“The Network City: Emergent Urbanism in Contemporary Life”

Statement of Research Goals for “Networked Publics” Research Fellowship
Kazys Varnelis

Abstract

During my one-year residency at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California, I propose to undertake a book-length investigation on the interaction of the virtual and the physical realms in the contemporary city. This project both critically examines the present-day urban condition and investigates an emergent urbanism that produces new forms of networked publics, generated by people in their everyday activities as well as in the realms of architecture, urban design and telecommunicational public art.

Proposal

The Network City seeks a new understanding of how the virtual and physical support networked publics. As a historian and theorist of architecture and the city, I work in a field that typically understands the urban realm as primarily physical, composed of buildings, streets, plazas, parks, and other built artifacts within which people dwell and that act as a theater for the public sphere. Indeed, wherever one locates the dawn of the public sphere, be it Athens, the city-states of the Italian Renaissance, seventeenth century Paris, or the bourgeois metropolis, architecture plays a crucial role in forming an urban milieu that is a fundamental constituent of the public sphere in question.

That architecture’s role in these historical moments of formation is not merely accidental is demonstrated by the fact that in all of these cases, the discussion and debate of architecture’s purpose is eagerly taken up within the public sphere. According to this position, eloquently described by Jane Jacobs in her book the Life and Death of Great American Cities (1961) and more recently taken up by the Congress for New Urbanism, a vital public sphere depends on an architectural infrastructure that encourages frequent random face-to-face interactions within an urban community.

But another, equally compelling, view of the public sphere holds that rhetoric, print, journals, and popular periodicals all provide the medium in which the public sphere thrives. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), J?ɬºrgen Habermas suggests that the public sphere is not necessarily identifiable with a place. Instead, the assembly and dialogue that constitute it occur via the media as much as through any physical urban infrastructure.

Today, it may appear that the latter position has won. The spread of virtual networking technologies””?the web, email, instant messaging, cell phones, wireless messaging, inexpensive international phone service, and so on””?together with the growth of physical nomadism during the last quarter century have radically restructured how individuals relate to each other. When people do see each other in person today, it is generally in spaces of consumption such as the shopping mall, the multiplex movie theater, or the late capitalist art museum.

Conventional public spaces increasingly appear to be less and less viable and are little used unless, as in the case of Jacobs’s own Greenwich Village, colonized as outposts of the mall themselves. Among advocates of conventional urbanism, laments about the end of the city and the placelessness of contemporary life are commonplace. For Futurists such as Marshall McLuhan, Alvin Toffler, George Gilder, or Nicholas Negroponte, the resulting radical decentralization of the networked world will lead to a more intimate future existence.

But the virtualist approach does not account for the rapid growth of global cities in the last two decades. If strangely disconnected from their environment while simultaneously permeated by suburban culture and the shopping mall (or at least its stores), more Rem Koolhaas’s Generic City than Jane Jacobs’s Greenwich Village, major urban centers are, as Manuel Castells tells us in The Rise of the Network Society (1996), the command-and-control nodes of global networks. Within these, face-to-face, or at least metropolitan-area-network, interactions are still crucial.

My proposal, Network City, seeks to come to an understanding of this paradoxical condition of real and virtual, dispersal and concentration. It begins with the premise that, as urban geographer Ronald Abler observed in “What Makes Cities Important,” (1970) cities themselves are communications systems or media. Media are fundamentally means of transmitting information. Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin (1996) point out that if the function of telecommunications is to make communications easier by minimizing time constraints to overcome space constraints, the function of the city is to make communications easier by minimizing space constraints to overcome time constraints. This, then, is why the public sphere has been associated with urban environments. Like a newspaper or a blog, a city enables ideas, opinions, attitudes, and messages to spread rapidly.

Moreover, urban fabric serves as an infrastructure within which distinct networked publics that use other media can emerge. If, on the one hand, the world is increasingly composed of new tribes, widely dispersed nationally and globally and connected by telecommunications, on a local scale, research by the Claritas corporation shows that people generally live next to people they like, in neighborhoods they feel comfortable in. Demographic clusters settle into geographic locations based on a variety of factors: historical precedent, housing types, educational possibilities, opportunities for work, retail choices, cost of living, and the presence of like-minded people. Even in our globally networked world, the bulk of our interpersonal telecommunicational activity is local: SMS messaging, email, cell phone calls, and so on are more likely to take place with others in proximity to us, even if these interactions happen at a disconnect. Moreover, the global networking of clusters of like people is also a global networking of clusters of like places.

This project is detailed in the proposed table of contents that accompanies this introduction. Its scope is large, but I maintain that a broad understanding of this material will be more revealing than a narrow focus on a particular topic by drawing attention to connections that might otherwise not be visible. Moreover, I have made substantial progress with drafting this material through teaching my class “The Network City” at the Southern California Institute of Architecture since 2000, in my class on “Public Art, the Public Sphere, and Public Space” in the Public Art Studies Program in the University of Southern California’s School of Fine Arts, and in a number of articles that I have written to date.

Table of Contents:

Part I. The Growth of Network City

Part I begins with the premise that if Network City is not a tabula rasa but rather a palimpsest, then we must understand both the key infrastructural elements that underlay it as well as the planning strategies that inform it.

Chapter 1. The Rise and Demise of the Centralized Metropolis

Chapter 1 explores how the downtown city core and the suburb developed symbiotically during the last 150 years. Both city core and suburb are made possible by new telecommunications technologies (the telephone and the telegraph) as well as new forms of transportation (the railroad, the automobile, and the truck) that make allow management, industry, and dwelling to separate into distinct urban zones.

If this hierarchical and centralized urban environment produces the classic model of the modern metropolis in the United States and elsewhere, it also spawns its own contradictions. For as the downtown business center grows, it becomes prohibitively expensive and congested while as outlying areas grow, they wind up farther and farther removed from the city core and begin to generate their own secondary business centers. The result, beginning with the first crisis of Fordism, the Depression of the 1930s and extending to the post-Fordist restructuring of the 1970s, is the undoing of the centralized city model.

Chapter 2. The Open City and the (Decentralized) Plan

Chapter 2 investigates attempts to respond to the problems of the centralized city model. It begins with modernist urban plan, embodied by the urban planning group CIAM, which promoted decentralized urban forms but insisted on doing so via a hierarchical model of control dependent on a Fordist regime and advocated a further distinction of the city into clear, separate zones of living, dwelling, recreation, and transportation. The chapter centers on an exploration of the development of postwar decentralization as both a means of guarding against nuclear attack during the Cold War as well as a way of decongesting the city. The role of the Federal Interstate Highway System and AT&T’s hardened postwar telecommunications network are key to facilitating this change. The section on the decongestion of the city focuses on Los Angeles architect-developer Victor Gruen, the inventor of the shopping mall and influential promoter of downtown walking districts as means of re-creating a new Agora or hybrid marketplace-public realm.

Chapter 3. From Plan to Network

Chapter 3 introduces the critique of the plan and the rise of the network as a model. It begins with a critical discussion of Rand Corporation researcher Paul Baran’s proposal for a distributed, as opposed to centralized (as outlined in chapter one) or decentralized (as outlined in chapter two), communications network structure as the basis of a military communications network that could survive nuclear attack by the Soviet Union by giving the power to route information intelligently to every node. In order to come to an understanding of the importance of the network in subsequent developments, this chapter then compares Baran’s hypotheses with four other key critiques of the top-down model of city planning developed in the 1960s, that of Jane Jacobs who argued for dense, street-centric urban cores as essential for the creation of community, that of architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri, who concluded that under welfare-state capitalism, the task of planning the city was now less a physical one than an economic one, that of the Situationists who promoted a re-activated urban environment based on already existing urban texture, and that of Andrea Branzi, leader of the architectural group Archizoom, who proclaimed that in the future the task of the architect and urban designer would not be to make forms and plans but rather to manipulate relationships of people, objects, and information.

Part II. Network City

Where Part I. The Growth of Network City looks at the city diachronically, Part II, Network City explores it synchronically, mapping the contemporary urban condition.

Chapter 4. From Postsuburbia to the Posturban Condition

Chapter 4 introduces the condition of posturbanity. At the start of the 21st century, for the first time, the majority of the world’s population dwelt in cities. This echoes the condition of the United States, where cities first became the dominant form of habitation in 1960. Nevertheless, this is not simply a time in which cities grow. On the contrary, in 1970 only a decade after the city’s victory in the United States, the suburb outpaced the city in terms of population. That this was not just a case of the center growing in concert with the periphery is demonstrated by the fact that in 1973, more Americans were employed in suburbs than in city cores. During the 1970s and 1980s, the traditional commute was undone as workers in places like Orange County or Long Island increasingly shuttled from suburban home to suburban workplace in a seemingly aimless flow of daily traffic, a phenomenon dubbed postsuburbia by Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster in their book, Post-Suburban California: The Transformation of Postwar Orange County, California (1991). After postsuburbia, however, comes the posturban condition. In developed countries, and increasingly in developing countries as well, networked communications are making it possible for individuals to participate in a diffuse urbanism, or even posturbanism, in which they can participate in ways of life that have characteristically been considered urban without dwelling in anything resembling a traditional city.

Chapter 5. Concentrated Network City Cores

Chapter 5 suggests that the posturban world is anything but homogeneous. Instead, as Saskia Sassen and Manuel Castells have explained, globalization has led to the rise of highly centralized “urban” cores, termed “Global Cities” by Sassen and described as “Megacities” or “Command and Control Centers for the Network Society” by Castells. This new geometry is fractal in quality: a global city is itself typically not a discrete core but rather a large-scale area of high habitation that spreads over hundreds of miles to form what urban geographer Jean Gottmann already identified in the 1960s as “Megalopolis.” This chapter explores the infrastructure supporting the network city core by examining the decentralized nature of modern telecommunications systems and the Internet, which are built directly on the structure laid down in the downtown-centric model described in the first chapter. Instead of being placeless, as is often thought, the geography of the Internet’s infrastructure creates distinct limitations that further emphasize the centrality of the concentrated city core. The chapter concludes with an examination of the touristic-cultural network that boosters of concentrated network city cores advocate, stimulating the appearance of a public’s presence and increasing focus on the center through big-ticket items such as sports stadiums, museums, concert halls, and so forth.

Chapter 6. Terrain Vague

Chapter 6 addresses the areas left behind by the network city, be they the run-down post-rural hinterlands””?as opposed to out-of-city leisure destinations or exurban settlements””?or poor areas of the megalopolis, bypassed by the growth that surrounds them. Some of these spaces are what Castells calls “black holes of marginality,” and whether they are in the developed or developing world, both communications and transportation networks pass by these often heavily inhabited spaces, disregarding their inhabitants. Although these spaces could give rise to counter-publics, their exclusion from global network culture leaves them without voice. Other spaces, described by Spanish architect and critic Ignasi de Sola-Morales comprise a “terrain vague.” These are the blank spaces of our contemporary life. Empty, abandoned spaces composed of “industrial areas, railway stations, ports, unsafe residential neighborhoods, and contaminated places” are bereft of public activity and are dominated not by architecture but by emptiness. Sola-Morales describes these as places “where the city is no longer.” This chapter finishes with a reflection on a phenomenal terrain vague that permeates network culture, the “non-place” described by anthropologist Marc Augé. If, urbanism is now a way of life, so, too is the non-place. Non-places are the “spaces of circulation, distribution, and communication where neither identity, relation, or history may be apprehended,” void of any public qualities or any placeness that might be constructed through use over time. Non-places dominate what geographer Robert E. Lang calls “Edgeless Cities,” which he points out are much more common than the much more distinctly identifiable “Edge Cities” identified by journalist Joel Garreau. Edgeless Cities produce a formless, low-density sprawl that is “unmarked” and unseen, a sort of inhabited terrain vague spreading “almost imperceptibly” through the posturban world.

Part III. Emergent Urbanisms

The condition described in Part II. Network City cannot help but appear gloomy. Instead, however, the book concludes with an optimistic set of observations and proposals for an “emergent urbanism” that traverses the topology of the network city from the bottom-up.

Chapter 7. Networked Lives, Augmented Cities

Chapter 7 turns to the practices of individuals and groups occupying the network city in everyday life. Even if nationally or globally dispersed and connected in networks by telecommunications, part of what Melvin Webber called a “community without propinquity,” individuals generally congregate in similar demographic clusters. This chapter looks at the research by San Diego firm marketing Claritas into how individuals and families worldwide occupy locations based on the physical and virtual infrastructure they find: the housing types, transportation and communication facilities, employment possibilities, retail opportunities, economies, and like-minded people. The chapter then traces the possibilities for these groups to emerge as networked publics. With ubiquitous computing, the pervasive spread of networked technologies throughout everyday objects, and the increasing for possibilities created by handheld wireless technologies such as the cell phone, the Blackberry, the Treo, PocketPC and so on, individuals have the capacity for interacting with their environment in radically new ways, in effect creating augmented cities. This chapter concludes with a look at advanced media systems as smart rooms, augmented reality, attentive billboards, location-aware services, geonotes and digital graffiti, and so on.

Chapter 8. Emergent Urbanism

Chapter 8 explores projects by architects and urban designers who engage this new territory. Recent architectural discourse has been dominated by the idea of “Supermodernism,” a highly abstract, figural architecture that relies on form and phenomenological qualities for its spectacular impact, epitomized by Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim-Bilbao or his Experience Music Project in Seattle. As articulated by architecture theorist Hans Ibelings, Supermodernism embodies the qualities of placelessness, lack of meaning, context, and identity of the non-place. If for Ibelings this is positive, it is a fundamental thesis of this book, however, that no matter how attractive, such work is misguided. As new media art theorist Lev Manovich has stated, contemporary aesthetics is moving from the Formalism of Modernism to Informationalism. The chapter turns to explore a new kind of design that I dub “Emergent Urbanism” that engages Informationalism more directly and rejects the top-down Plan, in favor of more unpredictable effects, acting as a stimulant rather than as a prescription for networked societies.

This work often, but not always, takes on either the terrain vague or the hyperdense global city core as its territory, generally is designed not just in the spatial but also in the temporal realm, and often tries to create possibilities for new, networked publics. This chapter looks at designers such as Rem Koolhaas/OMA, Diller and Scofidio, Foreign Office Architects, MDRDV, Stan Allen, Field Operations, SERVO, and Ben van Berkel & Caroline Bos.

Chapter 9. Networked Art

Chapter 9 suggests that we can learn from New Media artists working with telecommunications. It begins with an assessment of the historical legacy of Kit Galloway and Sherri Rabinowitz’s Los Angeles-based group, the Electronic Café, most notably, their November 1980 "Hole in Space." In this “Public Communication Sculpture,” unannounced to the public, two walls, one at the Los Angeles’s Century City Shopping Center and another at New York’s Lincoln Center were turned into portals. Video cameras transmitted images from each site to the other where they were beamed, full size onto walls. Microphones and speakers facilitated audio transmissions. Hole in Space lasted three nights. During the first night, encounters were casual and accidental although by the end of the night, a new public space had been created. As word spread, separated friends and family made arrangements to meet at the portals on the second evening. On the third night, after Hole in Space was featured on television news, so many people attempted to participate in this shared human experience that traffic ground to a halt and the experiment was forced to end by the authorities.
Beyond simply novelty, New Media typically refer to a new way of structuring information defined by networked connections and a predilection for open-ended information management and interpretation that reflects the contemporary diversity and complexity of society. After surveying the work of the Electronic Café, Chapter 9 looks at how other, more recent projects such as those of Urban Tapestries, Urban Eyes, Blinkenlights, and Blast Theory restructure our ideas of the city.