Thoughts on the Urban Long Tail

Stephen Johnson, author of Interface Culture and Emergence, is now writing on the Urban Long Tail and lecturing widely on the Urban Web. In Discover Magazine he suggests that the Long Tail is a sort of antidote to the indifference and withdrawal that Richard Sennett identifies in the contemporary city. Johnson argues that as our tastes become more eccentric, the diversity of taste cultures that we can find in dense cities will appeal to us more and more. Forms of locative media and such as dodgeball or even tribe.net will facilitate this. It’s worth bearing in mind, however, that the urban has itself greatly changed during the last thirty years. You may seek others like yourself, but as this USA Today report on the work of demographic corporation Claritas demonstrates, the earth is now blanketed in a posturban terrain of discontinuous microcosms, clusters of communities organized by similar taste, culture, and ideology. The kind of urban infrastructure (40 year old suburb, brand new 80 story condos on the beach, exurban loft, ultra-dangerous urban renaissance skid-row housing) we choose for ourselves, then, is a product of our position within a cluster. So is this really an antidote to the condition of disconnect Sennett identifies? Not in my book. But this post isn’t intended as a lament. We can’t recuperate the city any more than we can recuperate the pre-industrial village. Instead, architects and urbanists need to find strategies for working in this new landscape.


Stephen Johnson, author of Interface Culture and Emergence, is now writing on the Urban Long Tail and lecturing widely on the Urban Web. In Discover Magazine he suggests that the Long Tail is a sort of antidote to the indifference and withdrawal that Richard Sennett identifies in the contemporary city. Johnson argues that as our tastes become more eccentric, the diversity of taste cultures that we can find in dense cities will appeal to us more and more. Forms of locative media and such as dodgeball or even tribe.net will facilitate this. It’s worth bearing in mind, however, that the urban has itself greatly changed during the last thirty years. You may seek others like yourself, but as this USA Today report on the work of demographic corporation Claritas demonstrates, the earth is now blanketed in a posturban terrain of discontinuous microcosms, clusters of communities organized by similar taste, culture, and ideology. The kind of urban infrastructure (40 year old suburb, brand new 80 story condos on the beach, exurban loft, ultra-dangerous urban renaissance skid-row housing) we choose for ourselves, then, is a product of our position within a cluster. So is this really an antidote to the condition of disconnect Sennett identifies? Not in my book. But this post isn’t intended as a lament. We can’t recuperate the city any more than we can recuperate the pre-industrial village. Instead, architects and urbanists need to find strategies for working in this new landscape.