Prologue: Urban Requiem, p 4 – 5 “we need to innovate—to reinvent public places, towns, and cities for the twenty-first century. […] The old social fabric—tied together by enforced commonalities of location and schedule—no longer coheres. What shall replace it?”
1 March of the Meganets, p 13 “the crucial ingredients of the incendiary brew have been digital information storage, transmission, networking, and processing hardware, together with the associated software and interface capabilities.”
1 March of the Meganets, p 29 “it turns out that we face neither millenium-any-day-now nor its mirror image—apocalypse-real-soon. Instead, we have been presented with the messy, difficult, long-term task of designing and building our future—and making some crucial social choices as we do so—under permanently changed, postrevolutionary conditions.”
3 Software: New Genius of the Place, p 44 – 45 “Some smart objects require specialized sensing capabilities, as appropriate to their particular roles. They may be equipped, if necessary, with cameras and microphones as “eyes” and “ears.” They may incorporate temperature and humidity sensors. They might watch out for tiny traces of explosives, drugs, or pollutants. There might be miniature accelerometers to detect motion, piezoelectric detectors for forces and stresses in structural elements, micropower impulse radar (MIR) to measure distances and fuel levels, electric field sensors for capturing gestural information, and digital compasses to track orientation. They might even make use of living cells as detectors for hormones and microorganisms. The list is potentially endless.
[…] new tag and sensor technologies allow objects to become aware of one another and to begin to interact. This is the first, elementary step toward artificial ecosystems and societies of smart stuff.”
3 Software: New Genius of the Place, p 46 “Eventually, we will cease to conceive of computers as separate devices, and begin to regard machine intelligence as a property that might be associated with just about anything.
We will increasingly inhabit a world of things that don’t just sit there, but actually consider what they are supposed to be doing and choose their actions accordingly.”
3 Software: New Genius of the Place, p 50 “equipping a place with its genius has simply become a software implementation task. Lines of code can supply every electronically augmented environment with a tailor-made, digital genius that makes its presence felt through input devices and sensors, displays, and robotic actuators. It can respond to the needs of its inhabitants, adapt to changes in its surroundings, and—by making use of its network connectivity—focus global resources on current local tasks. By virtue of the rules that it encodes, it can facilitate some activities and discourage or exclude others. It can even enforce ethical and legal norms.
Code is character. Code is the law.”
4 Computers For Living In, 58 “the old dream of a robot-serviced future is finally materializing—but in the form of geographically distributed assemblages of diverse, highly specialized, intercommunicating intelligent artifacts, not those cadres of clanking multipurpose humanoids imagined in the late industrial era”
4 Computers For Living In, 59 “Our buildings will become less like protozoa and more like us. We will continually interact with them, and increasingly think of them as robots for living in.
In the distant past, they were little more than skeleton and skin. Following the industrial revolution, they acquired elaborate mechanical physiologies—heating-ventilation-air conditioning (HVAC) systems, water supply and waste removal, electrical power and other energy systems, mechanical circulation systems, and a wide variety of safety and security systems; pretty soon, these evolved to the point where they were responsible for the bulk of a building’s construction and operating costs. Today, in the wake of the digital revolution, they are getting artificial nervous systems, sensors, displays, and computer-controlled appliances; the structure becomes a chassis for the sophisticated electronic systems that play a rapidly growing role in responding to the requirements of the inhabitants.”
4 Computers For Living In, 63 “dynamic pricing of network-distributed digital information, based on its timeliness and relevance in specific contexts, provides one possible solution to problems created by collapse of the “intellectual property” approach to controlling and marketing information. The idea is to charge high prices for really hot stuff, and let everything else be inexpensive or even free.”
5 Homes and Neighborhoods, 75 “At the lower end, by contrast, employers are the ones who stand to benefit most directly. The live/work home shifts the responsibility and cost of maintaining workspace from employer to employee, and makes it far more difficult for union organizers and government inspectors to enforce workplace protections. In the extreme, home workspaces can become exploitive home sweatshops.”
5 Homes and Neighborhoods, 77 “telecommunications networking can add great value to localities where relatively well-off people would like to live. It can remove constraints that have prevented them from doing so in the past. But it doesn’t do much for localities that have no intrinsic attraction. Nor does it help people who find themselves trapped in marginalized, underserviced areas and are too poor to move.”
5 Homes and Neighborhoods, 78 “ the effect of decreasing reliance on adjancency may actually be even greater centralization of particular activities on these sorts of locations. The elites who control the global economy, and benefit most directly from it, will want to cluster together at vibrant and attractive locations. Geographic dispersion of enterprises, and concentration of ownership, control, and profit appropriation, can turn out to be opposite sides of the same coin.”
6 Getting Together, 94 – 95 “Now, by telephoning or emailing ahead to arrange precise times and places, you can end up meeting only those you explicitly choose to meet. It is efficient, but also a condition that threatens us with loss of public life and growing social fragmentation.
At the extreme, electronic management of face-to-face meetings can render some members of society literally invisible to others.”
6 Getting Together, 96 – 97 “On the one hand, global information flows are reducing the importance of old political borders and diminishing the effectiveness of physical public space in producing and representing internal social integration. Simultaneously, electronic privacy and interaction management technologies are creating the possibility of new schisms and subdivisions. […] If public life is not to disintegrate, communities must still find ways to provide, pay for, and maintain places of assembly and interaction for their members—whether these places are virtual, physical, or some new and complex combination of the two. And if these places are to serve their purposes effectively, they must allow both freedom of access and freedom of expression.”
7 Reworking the Workplace, 108 – 109 + p 174 NOTE 14 “The various new sorts of electronic linkages among employees, consultants, suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and customers, unlike those accomplished through physical proximity, can rapidly be reconfigured in response to changing conditions and competitive pressures.
Globally mobile capital drives this ongoing process of reconfiguration and adaptation by continually seeking out locations where labor markets and general business conditions are currently most attractive, while multinational corporations take vigorous advantage of their ability to distribute their activities in pretty much any ways they may choose. As Lester Thurow has put it, “The global company simultaneously permits, encourages, and forces companies to move to the lowest-cost locations.” Furthermore, since capital can now migrate at far faster rates than people can, multinational capital can effectively use the threat of withdrawal from a community and so can more readily get the upper hand in its dealings with labor and with governments.
[… NOTE 14] Since the physical means of production are still often expensive to move, the threat of withdrawal will often precede or even head off actual withdrawal. It will pay companies to try to drive down wages and taxes in their current locations to avoid having to pay moving costs.”
7 Reworking the Workplace, 109 ERIC HOBSBAWM “City states like Hong Kong and Singapore revive, extraterritorial ‘industrial zones’ multiply inside technically sovereign nation-states like Hanseatic steelyards, and so do offshore tax havens in otherwise valueless islands whose only function is, precisely, to remove economic transactions from the control of nation-states. The ideology of nations and nationalism is irrelevant to any of these developments.”
7 Reworking the Workplace, 110 “Now we have not only a global economy, but one that responds (and must be responded to) very rapidly, and that threatens old stabilities as a result.”
7 Reworking the Workplace, 111 “To win at this game in the long run, [cities] will need the right sorts of local attractions to retain the talent—in particular, pleasant and stimulating local environments, high-quality educational and medical services, and sufficiently flexible transportation infrastructures and building stocks to accommodate rapidly reconfiguring patterns of activity.
[…] How can enterprises with global interests be motivated to support infrastructure construction and maintenance, preservation of environmental quality, and provision of good education and medical care in particular local contexts? How can the notoriously short time horizons of these big-time economic actors be extended far enough to make a real difference? How can they become committed citizens of the diverse and scattered local communities that they engage?
These will be life-or-death policy questions for civic leaders of the twenty-first century. Get the answers wrong, and face the specter of the Schumpeterian dumpster. Get them right, and cities may—as some optimistic commentators have suggested—be “poised for a huge surge in economic growth.” ” (DIANE COYLE)
8 The Teleserviced City, 116 – 117 “Wherever [.] electronic monitoring is carried out, it adds what are sometimes called quaternary social relationships—those that exist between observed and anonymous observer—to our primary, secondary, and tertiary relationships. And as vigilant civil libertarians have been quick to point out, we could well end up imprisoning ourselves in a vast electronic Panopticon.”
8 The Teleserviced City, 120 “Society as a whole is becoming more and more dependent on a vast, complex web of automated, electronic intermediation”
8 The Teleserviced City, 121 “If electronically achieved efficiencies are to yield real human benefits, they must be complemented by opportunities to spend freed-up time on something better […] We will be able to count the wired, live/work home a social success if it can provide opportunities to devote more time and energy to our most valued primary relationships. The small-scale twenty-four-hour neighborhood will be a winner if it can encourage and reward renewed attention to community building.”
8 The Teleserviced City, 124 “something of a paradox emerges; hot spots of electronically mediated activity—such as Manhattan’s Financial District, the City of London, or the teleworking-millionaire enclave of Aspen—become magnets for the low-wage service workers who do the sorts of things that computers and electronically controlled machinery cannot. And, of course, these concentrations of service workers become part of the attraction of such localities for the more privileged. It is a dirty little semisecret, then, that all of these high-flying places have large, far less interesting and attractive, low-rent counterparts somewhere nearby.”
9 The Economy of Presence, 129 “We will [..] plot our actions and allocate our resources within the framework of a new economy of presence. In conducting our daily transactions, we will find ourselves constantly considering the benefits of the different grades of presence that are now available to us, and weighing these against the costs.
Elements of this economy of presence were in place and structured daily life in the cities of the past. But digital telecommunications infrastructure and smart spaces are now completing the system, and as a result they are introducing new possibilities and radically restructuring comparative benefits and costs.”
10 Lean and Green, 147 “familiar urban patterns have lost their inevitability.”
10 Lean and Green, 148 – 149 “IBM estimated that junked computers were taking up a couple of million tons of U.S. landfill at the turn of the century. It was also estimated that computers were consuming ten percent of the total U.S. electronic power supply. But these levels are certainly modest enough to promise very substantial savings of resources through substitution of electronics for construction. And the trend is toward smaller devices, greener manufacture, and lower power consumption.”