digital cities and electric suburbs

V. has the quality of remaining in your memory point by point, in its succession of streets, of houses along the streets, and of doors and windows in the houses, although nothing in them possesses a particular beauty or rarity. V.'s secret lies in the way that your gaze runs over patterns following one another in a musical score where not one note can be altered or displaced. The man who knows by heart how V. is made, if he is unable to sleep at night, can imagine that he is walking along the streets and he remembers the order by which the copper clock follows the barber's striped awning, then the fountain with the nine jets, the astronomer's glass tower, the melon vendor's kiosk, the statue of the hermit and the lion, the Turkish bath, the cafe at the corner, the alley that leads to the harbour. This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetables and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech. Between each idea and each point in the itinerary an affinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory.
Italio Calvino, 'Invisible Cities'

..a city unrooted to any definite spot on the surface the earth, shaped by connectivity and bandwidth constraints rather than by accessibility and land values... (with) places... constructed virtually by software instead of physically from stones and timbers, and... connected by logical linkages rather than by doors, passageways, and streets.
William Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn

The look-and-feel of the 'digital city' existed long before it could be realized. American SF writer William Gibson most formatively shaped our ideas about the experiential reality of the infosphere. In 1984 he named and described 'cyberspace', the 'space' created by the relationships of data inside a computer network, as a 'consensual hallucination' in his seminal novel, 'Neuromancer', and compellingly depicted an architectonic networked world of multi-sensory information (The Matrix). What gave Gibson's vision such staying power was that he was tapping into a well-understood (and well-worn) metaphor.

The city has been a metaphorical trope for as long as people have been keeping records. This is scarcely surprising given that cities, and the production of surplus goods/skill specialisation they require to exist, seem to be a prerequisite for the development of written language. Ur, Sumer, Rome, Constantinople, Paris, New York -- from the earliest times the city was a miracle, a prodigy. Cities have always been magnets irresistibly drawing population from rural areas by providing both the mundane and the marvelous. They attract yet are feared. The city's complexity seems chaotic and threatening yet its potential exciting. Everything in the human world can be found in the city. The city embodies the freedoms and the dangers of anonymity, heterogeneity and availability.

The city, then, seems to be a nearly perfect metaphor for the Internet. It is multifarious, allowing for a variety of subsidiary metaphors such as diverse kinds of buildings, shops, transit systems, parks, neighborhood, etc. Each of these sub-metaphors can be clearly applied to a diverse range of services and information types:reference material stored within a 'Public Library'. 'Shopping precincts' and digital malls to give access to interactive shopping and on-line catalogues. Government services accessed in 'office blocks'. 'Bars' and 'cafes' provide interfaces to meet people and chat, etc.

The city contains multiple choices, multiple functions and multiple users. It provides order to a chaotic system. It promises stability yet allows for and contextualises change. The near universal acceptance of 'homepage' as denoting the index or splash page of a personal website indicates how easily the architectural metaphor entrenches itself. The modernist banality of many online architectural representations may also, perhaps, be explained by the hold which real-world architecture has on our imaginations. It's hard to think outside the box...

The digital realm is replete with architecturally-derived environments ranging from fully-immersive Virtual Realities and multi-user player-POV games to the often poetic textually-described social structures of MUDs, MOOs and other communal spaces. The number of these environments is increasing rapidly and many people spend substantial amounts of their time 'in' them.

Some theorists even posit that the digital is replacing the 'real' metropolis. Australian media artist, Jeffrey Shaw, has characterised the last forty years of architectural practice as a history of dematerialisation. He traces the dissolution of architectural efficacy in the 'real' world from the preoccupation with responsive 'soft-architecture' in the '60s, through kinetic and luminous sculpture (so much of which owed an unstated debt to the fascist architect Albert Spiers sculpting of spectacle with light and space in the '30s and '40s), to the tele-virtual architecture of the '90s. Architecture, for Shaw, has become a matter of relationships constructed from invisible algorithms, data structures, underlying our ability to create shared spaces despite the disparate geographical locations of these 'space's' inhabitants.*

Among the earliest examples of virtual architecture mediated by networked computers are the text-based environments of MUDs (multi-user domains) and Moos (MUD Object Oriented). In MUDs and Moos, multiple users can log into a shared environment and interact using text. Although the interactions take place as text messages, the participants in the MUDs relate to their environments with images representing the 'room' they're 'in' or textual descriptions of the space, and with two-dimensional maps. Often, but not always, the maps mimic or represent physically constructable environments.

Detail of Diversity University's sitemap

Full image

<< See, for example, Downtown Anywhere

• Flat' Virtual Cities use flat maps of cities or buildings as an interface to further information. This is particularly typical of promotional and educational sites about real cities.

See IconTown which is an interface to a 'virtual community' (in this case, peoples homepages)
>>

• 3D Virtual Cities use virtual reality technologies to model the built form of cities, to varying degrees of accuracy and realism.

These include QTVR 'tours' (see EuroVR, for example), or VRML or other 3D models (see The Glasgow Directory and Virtual Sydney)

• "True" Virtual Cities provide people with a genuine sense of moving around an urban place. To fulfill this demanding criteria a true virtual city must have a sufficiently realistic built form interface, a rich diversity of services, functions and information content, and crucially, the ability to support social interaction with other people.

<< See, for example, Cybertown

One of the most ironic aspects of the 'virtual cities' rhetoric is that it has been honoured more in the breach than in reality -- there are actually very few functioning 'real' virtual cities around...

There are, of course, many virtual worlds which include architectural representations -- buildings, public spaces etc -- but these tend to resemble squeaky-clean suburbs rather than bustling metropolises with their attendant thrills and possibilities. These worlds may be on the way to containing cities, but currently they resemble nothing more than vast housing developments. Cyberbia, ironically, looks more like a Neighbor's set than like Gibson's or Stephenson's digital dystopias.

AlphaWorld, which was the first and became the largest of more than 1000 worlds generated using ActiveWorld software, is a good case in point. AlphaWorld, which opened in June 1995, comprises a massive virtual space, some 429,038 'square kilometers'. Springing into existence as a vivid green flat, featureless plain stretching for hundreds of virtual kilometers in every direction, there were no 'natural' features, no mountains or rivers, no trees, no life. Everything that now exists in AlphaWorld -- 48.9 million objects as of February 2000 -- has been placed there by the homesteaders, using simple block-building tools.

A fascinating study of the growth of the community was undertaken, highlighting its rapid, almost cancerous, growth. What this study could not highlight was the number of homesteads that were built and soon abandoned -- AlphaWorld now consists of huge tracts of ghost town where homesteaders have lost their first enthusiasm and abandoned their digital structures.* This pattern of abandonment perhaps reflects a lack of understanding of urban dynamics by AlphaWorld's originators. Once homesteaders had done building, there wasn't much else to do there -- rather like the new suburbs AlphaWorld so resembles. As the creators of Habitat, an early graphical MUD noted:

Most of all, we needed things for 20,000 people to do. They needed interesting places to visit -- and since they couldn't all be in the same place at the same time, they needed a lot of interesting places to visit -- and things to do in those places. Each of those houses, towns, roads, shops forests, theaters, arenas, and other places is a distinct entity that someone needs to design and create.

Whilst Martin Dodge's taxonomy is useful, it ignores the many hybrid varieties. Some of the most interesting are those that utilise the city as an interface metaphor in a similar fashion to the classic Art of Memory memory palace -- a series of memorable 'places' to store content/information for easy access and enhanced relational understanding. In general, these are individual user applications or interfaces rather than online communities.

One of the earliest of these was Andreas Dieberger's Information City (1993->?). His intriguingly literal concept involves a non-immersive virtual reality which acts as a spatial user-interface for large hypertext collections. It uses the metaphor of a city to represent documents as buildings in a virtual environment through which the user navigates, and makes use of Jay Bolter's concept of 'writing on the world' to convey as much information about the documents as possible without overloading the user.*

On entering the Information City for the first time, it is structured according to an interest profile provided by the user, so that the topics of interest are grouped into 'districts of interest'. Walking along the street the user can look at related documents as though it were a library where all the books about a subject are on the same shelf. A house with open doors denotes a document in strong relation to the topic looked for, a half-closed door signifies a weak relationship. The outside of the buildings convey information about internal complexity and age of the document. For example, a worn doormat would show a house (document) that is entered often.

 

 

 

 

 

Andreas Dieberger, 'The Information City - A Step towards Merging of Hypertext and Virtual Reality

Dieberger's vision has been realised, at least in part, by a long-term research project undertaken at MIT from 1995 up to the present. City of News, by Flavia Sparacino, Alex Pentland, Glorianna Davenport, Michal Hlavac, and Mary Obelnicki, explores the possibilities of using the city metaphor as a pragmatic way of organising and accessing constantly changing information such as the news. They draw explicit parallels between their project and Renaissance memory practices.

They describe City of News as:

...a dynamically growing urban landscape of information. It is an immerse, interactive, web browser that takes advantage of people's strength remembering the surrounding three-dimensional spatial layout. Starting from a chosen "home page", where home is finally associated with a physical space, our browser fetches and displays URLs so as to form skyscrapers and alleys of text and images through which the user can "fly". The City is organized in urban quarters (districts) that provide territorial regrouping of urban activities. Similarly to some major contemporary cities there is a financial district, an entertainment district, and a shopping district. In addition to these areas we have created other functional groupings by creating a mapping between modern newspaper layout and city planning.

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