E-Topia : Urban Life, Jim - But Not As We Know It
by
William J. Mitchell |
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Hardcover
- 192 pages (October 1999)
MIT
Press; ISBN: 0262133555 ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.82 x
9.26 x 6.27 |
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Amazon.com
Review |
Amazon.com
This little book begins with a big claim: the city
is dead, and cyberspace killed it. But Mitchell, it turns out,
is too intelligent an observer to really mean anything quite so
drastic. Despite his weakness for bold, catchy statements (and
it is a weakness), this MIT architecture professor has both feet
planted in the long and much-studied history of urban spaces,
and he draws from it a pragmatic optimism that keeps his argument
both hopeful and nuanced. His real thesis: Under cyberspace's
influence, the city is changing, no more or less radically than
it did under the influence of postal systems, electricity, and
cars. And if we ride the new changes carefully, he insists, the
places we live and work in can become "e-topias--lean, green cities
that work smarter, not harder." |
Editorial
Reviews |
From
Scientific American
As urban places have changed successively with the advent of such
advances as piped water, printing, electricity and the Industrial
Revolution, so they will change again with the advent of the digital
revolution, Mitchell says from his perspective as dean of the
school of architecture and planning at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. In what way? "The resulting new urban tissues will
be characterized by live/work dwellings, twenty-four-hour neighborhoods,
loose-knit, far-flung configurations of electronically mediated
meeting places, flexible, decentralized production, marketing
and distribution systems, and electronically summoned and delivered
services." Urban places will become "e-topias--lean, green cities
that work smarter, not harder." Mitchell fills out this sketch
in considerable detail with predictions of the alterations the
digital revolution will bring to buildings, neighborhoods, communications,
travel and other aspects of urban life. "We will," he writes,
"characterize cities of the twenty-first century as systems of
interlinked, interacting, silicon- and software-saturated smart
places."
Business
Week, Marcia Stepanek
...e-topia offers an important way of looking at the future and
a fresh starting place for contemplation. Just prepare to encounter
more questions than answers. |
Book Description |
Book
Description
"Mitchell has done
it again! This dazzling survey of the cyberfuture and its impact
on urban life shows that he is still the world's foremost authority
on the subject." -- Sir Peter Hall, Bartlett Professor of Planning,
University College London
"Few people understand the challenges and opportunities of emerging
network society better than William J. Mitchell. A visionary with
a program, Mitchell not only points us toward a new future but
also shows us how to get there. Anyone interested in the shape
of life in the 21st century should read this book." -- Mark C.
Taylor, Director of the Center for Technology in the Arts and
Humanities, Williams College
The global digital network is not just a delivery system for email,
Web pages, and digital television. It is a whole new urban infrastructure--one
that will change the forms of our cities as dramatically as railroads,
highways, electric power supply, and telephone networks did in
the past. In this lucid, invigorating book, William J. Mitchell
examines this new infrastructure and its implications for our
future daily lives.
Picking up where his best-selling City of Bits left off, Mitchell
argues that we must extend the definitions of architecture and
urban design to encompass virtual places as well as physical ones,
and interconnection by means of telecommunication links as well
as by pedestrian circulation and mechanized transportation systems.
He proposes strategies for the creation of cities that not only
will be sustainable but will make economic, social, and cultural
sense in an electronically interconnected and global world. The
new settlement patterns of the twenty-first century will be characterized
by live/work dwellings, 24-hour pedestrian-scale neighborhoods
rich in social relationships, and vigorous local community life,
complemented by far-flung configurations of electronic meeting
places and decentralized production, marketing, and distribution
systems. Neither digiphile nor digiphobe, Mitchell advocates the
creation of e-topias--cities that work smarter, not harder.
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