e-topia

For planners and politicians, steering us away from the dual city is a matter of finding policies that generate an acceptable level of social equity. For architects and urban designers, the complementary task is to create urban fabric that provides opportunities for social groups to intersect and overlap rather than remain isolated by distance or defended walls - the laptop at the piazza cafe table instead of the PC in the gated condo.

We will characterize cities of the twenty-first century as systems of interlinked, interacting, silicon- and software-saturated smart, attentive, and responsive places. We will encounter them at the scales of clothing, rooms, buildings, campuses and neighborhoods, metropolitan regions, and global infrastructures.

Whereas the industrial revolution forced the separation of home and workplace, the digital revolution is bringing them back together. <..> This does not mean that majority of us will become full-time, stay-at-home telecommuters, and that traditional workplaces - particularly downtown offices - will simply disappear.