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’s (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 Virillio 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 Virillio 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.

Secondly, 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:

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

II 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.

III 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.

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

V 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.