e-topia
by William J. Mitchell
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Book Summary Information
Author: William J. MitchellEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1999-09-17
ISBN: 0262133555
Number of pages: 192
Publisher: The MIT Press
Book Reviews of e-topia
Book Review: Dazzling Digital Urban Vision!
Summary: 5 Stars
Changes and advancements are already at our front door: in political philosophy, technology, communications, infrastructure as well as shifts in attitudes and behavior of people. It all will affect regions, cities and communities, and basically alter the requisites for future planning and the role of professionals. Today we are faced with two complex processes: urbanization and globalization. This is closely followed by the development of increasingly sophisticated information technologies and radical transformations of other network-complex infrastructure systems such as telecommunications, transport, energy, etc. What seems to set itself as one of the most interesting challenges today is the complex interaction between infrastructure networks, new information technologies and emerging new architectural and urban patterns and forms.
In "e-topia", William J. Mitchell, dean of School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of the well-known work City of Bits, gives us an insightful view about tomorrow cities and the way we may live in them. Given his dual background in Architecture and Information Technology field, Mitchell offers a very vivid-balanced and at times thought provoking view on how information (digital) technology will shape our regions, cities, communities, neighborhoods and homes in the (near) future. Mitchell's main emphasis is on how the new technologies will shape and alter the urban form.
"E-topia" consists of 10 chapters, which can be read as a whole and as separate entities. This gives an additional quality to this work, apart from the pristine language and clarity of discussion, which can appeal to wider non-technical and non-architectural audience. The concise, compact written, well-structured and well-referenced 10 chapters span a whole range of topics, starting from more "hardware" issues to those of more "software" character. The detailed discussion takes us through the digital technology revolution of the moment, its different use, application and possibilities. One can feel a strong MIT research & development presence here. It can be argued that the discussion of significant research in the digital technologies could have taken a broader outlook, but on the other hand MIT is one of the global centers of R&D, teaching and learning in this sector. Aside from Mitchell's City of Bits, books by MIT's Professors Nicholas Negroponte (Director of MIT Media Laboratory) Being Digital and Michael Dertouzos (Director of Laboratory for Computer Sciences) What will be and Bill Gates's The Road Ahead, give a state of the art on the technological underpinnings of the digital revolution. Elegantly balancing between natural and social sciences, Mitchell continues the discussion through a sort of global/region/city sphere, focusing especially on community, neighborhood and home level. The influence of IT on workplaces, social places, commercial marketing and exchange of information places are also covered. The story is a continuous one shifting slightly from topic to topic, but always having a sort of hierarchical, historical, and contextual thread. The discussion always ends up, between the lines, on how the city for the 21st century will (probably) look like, in respect to the symbiosis with the digital technologies. It has to do with the question of how `smart-technologically flavored' places, buildings, and artifacts will change and shape our relationships with other people and objects.
Mitchell argues for the extension of definitions of architecture and urban design (form) to incorporate `virtual reality' as well as physical one and at the same time to be interwoven with telecommunication and transport infrastructure of the future. The analysis of the relation between telecommunications and all aspects of city development and management is provided more in detail by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin's book on Telecommunication and the City. Their upcoming book Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition will probably shed even more light on these issues. For Mitchell the global digital network is much more than just e-mail, internet (world wide web) and digital TV. It is a completely new urban infrastructure, - one that will not efface or demolish the urban form as we know it but rather, `change it or complement it' in a positive way so that it will become an inseparable part of our cities, communities, neighborhoods, homes - our everyday lives. He simply points out that in the coming decades, the digital revolution is an unavoidable factor in shaping of the urban form. And above all, although at times the ideas might seem far-fetched and hard to believe, Mitchell does not just point to this new future but also shows us how to get there. He proposes strategies for the `creation of cities that not only will be sustainable but will make economic, social and cultural sense in an electronically interconnected and global world'. Unfortunately the discussion doesn't go deep enough here. For a more comprehensive analysis of economic, social, political and cultural dynamics of the global digital revolution, one should turn to works of Manuel Castells (his trilogy), especially The Network Society - Volume I.
William J. Mitchell also argues in his "e-topia" that the `new settlement patterns of the 21st century will be characterized by live/work dwellings, 24 hour pedestrian scale neighborhoods rich in social relationships and dynamic community life, by electronic meeting places, decentralized production, marketing and distribution systems'. He advocates, as he calls it, `the creation of e-topias - cities that work smarter, not harder'. Stephen Doheny-Farina also gives an eloquent exploration of the nature of cyberspace and the increasing virtualization of everyday life in communities and neighborhoods in his work The Wired Neighborhood. He argues that electronic neighborhoods should be less important to us than our geophysical neighborhoods, also looking more into the negative aspects of IT than Mitchell does. Like Mitchell, he also speaks in favor of `civic networking, a movement that organizes local information and culture, and shows how new technologies can help reinvigorate communities'. Mitchell draws (indirectly) much from the founders and advocates of the `New Urbanism' and Sustainable Communities movement. In particular one can find links to the works of Peter Katz and Vincent Scully The New Urbanism, Peter Calthorpe's The Next American Metropolis, Anders Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk's Towns and Town Making Principles, and Michael Bernick Robert Cervero's Transit Villages in the 21st Century.
"E-topia" points out the important aspect of changes and polarization in society vis-?-vis the digital technologies. Here the author makes a stance that architects, urban planners and designers can help to create social groups that intersect and overlap. This discussion is taken to a more profound analysis in the work of Donald A. Sch?n, Bish Sanyal and William J. Mitchell, High Technology and Low Income Communities, (with participation of Manuel Castells and Peter Hall). Most of Mitchell's argumentation draws heavily on history of technology, architecture and urbanism. In a subtle, but yet convincing discourse from Plato to Mumford, he shows that there is a `red thread in history of cities' and especially that there is an unavoidable pattern of development and change in technologies. In this way, Mitchell explains not just how things are likely to change, but also examines historical precedents. The references (endnotes) in the book are a Tour-de-Force by themselves. As opposed to his previous book `City of Bits', there is a general lack of illustrations in "e-topia", something which could have complemented the discourse well. A companion CD-Rom (with illustrated examples and additional diagrams and tables, as well as multimedia presentations) could have been an interesting addendum to the book that advocates the IT future. Probably the most striking chapter `The Economy of Presence', summarizes the synchronistic and asynchronistic communication (discussion on face-to-face and tele communication). The last chapter, `Lean and Green' gives a refreshing discussion and outlook on green building techniques.
Even though Mitchell is a strong advocate of the life in the digital age, he asserts that urban planning should still focus on the cultural, scenic and climatic attractions of place. The spirit of the place (Genius Loci), discussed in length by Christian Norberg-Schulz in Genius Loci - Towards a New Phenomenology of Architecture, is vivid in Mitchell's thinking and conclusions. Maybe the best illustration of these two waves (electronic vs. geophysical) of thought in Mitchell's work can be found in the concluding chapter `Lean and Green' (under the concluding heading `Our Town Tomorrow')
Sir Peter Hall has called this book a `dazzling survey of the cyberfuture and its impact on urban life'. For him and other experts in the field, William J. Mitchell is the world's foremost authority on the subject. This is not an anticipatory work, book of dreams or a nostrum for the future cities. It is simply a solidly grounded survey and inquiry study with visions, forecasts and scenarios for the city of the future. It is a homogenous series of lessons on how the evolution of digital technologies has altered and will alter the way we live, work, build and communicate in our cities, communities and neighborhoods - a coherent and balanced vision of digital technologies (foremost IT) and urban form and their influence on everyday life patterns.
(This review reproduced by permission of the Nordic Architectural Journal - author: Tigran Hasic)
Summary of e-topia
The global digital network is not just a delivery system for email, Web pages, and digital television. It is a whole new urban infrastructure-one that will change the forms of our cities as dramatically as railroads, highways, electric power supply, and telephone networks did in the past.Picking up where his best-selling City of Bits left off, Mitchell argues that we must extend the definitions of architecture and urban design to encompass virtual places as well as physical ones, and interconnection by means of telecommunication links as well as by pedestrian circulation and mechanized transportation systems. He proposes strategies for the creation of cities that not only will be sustainable but will make economic, social, and cultural sense in an electronically interconnected and global world. The new settlement patterns of the twenty-first century will be characterized by live/work dwellings, 24-hour pedestrian-scale neighborhoods rich in social relationships, and vigorous local community life, complemented by far-flung configurations of electronic meeting places and decentralized production, marketing, and distribution systems. Neither digiphile nor digiphobe, Mitchell advocates the creation of e-topias-cities that work smarter, not harder.
This little book begins with a big claim: the city is dead, and cyberspace killed it. But Mitchell, it turns out, is too intelligent an observer to really mean anything quite so drastic. Despite his weakness for bold, catchy statements (and it is a weakness), this MIT architecture professor has both feet planted in the long and much-studied history of urban spaces, and he draws from it a pragmatic optimism that keeps his argument both hopeful and nuanced. His real thesis: Under cyberspace's influence, the city is changing, no more or less radically than it did under the influence of postal systems, electricity, and cars. And if we ride the new changes carefully, he insists, the places we live and work in can become "e-topias--lean, green cities that work smarter, not harder."
As in his bestselling City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, Mitchell floats his claims on a brisk stream of technological detail, much of it eye-opening, all of it clearly presented. Low-earth-orbit satellites; small-scale, wearable computer networks woven into underpants; artificially intelligent houses; and the logistics of high-tech pizza delivery are just a few of the phenomena that go into Mitchell's sketch of the emergent digital city. Casually erudite nods to urban theorists from Plato to Lewis Mumford to William H. Gates III round out the portrait. In the end, Mitchell shows us the city doing more or less what it has always done: evolving away from its simple, ancient roots toward increasingly mediated complexity. --Julian Dibbell
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