2. From Dreams of Transcendence to
the ‘Remediation’ of Urban Life
• 1960s-1990s Pervasive obsession with
substitution/ dematerialisation/ death of
distance
• Assumption that ICTs would inevitably
eviscerate and simply replace cities/
corporeality/ materiality/ physical flow
• Cities (concentrations of space to
overcome time), body and transport
abandoned because of real-time
interactions to overcome space
• Cast away “Ballast of
materiality” (Benedikt)
• Fantasies of complete transcendence:
utopian/dystopian/’neoliberal/
cyberlibertarian
3. A ‘Manifest Destiny’ or
‘Anything-AnytimeAnywhere Dream’:
Examples
• ”The city as a form of major dimensions must inevitably dissolve
like the fading shot in a movie" McLuhan 1964
• ”If cities did not exist, it now would not be necessary to invent
them" Naisbitt and Aburdene 1991
• ”The city of the past slowly becomes a paradoxical agglomeration
in which relations of immediate proximity give way to
interrelationships over distance” Virilio 1993
• ”In urban terms, once time has become instantaneous, space
becomes unnecessary” Pawley 1997
• “When work is a few keystrokes away from the comfort
of your home-office, why even build in reality”? Kaba 1996
4. Massive Myth! Instead, Urban Remediation
• Bolter and Grusin: Cyberspace "is very much a part of our
contemporary world. It is constituted through a series of
remediations. As a digital network, cyberspace remediates
the electric communications networks of the past 150
years, the telegraph and the telephone; as virtual reality, it
remediates the visual space of painting, film, and
television ; and as social space, it remediates such
historical places as cities and parks and such 'nonplaces'
as theme parks and shopping malls. Like other
contemporary telemediated spaces, cyberspace refashions
and extends earlier media, which are themselves
embedded in material and social environments".
5. • Massive parallel growth in ICT use,
urbanisation and transport flows
• Very material geographies of ICTs
• New media applications increasingly
articulate closely with, and animate,
fine grain of urban places
• Complex spatial divisions of labour
• Complex combinations of face-to-face
and electronic interactions within and
between cities
• ‘Compulsion of proximity’ for
burgeoning ‘creative’ industries and
people, as well as massive ICT flows
• ICTs have quickly become normal,
taken for granted and banal
• Now the ordinary urban landscape
62. Conclusions
• Complex and multi-scaled urban remediations underway
• These rely on subtle, complex and continuous combinations
of ‘virtual’ and urban/corporeal/physical/place-based
• ICTs have very quickly become ordinary - The most basic
and prosaic background to contemporary urban life
• The urban is ICTs; ICTs are the urban. Not separate realms
• Urban life continuously brought into being by massive,
globally-stretched complexes of increasingly automated
logistics, consumption, surveillance and social systems
• But, with a few exceptions, research and policy paradigms
lagging far behind
• Often trapped in the anachronistic concepts and paradigms
of modern, electromechanical urbanism or fantasies of
virtual transcendence and dematerialisation
63. Main Policy Challenges
• View remediating cities as sociotechnical process
• Develop ‘relational' conceptions of urban place: space and
time continually brought into being through remediation,
operating at scales from body to globe
• Creatively shape ICTs and urban spaces in parallel as joined
and inseparable ‘hybrids’
• Bold and flexible experiments in urban remediation needed as
basis for creative, sustainable and just future cities
• Must strive to revitalise urban public realms through
remediation, addressing dangers of electronic/physical
capsularisation, sprawl, and rise of national security states
• Also address growing invisibility of social and technical power:
the growth of ‘software-sorted’ digital divides
