Making the Digital City

The Early Shaping of Urban Internet Space

Alessandro Aurigi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351920629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Since the late 1990s, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been hailed as a potentially revolutionary feature of the planning and management of Western cities. Economic regeneration and place promotion strategies have exploited these new technologies; city management has experimented with electronically distributed services, and participation in public life and democratic decision-making processes can be made more flexible by the use of ICTs. All of these technological initiatives have often been presented and accessed via an urban front-end information site known as 'digital city' or 'city network.' Illustrated by a range of European case studies, this volume examines the social, political and management issues and potential problems in the establishment of an electronic layer of information and services in cities. The book provides a better understanding of the direction European cities are going towards in the implementation of ICTs in the urban arena.

PART I
THE CONTEXT:
PUBLIC SPACE AND CYBERSPACE

Chapter 1

Introduction

Introduction

This book is a critical history of the emergence of ‘civic’ Internet information systems in Europe, their role as innovative regeneration ‘tools’, and above all how they have been socially constructed. This history starts from the mid of the 1990s.

The 1990s, and in particular their second half, were characterised by a surge in technological advances in Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs). Among these were increasing data transmission speeds, rapid evolution of microprocessors and their computing power, and possibly above all the emergence of the World Wide Web, an accessible way of distributing and utilising multimedia information over the Internet. It soon appeared to the IT industry as well as a range of commentators that the web definitely had the potential of popularising the Internet, making its focus and mission shift from that of a mainly academic international networking system, to a multi-purpose – and nearly all-purpose – global information grid.

This is exactly what started happening, as the number of Internet hosts – the computers permanently connected to it – started growing exponentially, together with the amount of information available on the new web platform.

Such a phenomenon was rather obviously bound to be seen as a ‘revolution’ of analogous importance to other previous milestones in human social history. Books started appearing arguing that, after the industrial revolution, humankind was facing an information revolution of vast proportions and significance, from business related texts such as Frances Cairncross’ The Death of Distance (1998), to writings in Architecture History such as Charles Jencks’ What is Post-Modernism? (1986 and revised in 1996), with its section on the ‘Post-Modern Information World’. The conviction that society had to be interpreted as post-fordist, postmodern, information and knowledge-based, was being reinforced more than ever.

Society was seen by many commentators to be changing fast and radically, partly because of the heavy impacts of the ‘layer’ of electronic information and its potential for ‘virtualising’ functions that before would have been affected and shaped by the traditional limitations of physical distance, as well as time.

Hype was dominant, as the enthusiasm for the potentially beneficial impacts of new technologies on all aspects of society was contagious and hi-tech and telecommunications companies were for obvious reasons proactively encouraging this attitude.

Visions of a future technological ‘heaven’ were juxtaposed to fears of a dystopian perspective on a socially polarised society, more unjust than ever, heavily controlled and commodified.

Cities would have a central position in this wider debate, as ICTs were seen as revolutionising both spatial and socio-economic relationships, the main ingredients of urban environments. Again, even here, hype and speculation were prevailing, and even scholars and authoritative commentators were easily being carried away with making either enthusiastic or catastrophic predictions about urban futures where high technology was dominant.

Within this climate, newspapers and the media in general had started using terms like ‘cybercity’ or ‘virtual city’ to identify all sorts of – often very diverse – early experiments and ideas involving ICTs and cities. Martin Jacques from The Guardian newspaper visited Kuala Lumpur in 1997 and argued ‘Modern planning is not just about roads and estates. It’s about an “intelligent network” linking our offices and homes’ (Jacques, 1997).

In the same year, The Independent was reporting on a forthcoming experiment – sponsored by the two IT giants Gateway and Microsoft – to be held in a secret street in Islington, London, where the whole neighbourhood was going to be wired and provided with computers and software to communicate, becoming an ‘Internet Street’ (Arthur, 1997).

In their timely book Telecommunications and the City, Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin highlighted the many different metaphors – and in a way buzzwords – used by scholars and commentators to describe the increasingly telecommunications-based urban space of western cities (Graham and Marvin, 1996, p.72).

However, a concrete possibility of using the Internet to help regenerating urban environments seemed to exist. Several early and strongly symbolic examples, often referred to as ‘digital cities’, ‘virtual cities’, or ‘civic networks’ were opening the way of what seemed to be a new ‘movement’ involving the implementation of civic cyberspace to benefit the physical city and its socio-economic environment.

These new urban projects could be seen as potentially beneficial towards economic development and regeneration, by providing innovative tools for place marketing on the one hand, and an environment facilitating the growth of a better informed, up-to-date and clued up workforce on the other. Other benefits could be envisaged within the complex field of city management, as the Internet could help delivering services – old and new – supporting transactions, conveying information to the population. Another extremely important area was the support of participation and public discourse, which would enhance the public sphere of fragmented Western cities and boost democratic processes.

Urban cyberspace could then be seen as a crucial piece of technological innovation which could be able to deliver benefits in all those areas, and in a way become a sort of parallel, even enhanced public space of Western cities, complementing and revitalising the physical public space, seen by many as a feature in deep crisis.

In the 1990s urban Internet was a novelty, and it attracted considerable amounts of funding from the European Community, making possible the development of some apparently very complex projects. Current, successful paradigms seemed to point towards a model of ‘holistic’ intervention, involving efforts of creating general, all-encompassing web sites which would present themselves as informational ‘mirrors’ of their host cities, and would therefore tend to address a variety of urban regeneration issues and problems, under the same ‘digital city’ label.

Within this scenario, the ‘digital city’ concept – though still used sometimes to label virtually any kind of urban-related IT project – was quickly associated mainly with a specific type of initiative: web-based urban information systems and virtual communities. This was probably partly due to the success of the most famous ‘digital city’ paradigm in the whole of Europe: the Amsterdam-based DDS, De Digitale Stad.

In a short amount of time many other ‘digital cities’ – or ‘civic networks’ as some would call them – were born all over Europe, constituting a potentially very interesting phenomenon of innovation in city management, economic regeneration, and community building. They could be seen as an attempt to establish a parallel public space – a cyberspace – in Western, fragmented urban societies. But these initiatives were very scarcely known or analysed, and their scope, characteristics, impacts, motivations, were generally taken for granted within the hype-ridden climate of the 1990s.

Little empirical research was accompanying these developments, and a clear need was felt to gain more precise knowledge of the phenomenon, an awareness which could go well beyond the hype present in the media and boosted by the interests of the numerous growing new technology businesses and firms.

The ‘digital city’ was here, but what was it really? What types of initiatives could be identified, and how was urban cyberspace being shaped? Objectives of a research on this topic had to be gaining an understanding of the scope and quality of the phenomenon, at the wider European scale, but also exploring the ways some ‘best practice’ examples were actually being constructed and managed. Were digital cities really ‘holistic’ or were they focused on some precise purpose? What actual potential for regeneration did these projects have, and were they being shaped to realise that potential? What was the vision behind some of them, and was it really compatible with the ‘new public space’ vocation that most commentators would assign to digital cities?

This book is based on empirical research done to explore the early stages – which tend to be also the most crucial ones – of development of web-based urban information systems – or digital cities – in Europe. These projects started appearing in the mid 1990s and provoked quickly a series of press reports and – in general – a great deal of hype on their potential. However, the most resilient – and possibly inspired – of them have in different ways survived the turn of the century, and have become an accepted, innovative aspect of urban life in their own cities. So, the book looks at the development of digital cities in the European Union at different stages of their ongoing evolution, embracing events happened between 1996 and 2004.

The narrative starts from an attempt at defining the phenomenon as a whole and recognising a series of major issues. It then concentrates on creating an early typology of digital cities, and then moves to the analysis of two exemplar case studies. As one of these projects has become an award-winning paradigm of a successful and complex ‘digital city’, its history has been updated to 2004. It is a story of civic web sites, and their configuration. It is an analysis of their features and contents, as well as a reflection on the processes and actors that were and are shaping them, and what this could mean for the realisation of their alleged beneficial impact on the planning of Western cities.

What the book is about

The main focus of this book is to gain an insight on the phenomenon of digital cities. The research it is based on has had to deal with a variety of ways employed by civic institutions – both public and private – to try and exploit the World Wide Web of the Internet to benefit specific aspects of urban regeneration, as well as providing ‘platforms’ where the growing virtual fragments belonging to cities could be organised, presented, and given sense.

On the one hand this has involved exploring uncharted territory, something about which very little had been written or documented properly. This has meant searching for basic knowledge and awareness on the topic, stemming from literature that was dealing with the wider issues of ICT and society, in order to produce an early – but strongly needed – theoretical framework for the interpretation of the phenomenon. What really were digital cities? Could they be considered, as the hype from the press seemed to take for granted, as an identifiable new trend of urban development? How many of these virtual sites could be found in Europe, and what were their characteristics? What were digital cities offering to the inhabitants of their physical counterparts? To what extent were crucial issues of inclusiveness and social polarisation in the access and use of technology considered and addressed by these initiatives?

On the other hand, as will be clarified in the first two chapters, concentrating on the immediately observable contents of some initiatives, however indispensable and desirable, has not been perceived as a complete enough method of studying the phenomenon. If nothing else, as technological development based on the Internet seemed destined to keep changing very quickly, some ‘deep’, qualitative approach to studying this topic, going beyond the contents in order to observe some of the underlying social factors affecting digital city design and management, seemed like a very useful and enriching approach.

Valuable and stimulating input from the sociology of technology, and its theories on the social shaping of technology, have added a very valuable dimension to this book.

How the book is organised

This book is organised in sections, which correspond to the phases of the investigative journey it outlines.

Chapters 2 and 3 deal with issues on cities, the urban public sphere, and recent technological developments in the domain of Information and Communication Technologies. Between the mid 1990s and the early 2000s, not much has been written on the specific topic of digital cities and urban planning. So, it has been quite natural to consider a wider perspective, and engage in wider literature about cities, telecommunications and the urban public sphere, in order to get suggestions and inspiration.

The fourth chapter deals with the initial exploration of the phenomenon, and provides results and answers relative to the need to identify the scope of the digital city ‘movement’ and how such initiatives could be categorised and analysed from the point of view of their contents, throughout the European Union. This is achieved through a survey-based approach, centred on the observation of many ‘web cities’ and their contents.

Chapters 5 and 6 describe the qualitative investigations of two exemplar, leading edge, digital cities. These are linked to and extend from the survey presented in chapter 3, which provides for the choice, from a spectrum of over 200 possible cases, some examples that are – or have been – likely to be considered as ‘best practice’ ones. The Bologna digital city in Italy – named ‘Iperbole’ and the Bristol one both complied with the survey’s criteria for advanced examples, and scored high within it.

Chapter 7 provides a comparison of the two examples, extrapolating common trends and differences, and identifying a series of main issues, problems, and possible solutions that are related to the processes underlying the shaping of urban high technology initiatives, and can inform similar projects.

Chapter 8 wraps everything up into a series of conclusive remarks, highlighting some important changes in the way advanced telecommunication and Internet technologies are perceived, that are happening after the turn of the millennium. These changes confirm, on the one hand, the relevance and timeliness of works such as the investigations presented in this book, and on the other hand suggest the need for further, more refined research on the topic of urban telematics.

Chapter 2

Cyberspace and the City’s Public Sphere

Introduction

Speaking about the ‘city’ is getting harder a ities have reached levels of extreme complexity, but because the notion of ‘city’ itself is facing a crisis never encountered before. Can a complex network of streets, buildings and green areas, of slums and glamorous commercial zones be considered a city just because it hosts a large number of people? This question has engaged an extremely large number of architects, planners and sociologists in trying to figure out how contemporary urban space is evolving, and how the instruments and the practice to deal with it should evolve as well. A common feeling of inadequacy has in fact become the base of a wide debate about the present and the future of cities, and many are questioning the efficiency of the existing approaches used to plan, design and manage a town:

Having taken on board the theme of the crisis of planning, whether this is true or supposed, we have seen as useful, or even necessary, to verify whether the traditional planning instruments are still able to fulfil the needs of cities that are seeking their lost identity or looking for a brand new one (Lo Piccolo, 1995, p.19) [translation by author].

The next few pages review some of the crucial issues that relate to this crisis of identity of cities and uncertainty about the adequacy of planning. The main issues of fragmentation of space, society and political agency are examined together with their consequences on urban scenarios. Several tensions characterising contemporary urban life, and the way we analyse it, are highlighted. Among these, the tension existing between the ‘global’ aspects of contemporary society and economy, and the need for protecting local interests, cultures and communities, plays an important role, as do the gradual ‘commodification’ – the reduction to a commodity – of places often carried out by the ‘global’ agents and the consequent crisis of urban public space. The overall scenario in which these tensions have to be framed is a situation of conflict and transition between the centralised urban control, promoted by a declining modernist planning, and the fragmented postmodernist vision of the contemporary city.

For a few years, advocates of the social, public potential of computer networking, have argued that the application of new telecommunication technologies, and in particular the electronic ‘space’ better known as cyberspace, could play an important role in the restructuring and revitalisation of urban space, or at least of the public sphere. In the second part of this chapter, several different point...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• PART I: THE CONTEXT: PUBLIC SPACE AND CYBERSPACE
• PART II: THE EARLY STEPS OF THE DIGITAL CITY
• PART III: ISSUES, DILEMMAS AND THE FUTURE
• Bibliography
• Index