme: integrated broadband communications, road transport, informatics, and construction of telecom infrastructure in lagging regions. In 1996, Graham and Marvin note that some projects allow more balanced 'technology push' and 'demand pull' approaches bringing together technology with representative of users and city policy-makers("telematics sites").The European Digital Cities (EDC) project aims at 'providing an open cooperation network for concerted urban development through Telematics' and ... 'covers networking activities by cities, towns and regions with a view to laying the foundations of the Global Information Society as outlined by the G7 world conference of Feb. '95.
Apart from these networked projects, there exist a lot of other initiatives from the European Commission at the level of digital cities, on-line administrations, etc., mainly within the Telematics Applications Programme, that covered different domains: Administrations, Transport, Research, Education & Training, Libraries, Urban & Rural Areas, Health Care, Disabled and Elderly People, Environment, Telematics Engineering, Language Engineering, Information Engineering, Support Actions and Integrated Applications for Digital Sites.
Virtual Cities
Our contemporary cities are faced with the loss of real public spaces due to increasing problems of violence, insecurity, pollution, which also constitute specific problems by themselves. Digital cities may then be considered as an attempt to build new secured (electronic) public spaces and regain some characteristics of the cities, i.e., places of communication, interactions, offering a lot of economic, social and cultural opportunities (Graham and Aurigi, 1997).
Moreover, cities are increasingly competing with each other on a commercial level in order to attract investment and tourists and 'cannot afford then, not to promote themselves'. Cities have adopted marketing strategies. They present themselves as 'products' in the global image space; they participate to an 'electronic urban imagery'
The tie between physical urban space and virtual city
There are indeed many interaction points between real and electronic urban spaces. First, Alain d’Iribarne (1997) demonstrates that politics, social and cultural structures of the society heavily influence the foundation and the management of a digital town.
Secondly, the physical and economical growth of the city depends on whether a modern and well-developed telecommunication infrastructure exists or not. In addition to older communication structures —as roads, highways, railways...—, new information and communication technologies allow certain economic activities to move towards industrial suburbs (Atkinson, 1997).
Another admitted evolution about physical urban space and digital cities is the deepening integration of one into the other. As business centres become telecommunication nodes, electronic public spaces are increasing and buildings turn into network interfaces equipped with electronic sensors and sophisticated telecommunications capabilities, the interaction between digital towns and physical cities is stronger and stronger.
The time-space compression
The fast development of new information and communication technologies over the last years is currently overcoming, or at least reducing, time and space barriers. Morley and Robins (1995) or Graham and Marvin (1996) use to name this phenomenon 'time-space compression'. As a result of this, we note a complete reshaping of traditional economic and geographic basis and, broadly speaking, a total restructuring of traditional landmarks.
A major outcome for our everyday life could be the blurring of the boundaries between, on the one hand, workplaces and working hours and, on the other hand, entertainment or family life places and free-time. Homes will therefore tend to become the place for 'multiplexed activities', i.e., that ' we will find ourselves able to switch rapidly from one activity to the other while remaining in the same place '(Mitchell, 1995, p. 101).
Consequently, ' 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 '. The growing role of home in tomorrow’s ' information society ' seems to inspire utopian perspectives. As Graham and Marvin (1996) point out. The 'time-space compression' phenomenon could hence lead to the revival of citizen's involvement in social and cultural urban life as well as to an excessive withdrawal. As information and communication technologies spread, 'telepresence' will be more and more substituted for 'face-to-face contact'.
The glocalisation phenomenon
Concurrently to the 'time-space compression' phenomenon, another shift —a double process seemingly inconsistent— can be observed as information and communication technologies grow. On the one hand, the overcoming of space barriers leads to the globalisation of economic, social and cultural flows and to the emergence of world-wide business centres as ' information cities ' (Hepworth quoted by Graham and Marvin, 1996, p. 126), On the other hand, it could boost small-size cities economic activity thanks to information highways. It also favours decentralisation of mass production processes towards industrial suburbs and development of teleworking and services into remote areas. Authors have forged the terms'glocalisation'. the new geographies are, in fact, about the renaissance of locality and region ' (Morley and Robins, 1995, p. 115). Actually, it seems that 'global-local nexus' —conjointly with the 'time-space compression' phenomenon— is about reinterpreting traditional notions of localism, nationalism and globalism. The question is not to know whether globalisation or localisation will emerge but rather to foresee how global and local will be articulated. ' Globalisation, Morley and Robins write, is, in fact, also associated with new dynamics of re-localisation. It is about the achievement of a new global-local nexus, about new and intricate relations between global space and local space. Globalisation is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle: it is a matter of inserting a multiplicity of localities into the overall picture of a new global system ' (Morley and Robins, 1995, p. 116). In the same line of thought, Graham and Marvin (1996) add that ' the key relationship between cities and telecommunications is therefore a global-local one in which a city is integrated silently and invisibly into the new global electronic networks through which the many different regions and areas of the global economy are tied together to support profitable entreprise ' (pp. 97-98).
Conclusion: Utopian and dystopian discourses on digital cities
To summarise, utopian authors (Goldmark, Negroponte, Naisbitt and Aburdene, Pascal, Eubanks, Maisonrouge, Santucci, all quoted in Graham, 1996; Mitchell, 1995), or 'techno-optimists' (Gilder, Gates, Myrhvold et al, Toffler, quoted in Kunzmann, Brödner and Rücker, 1998) think that this electronic medium will provide the possibility to overcome many of the contemporary problems of the cities (violence, individualisation, insecurity, anonymity, ...) and of the society in general (loss of faith in democracy, of truth in the institutions, ...). Digital cities will contribute to the improvement of the real life democracy, they will create new electronic place for discussion and interactivity, close to the former Greek concept of Agora. For Graham (1996), these visions 'often tend to radically oversimplify the relations between cities and telecommunications' (p. 2). For Kunzmann, Brödner and Rücker (1998), 'in general, these visions are technological dreams and present a futuristic and fictional world, influenced by technological determinism' (p. 3). This is the paradigm of 'all that is technologically possible will happen' (Kunzmann, Brödner and Rücker, p. 3) or the 'anything-anytime-anywhere' dream (Graham and Marvin, 1996, p. 88).
The dystopian discourses, close to social determinism, focus on the 'collapse of the public sphere of the postmodern city' (Graham, 1996, p. 12) by stressing the increased risk of electronic ghetto due to the development of inforichs and infopoors (Davis quoted in Graham, 1996). They also emphasised that our contemporary society is marked by an increasing fear of 'the other' and that consequently telecommunications, especially in digital cities projects, will create social connection but together with a disconnection in the real urban world (Schroeder quoted by Graham, 1996). Linked to this argument, some authors like Calhoun or Castells, also quoted by Graham (1996) underline the decreasing possibilities of meeting with others, of losing contacts 'across lines of class, race and culture' (Calhoun).
The more realizations are happening at the local level, at the level of local administrations and that the democratic potential or the possibility of bringing citizens and administrations or politicians nearer from each other it could be easier to set up in such a local context. Local developments could provide us with interesting elements regarding the introduction of multimedia in the public sector in general. Digital cities were then seen as laboratories of the integration of multimedia technology within the public place.
Digital cities, at the beginning, strictly defined as web sites that give access to city’s administrations. These local developments could provide us with interesting elements regarding the introduction of multimedia in the public sector in general. Digital cities were then seen as laboratories of the integration of multimedia technology within the public place. This feeling was confirmed by Michel Hervé (1997).
For Emmanuel Eveno (1997), the importance of communication within cities is linked to the definition of the city itself. Cities are places where people gather and communicate.
All these arguments confirm our initial choices of digital cities as a relevant place to observe changes induced by the development of multimedia applications. Regarding the democratic potential of these local developments that has been announced in numerous discourses, it seems that, even if the link between city and democracy is quite clear (Eveno, 1997).
Definition of digital cities and proposition of a typology
The term 'digital city' has several meanings, sometimes very different. There is actually no common definition of that concept and authors seldom adopt a strictly identical sense. 'Digital city' is used to qualify the rapid growth of information and communication technologies that is currently transforming advanced industrial cities as well as to designate on-line services —mostly services available through the World Wide Web— managed by municipal government, businesses, citizens or users and which either present local content or use the urban metaphor to facilitate users understanding.
In the reviewing of the literature, we observe that some authors do not approach the problem of this lack of common definition and do not specify what they really mean by the notion of digital city. In addition, we note a great diversity of terms used to indicate sometimes very similar experiences: Digital City, Virtual City, Wired City, City of Bits, Web-City, Webbed City, Electronic Town, Digital Town, ... On the other hand, some may use the same term in two opposite senses. Therefore, it is very difficult to elaborate an accurate definition of the digital city and, consequently, to constitute a rigorous basis of comparison.
Dutton, Blumler and Kraemer (1987a) underscore this issue when they distinguish two main meanings for the 'wired city' concept: ' The term ‘’wired city’’ is used in two different ways. At a conceptual level, it refers to a normative forecast of the future of communications —a prescriptive statement about how communications technology should be institutionalized and used. In this context, the wired city has been broadly defined as a community in which all kinds of electronic communication services are available to households and businesses. (...) At a concrete level, the wired city concept refers to experiments and projects involving the use of advanced information and communications technologies for the provision of services to households and businesses. Defined broadly, nearly any new development in computing and telecommunications might be called a wired city project if used to provide services to business and households of a community.
Defined narrowly, wired city projects refer to new developments in cable and telecommunications that affect the public communications systems of a community '.
According to this somewhat outdated definition —it was actually elaborated in the mid-eighties and originally applied to the rapid growth of cable television during the seventies—, the 'wired city' concept appears as an extremely wide notion which could include a service provided to the public —as, for instance, a city council’s website— as well as a much wider urban planning project aimed at integrating new information and communication technologies in the city, well as a much wider urban planning project aimed at integrating new information and communication technologies in the city.
On the one hand, we list those who consider the digital city as an online interactive physical space of one city.
Among them, Graham and Aurigi (1997) mention ' an emerging range of new, Internet-based, local initiatives known as ‘’virtual cities’’ ' developed ' to widen local participation in telematics and to engineer the emergence of new ‘’electronic public spaces’’, which, at the local level, will complement or replace the undermined physical public space of cities. '
On the other hand, there are those who use this expression to designate the wide urban restructuring process lead by current developments in telecommunications that have important implications for both physical form and social and economic life of contemporary cities.
To sum up, it seems that the concept of digital or virtual cities –or whatever the exact name it takes– concerns two main types of situation:
a project of developing a telecom infrastructure in a city, which is close to the wired cities concept of the 70’s
a set of services mainly available on the Web site and that are more or less linked with the concept of city.
Web site refers to the real city (grounded digital city) but this is not necessarily the case as observed (non-grounded digital city).
A possible typology of digital cities
Actors of the public sphere
The actors of the public sphere are the public administration, the citizens, the associations and the voluntary bodies, the commercial or private companies, and consultants, research centres or universities. All these actors may intervene in the management of the public sphere and according to the different cases; their importance in the sphere is different. Beamish also proposes a kind of typology, but of community networks more than strictly on digital cities. In her typology, she includes the actors of these networks as well as their main resources or the resources that they bring into the technical artefact: hardware, software, infrastructure, access possibilities, content, ... .
Grounded/non-grounded
The concept of grounded/non-grounded is the same as the one used by Graham and Aurigi (1997) where non-grounded refers to Web sites - the authors seem to exclude other technologies - which ‘use the familiar interface of a ‘‘city’’ as a metaphor to group together wide ranges of Internet services located across the world’ .Grounded cities on the contrary ‘relate coherently to the development of specific cities (...) and concentrate on integrating Web content located within the physical space of one city'. Non-grounded cities seem to be very close to virtual communities as they group together people who share the same interests but are not necessarily based in the same area. Some cities may be grounded as well as non-grounded, i.e. using the metaphor of the digital city to attract people and propose different kind of services to people who do not originate from the real city but be initiated by local authorities and also provide local content. The situation is then not necessarily binary.
Openness and closing
The ‘openness’ or closing of the city refers to the ‘nature’ of the inhabitants and to the frontiers of the city. The question here is who can live in the virtual city. Is it open only to the inhabitants of the city or can other people from other places be considered as inhabitant? What defined the status of inhabitant and the one of visitor?
Access
The notion of access refers to the fact that people have to pay or not to access to the services offered or the information provided in the digital city. It also concerns the types of accesses and access places available in the real city.
Content/Services
The content of the digital cities is another element of the typology. At that level, we may consider three main types of services: information - communication - transaction. Information refers to the research of information in database (relation many-to-one) for example or simply through navigating on the Web site with or without using search engines. In this category, the user is relatively passive. The transaction category consists of functions for which the user is handling some tasks himself and sometimes must pay for them: ordering a ticket, tax forms, application for day care. Communication includes communication through e-mails (relation one-to-one) or forums (relation many-to-many).
Dominant metaphor
In some of the digital cities, the metaphor of the city is clearly used. Sometimes other related metaphors like quarters, streets and so on are also used.
Target public
In her typology on community networks, Beamish includes the target group of these
networks: individual, school, youth, specific groups like homeless, elderly, women,
... This characteristic could also be used here. The target public on the digital cities can be: the inhabitants of a specific city, the members of a community, the tourists or visitors of a city, the local SMEs, the community groups or non profit making associations, people gathered by a common interest, …
History of the development of digital cities
According to Marie d'Udekem-Gevers (1998), the concept of digital cities comes from the United States, from political visions developed there and from local spontaneous initiatives. Digital cities found their history in two main types of initiatives because they embedded two ideas: the Community and the City.
Community refers to the relations and social links between people that share the same interests or values and City refers to administrative relations, to the links between citizens, policy-makers and the local administration.
Within the Community perspective, digital cities are very close to the free-nets and on-line communities that first developed in the United States in the 70’s. But the idea of using the technology to bring together communities is not new and already emerged in the 60s and 70s with the emergence of local radios and TVs.
In some cases, virtual communities and digital cities may be seen as an extension of the local community radio, television and newspaper concept (Simon, 1995). The initial idea of this move was to use new media to provide local content, often made by citizens themselves, to encourage user participation (Pailliart, 1993), to (re) create asocial link and allow the set up of communities (Pailliart), and to offer a place forfree expression.free-nets and on-line communities may be seen as theextension of this 'free' move initiated by free radios and community TV. This is these network communities that usually originated from members of grass-roots movements in numerous towns in the USA and in Canada (Pierson, 1999) allow 'interaction and communication between
citizens' (Casalegno and Kavanaugh, 1998, p. 70).
US Initiatives: Wired cities and electronic service delivery projects
Apart from the existence of free-nets and on-line communities, the 60’s idea of digital cities came from the USA (d'Udekem-Gevers, 1998) where the concept and the metaphor of 'wired cities' emerged (Dutton and alii, 1987a). At that time already, ICT were used in discourses as an answer to urban problems, especially to social problems. These discourses and the subsequent programmes lead by Lyndon Johnson (Dutton and alii, 1987a) were based on different infrastructures: telephone, cable, institutional and community-owned networks which would allow telecommunications applications that 'might improve city living and stimulate variable patterns of regional development' (Dutton, Blumler, Kraemer, 1987a, p. 5).The dominant infrastructure at that time was the coaxial cable. At the end of the 80’s, there was a shift towards 'more integrated communication facilities' (1987a, p. 7) with advanced satellite, microelectronic and fibre-optic technologies. Nowadays, the rapid emergence and diffusion of Internet and the Web technology has played a major accelerator role in the phenomenon of wired/digital cities.
In the late 80's and early in the 90's, many American local governments took initiatives to improve the delivery of political participation, to provide access to a common computer database and offer e-mail facilities via terminals in public places. These were the continuation of the 'public information utility' promoted in the 60's (Graham & Marvin, 1996). Internet 'generated renewed enthusiasm for electronic democracy' (Docter and Dutton, p. 126).
The European context: The' market' of digital cities
In Europe mainly, the digital cities concept came back at the front of the scene following the discourses and projects on the Information Society. The Delors White Paper introduced the idea and the following Bangemann report proposed teleworking (application 1), distance learning (application 2), a network for universities and research centres (application 3), telematic services for SMEs (application 4), road traffic management (application 5), air traffic control (application 6), healthcare networks (application 7) and electronic tendering (application 8), the transeuropean public administrations network (application 9) and mainly the city information highways
(application 10).
Besides their own objectives, the 10 Bangemann initiatives had to follow somegeneral objectives like ‘strengthening industrial competitiveness and promoting thecreation of new jobs, promoting new forms of work organisation, improving quality of life and quality of the environment, responding to social needs and raising the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of public services’ (Bangemann, 1994, p. 24). As the other applications, cities and administrations were mainly seen as potential markets.
The idea was to connect public administrations and to improve their efficacy and to connect households to multimedia applications and entertainment services. The Bangemann report stated vigorously that 'the information society has the power to improve the quality of life of the European citizens, increase the efficiency of our economic and social organisation and reinforce its cohesion' (p. 6). Cities were said to play an important role in the awareness process of the citizens and local administrations were said to have an important leverage effect by becoming mass users of the technology. But these initiatives, according to the Bangemann report, were to be launched as real commercial initiatives.
At the beginning, the EU adopts a technology push approach. Projects involving cities were included in technical research programme: integrated broadband communications, road transport, informatics, and construction of telecom infrastructure in lagging regions. In 1996, Graham and Marvin note that some projects allow more balanced 'technology push' and 'demand pull' approaches bringing together technology with representative of users and city policy-makers("telematics sites").The European Digital Cities (EDC) project aims at 'providing an open cooperation network for concerted urban development through Telematics' and ... 'covers networking activities by cities, towns and regions with a view to laying the foundations of the Global Information Society as outlined by the G7 world conference of Feb. '95.
Apart from these networked projects, there exist a lot of other initiatives from the European Commission at the level of digital cities, on-line administrations, etc., mainly within the Telematics Applications Programme, that covered different domains: Administrations, Transport, Research, Education & Training, Libraries, Urban & Rural Areas, Health Care, Disabled and Elderly People, Environment, Telematics Engineering, Language Engineering, Information Engineering, Support Actions and Integrated Applications for Digital Sites.
Virtual Cities
Our contemporary cities are faced with the loss of real public spaces due to increasing problems of violence, insecurity, pollution, which also constitute specific problems by themselves. Digital cities may then be considered as an attempt to build new secured (electronic) public spaces and regain some characteristics of the cities, i.e., places of communication, interactions, offering a lot of economic, social and cultural opportunities (Graham and Aurigi, 1997).
Moreover, cities are increasingly competing with each other on a commercial level in order to attract investment and tourists and 'cannot afford then, not to promote themselves'. Cities have adopted marketing strategies. They present themselves as 'products' in the global image space; they participate to an 'electronic urban imagery'
The tie between physical urban space and virtual city
There are indeed many interaction points between real and electronic urban spaces. First, Alain d’Iribarne (1997) demonstrates that politics, social and cultural structures of the society heavily influence the foundation and the management of a digital town.
Secondly, the physical and economical growth of the city depends on whether a modern and well-developed telecommunication infrastructure exists or not. In addition to older communication structures —as roads, highways, railways...—, new information and communication technologies allow certain economic activities to move towards industrial suburbs (Atkinson, 1997).
Another admitted evolution about physical urban space and digital cities is the deepening integration of one into the other. As business centres become telecommunication nodes, electronic public spaces are increasing and buildings turn into network interfaces equipped with electronic sensors and sophisticated telecommunications capabilities, the interaction between digital towns and physical cities is stronger and stronger.
The time-space compression
The fast development of new information and communication technologies over the last years is currently overcoming, or at least reducing, time and space barriers. Morley and Robins (1995) or Graham and Marvin (1996) use to name this phenomenon 'time-space compression'. As a result of this, we note a complete reshaping of traditional economic and geographic basis and, broadly speaking, a total restructuring of traditional landmarks.
A major outcome for our everyday life could be the blurring of the boundaries between, on the one hand, workplaces and working hours and, on the other hand, entertainment or family life places and free-time. Homes will therefore tend to become the place for 'multiplexed activities', i.e., that ' we will find ourselves able to switch rapidly from one activity to the other while remaining in the same place '(Mitchell, 1995, p. 101).
Consequently, ' 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 '. The growing role of home in tomorrow’s ' information society ' seems to inspire utopian perspectives. As Graham and Marvin (1996) point out. The 'time-space compression' phenomenon could hence lead to the revival of citizen's involvement in social and cultural urban life as well as to an excessive withdrawal. As information and communication technologies spread, 'telepresence' will be more and more substituted for 'face-to-face contact'.
The glocalisation phenomenon
Concurrently to the 'time-space compression' phenomenon, another shift —a double process seemingly inconsistent— can be observed as information and communication technologies grow. On the one hand, the overcoming of space barriers leads to the globalisation of economic, social and cultural flows and to the emergence of world-wide business centres as ' information cities ' (Hepworth quoted by Graham and Marvin, 1996, p. 126), On the other hand, it could boost small-size cities economic activity thanks to information highways. It also favours decentralisation of mass production processes towards industrial suburbs and development of teleworking and services into remote areas. Authors have forged the terms'glocalisation'. the new geographies are, in fact, about the renaissance of locality and region ' (Morley and Robins, 1995, p. 115). Actually, it seems that 'global-local nexus' —conjointly with the 'time-space compression' phenomenon— is about reinterpreting traditional notions of localism, nationalism and globalism. The question is not to know whether globalisation or localisation will emerge but rather to foresee how global and local will be articulated. ' Globalisation, Morley and Robins write, is, in fact, also associated with new dynamics of re-localisation. It is about the achievement of a new global-local nexus, about new and intricate relations between global space and local space. Globalisation is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle: it is a matter of inserting a multiplicity of localities into the overall picture of a new global system ' (Morley and Robins, 1995, p. 116). In the same line of thought, Graham and Marvin (1996) add that ' the key relationship between cities and telecommunications is therefore a global-local one in which a city is integrated silently and invisibly into the new global electronic networks through which the many different regions and areas of the global economy are tied together to support profitable entreprise ' (pp. 97-98).
Conclusion: Utopian and dystopian discourses on digital cities
To summarise, utopian authors (Goldmark, Negroponte, Naisbitt and Aburdene, Pascal, Eubanks, Maisonrouge, Santucci, all quoted in Graham, 1996; Mitchell, 1995), or 'techno-optimists' (Gilder, Gates, Myrhvold et al, Toffler, quoted in Kunzmann, Brödner and Rücker, 1998) think that this electronic medium will provide the possibility to overcome many of the contemporary problems of the cities (violence, individualisation, insecurity, anonymity, ...) and of the society in general (loss of faith in democracy, of truth in the institutions, ...). Digital cities will contribute to the improvement of the real life democracy, they will create new electronic place for discussion and interactivity, close to the former Greek concept of Agora. For Graham (1996), these visions 'often tend to radically oversimplify the relations between cities and telecommunications' (p. 2). For Kunzmann, Brödner and Rücker (1998), 'in general, these visions are technological dreams and present a futuristic and fictional world, influenced by technological determinism' (p. 3). This is the paradigm of 'all that is technologically possible will happen' (Kunzmann, Brödner and Rücker, p. 3) or the 'anything-anytime-anywhere' dream (Graham and Marvin, 1996, p. 88).
The dystopian discourses, close to social determinism, focus on the 'collapse of the public sphere of the postmodern city' (Graham, 1996, p. 12) by stressing the increased risk of electronic ghetto due to the development of inforichs and infopoors (Davis quoted in Graham, 1996). They also emphasised that our contemporary society is marked by an increasing fear of 'the other' and that consequently telecommunications, especially in digital cities projects, will create social connection but together with a disconnection in the real urban world (Schroeder quoted by Graham, 1996). Linked to this argument, some authors like Calhoun or Castells, also quoted by Graham (1996) underline the decreasing possibilities of meeting with others, of losing contacts 'across lines of class, race and culture' (Calhoun).
Sunday, June 24, 2007
How Would Someone with Systemic Approach Choose His Thesis?
Well,
I don't know.... Maybe he just sits for a while & decides on his options. Maybe he just makes one for his own...
Maybe he tries to connect the islands which seems to be so far from each other... maybe he just makes a boat & sail through them all....
But whatever he does... he knows that he is the sole person who have the responsibility... cuz no one else is seeing the connection. Noone else can figure out the relation....
So Hail Young Sailor... May thou join the tribes of men in honor & in health!
I don't know.... Maybe he just sits for a while & decides on his options. Maybe he just makes one for his own...
Maybe he tries to connect the islands which seems to be so far from each other... maybe he just makes a boat & sail through them all....
But whatever he does... he knows that he is the sole person who have the responsibility... cuz no one else is seeing the connection. Noone else can figure out the relation....
So Hail Young Sailor... May thou join the tribes of men in honor & in health!
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Ehsan & EarthQuake
Dear All*,
Yesterday afternoon as most of you may know, occurred an earthquake of 5.9 in
What has earthquake got to do with Systemic Approach? Hmm, good question… on the surface, nothing…. The motive behind writing this is about the co-incident of Mister Ehsan's presentation on 'Tehran Earthquake' & the occurrence of it. However, on a deeper level, it is bound to the systemic approach:
As I mentioned before, Mister Ehsan has done a research on Tehran Earthquake. He had kindly provided me the file of presentation which I will upload to 4shared sometime soon & we had a brief chat over it. In the suggestion boxes he had offered a few nice tips I would like to share here:
l
l Most important and vital information should not only be at
l
l No nuclear activity should be near
While the first suggestion is somewhat the most critical one, my personal idea tends to put more force on the third issue. That's the easiest, most accessible one & honestly, if we don't care about ourselves, no one else does! & that, right there, leads us to the discussion of individualism culture in
To the next topic,
Lou. Sh.
*(Well, I like the phrase Mr. Gharib uses! What can I say? I'm a pathetic loser! :D )
From Ehsan's 360
Why Systemic Approach?
Where do you live? No… no, I am not looking for a specific answer. You could be living in a small town, a big city or whatever…. But, how do you mention the place you live in?
Tehran, Iran, Middle East, Asia, Earth, Solar System, Milky-way galaxy, Cosmo-universe… We are all part of a bigger being. It does not matter how we mention it but we define ourselves in the surrounding of other rings of the chain. & there is with no exception a function in the surroundings… that's how we divide them… that's how we define the 'SYSTEM'!
And as we are all part of this greater system, we have no choice but to analyze our surrounding as a whole. The details, the fractions, the portions must be in seen in relevance to each other… they must form the big picture. & the whole is more than the fractions together… it has an identity of its own. No element can be discussed devoid of its environment… because, it's the context that gives character to an element
Saturday, June 16, 2007
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