Making the Digital City: The Early Shaping of Urban Internet Space

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Review by Jeffrey Barlow <barlowj@pacificu.edu>

Aurigi, Alessandro. Making the Digital City . The Early Shaping of Urban Internet Space. Ashgate Publishing Limited, Aldershot, Hampshire , England . 2005.

Some books are very difficult to review because they defy classification. This can be because they are very broad and might be of interest to a number of audiences, or because they are written for a small niche audience. Making the Digital City is of the former sort, though everything about the title and the presentation screams to the contrary. At first glance it seems that it is meant for a very small group interested in city planning, or perhaps more broadly, in architecture and the Internet. However, its appeal is in fact much broader.

The central focus of the book is a study of two early European “digital city” projects. These were digital projects intended to take the physical existence of a city, with its varieties of spaces, inhabitants, and complex social and economic transactions, into hyperspace. He defines “digital cities” as “…web-based urban information systems and virtual communities.” (p. 5) [1]

The author, Alessandro Aurigi, Ph.D., is a lecturer at Newcastle University , England , a noted center for advanced research on the meaning and use of digital materials. His particular interest is the relationship between the “information society” and the “…ways we imagine, conceive, represent, and manage buildings and cities.” (xii)

This focus might seem a rather odd one, but much of post-modern thought emerged from, and in turn, influenced architecture. The underlying metaphor, after all, of “cyberspace” is of a physical space, though we are all aware that it exists firstly as stored digital data, and lastly as the browser's interpretation of that data. “A town…” is fundamentally, as Le Corbusier, generally regarded as the master of modern architecture and planning said, “pure geometry.” (15) This work then, is as much about cyberspace and the many ways we think of it and use it as it is about urban planning.

The work would be very useful to a number of audiences. First, anyone engaged in a digital urban project, whether one as small as adding a wireless system to Forest Grove , Oregon , as is happening around Pacific University at present, or as broad as designing or redesigning huge urban or state-sponsored web sites, should read the book. The author emphasizes, however, that the results of these sites are as much a result of how we “think” about them as how we plan them.

The outcome of such projects is usually, Aurigi states, “technologically determined”. That is, most of the participants view the project as a simple technological add-on and spend most of their time discussing what sort of equipment should be used and how it may be paid for.

The author believes, however, that such projects are better viewed as social processes; outcomes are not determined so much by technology as by the social interactions that first create them, and then manage them. He describes his own approach as the “social construction of technology,” meaning that he emphasizes human interaction as more important than technology in determining planning outcomes.

Here the book becomes very useful to a second and broader audience: those who wish to be able to understand the various conceptions of cyberspace, and the minds that created those conceptions. Much of the beginning of the book is an intellectual history of cyberspace.

The author breaks the many perspectives on cyberspace into two warring camps: the utopian and dystopian. The utopians see the Internet as potentially a vast tool for good. This good would include facilitating democracy, human interactions, concerted political action, education, etc. On the other hand are the dystopians, the cyberpunks and the alarmists, who see danger in every digital project even an ultimate loss of our humanity.

Aurigi lays out the intellectual development of each school, breaking them down into sub-groups and introducing key thinkers in each and the ideas they thought, usually including generous quotations from those thinkers. The bibliography and notes alone here make the book worthwhile to any serious student of the Internet.

The author believes, however, that both the utopian and dystopian perspectives are ultimately technologically determinist; that is, they see the machinery as key, not the human processes whereby they are used. This perspective then, is key to understanding the author's analysis of the digital cities studies, and ultimately pulls the work together into a tightly organized cohesive whole, though the reader might be pardoned for occasionally wondering where on earth (or in cyberspace) the author is going.

A third group that could well benefit from this work is those who study web pages or sites as information conveying devices. The author developed, and here explains a comprehensive approach for studying digital projects and his model (actually he was leading research groups) could be a starting point for other such studies on any topic dealing with digital information. Questionnaires are laid out and their interpretation discussed in detail.

There are some groups for whom this book would not be useful. Foremost would be those seeking light infotainment. The book is dense and demanding. It betrays its academic origins constantly, as well as its publishing history as part of the “Design and the Built Environment Series.” The author is often less concerned with telling us what he knows, as how he knows it, and the intellectual context in which that knowing occurred.

Lastly, architects and urban planners might well be interested in this book, though as Aurigi points out in his study, such professionals most usually regarded these projects as something best left to techies, or more unfortunately, to the companies that produced the hardware utilized. In this fashion, “citizen users” soon became “consumers”, and projects originally thought to require increased public access to computers became ways to push information via cash machines at banks. Projects thought initially to be ways to encourage participation wound up preoccupied with management and control.

Given, however, a serious interest in the impact of the Internet, this work is well worth reading.

[1]For a better perspective of the work's central focus, it might be useful to go to: http://www.comune.bologna.it/ , the home of the Italian digital city, Iperbole , the digital project of Bologna , and to http://www.bbc.co.uk/bristol/content/news/ , the latest iteration of the project begun in Bristol , England . To the contemporary reader, there might seem to be nothing special about these two sites. However, they were among the first extensive European digital city sites. The highly successful predecessor was De Digitale Stad , in Amsterdam . The site can be found at: http://www.dds.nl/ but a more useful English-language explanation is to be found at: http://www.well.com/~hlr/tomorrow/amsterdam.html