Horan Thomas 2000
From UANotebook
Contents |
citation
Thomas A. Horan, Digital Places: Building Our City of Bits (Washington, D.C.: ULI -- The Urban Land Institute, 2000), pps.3-27,89-113.
notes
pp.5
"And now, into our already technology-infused cityscape comes the digital revolution. Seemingly unconstrained by temporal or spatial limits, the rapid and continuing emergence of Internet-based technologies, networks, and services brings with it entirely new dimensions of electronically mediated experience and communication. Will this virtual landscape make our cluttered public realm obsolete, so that we will no longer need to venture outdoors, content instead to surf the ubiquitous World Wide Web for all forms of work and pleasure? Will traditional cities meet the same fate as drive-in theaters?"
pp.6
"...it is not realistic to think that we can disassociate ourselves from our physical environment. Rather, the rise of cyberspace begs an examination of its connection to the physical world, the world of bricks and mortar. How and where do cyberspace and physical space intersect?"
Mentions three works:
- Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture.
- Stephen Graham, Telecommunications and the City.
- William J. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn.
- William J. Mitchell, E-Topia.
Author states he will focus on placemaking activities. He follows an inductive approach but not a deterministic one. Instead of treating digital place as a phenomenon to be observed, his aim to to improve and affect it by the "application of appropriate design principles.
recombinant design
William Mitchell's "recombinant architecture":
"Building on this notion of how technology facillitates the fragmentation and recombination of places, my aim is to analyze digital placemaking in homes, workplaces, libraries, schools, communities, and cities."
to "recombinant design" --pp.12:
"telecommunications systems replace circulatory systems, and the solvent of digital information decomposes traditional building types"
Placemaking, in the digital realm, involves splicing urban-based concepts, forms, and designs into recomposed homes, offices, communities, and cities.
pp.13: "A firm understanding of the content, context, and values embedded in existing physical and social communities must guide each design decision. As such, recombinant urban design must be considered an interdisciplinary process that crosses scietnific, technological, architectural, political, and sociological boundaries to apply a broad range of perspectives to the development of digital places."
Digital places
"these are not stable end-states buy dynamic settings that evolve over time." --pp.7
(this is not really different from regular old place)
a continuum:
- "unplugged" designs
- "adaptive" designs "representing modest attempts to visibly incorporate electronic features into physical spaces."
- "transformative" designs "rooms, buildings, communities composed of truly interfaced physical and electronic spaces."
Sense of Place (Harold Proshansky, psychologist):
"a substructure of self-identity that defines an individual's personal identity in relation the the physical world through memories, ideas, fellings, attitudes, values, preferences, meanings, and conceptions about behavior relevant to the physical settings in his or her daily life."
four strands of recombinant design
pps.13-21
- fluid locations -- we now have spatial fluidity in performing our daily activities. We have choices. Networks must ultimately connect to the real world. "It is in this interface between electronic flows and physical places that digital places arise." --pp.14
- meaningful places -- "embodies the need to design digital places in a manner that respects the functional and symbolic associations that places contain" --pp.14
- threshold connections -- "focuses on the need to design cognizant of the connections between physical and virtual space" --pp.18 First, there is the reflection of the digital era on the physical environment. Then there is the "interspace" between physical and electronic environment. "The purpose of this strand is to address the physical setting in which the electronically mediated activity is going to occur" --pp. 18 The focus is not on the style but on the relationship between parts.
- democratic design -- see user-centered and participatory design. things fail because the relevant parties were not consulted
wiring livable regions
a focus on "hard infrastructure" alone tends to treat the city as an industrial engine with only inputs and outputs.
"soft infrastructure" includes social, economic, and cultural attributes of a city --pp.89
from Kevin Lynch and Jane Jacobs: we should view "the city as a complex representation of physical, cultural, social, and cognitive associations between a place and its dwellers" --pp.90
there are different layers, forces and meanings operating in cities. they are "collage city", to us Colin Rowe's and Fred Koetter's words
second tier cities like Charlotte, Austin, Seattle, Minneapolis have benefited immensely from the growth of the network
(physical) place is not diminished by this digital revolution; rather, it asserts its importance in new and different ways. oddly, its power is concentrated, rather than diminished as a result of digital placemaking
