VIEWPOINT - CUDC Quarterly 2:1 - Fall 2001

Urban Opportunities of the Electronic Age
Ruth Durack
Director, Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio

For years now the prevailing wisdom among academics and social observers has been that the emergence of an information economy would spell disaster for cities. It has been assumed that advanced digital communication and data transfer abilities will inevitably accelerate the trend towards decentralization. If business can be conducted from anywhere, so the scenario goes, and if the Internet continues to play an increasing role in education and entertainment, individuals and family units will retreat to semi-isolation in the single-family castle that they will never have to leave, even to shop. The poor, lacking resources to escape, will be concentrated in  the ruins of the city, eking out a bare existence between the crumbling walls of derelict warehouses and obsolete office buildings.

But this nightmare, like so many predictions about the effects of computers, appears to be unfounded, as evidenced by the recent wave of renewed interest in inner-city living across the United States. To understand why this is happening, at the very moment when technology has conquered geography, we need to look at how the new technologies are changing the nature of the workplace and the processes of industrial production, which is the facet of this revolution that will have the most dramatic effect on the future of cities.

To survive in an increasingly competitive, global marketplace, businesses of all kinds and sizes have instituted organizational rearrangements to increase productivity and efficiency. This "reengineering" relfects a general shift from vertically managed, multi-functional businesses to more horizontally organized collaborations of specialized process teams. Networks of small specialist firms come together for particular projects and reform according to the specific demands of the task at hand. In addition, the definition of traditional business hours is breaking down through automated information services and the time differences involved in operating in a global marketplace. We are doing business in a much broader geographic and temporal arena than we ever have before, but the new data processing and telecommunications capabilities are allowing us to do it from a much smaller and more localized base of operations.

As business continues to break down into smaller, more specialized units, the tendency is to concentrate in clusters of interdependent functions, rather than to disperse in greater isolation. Contrary to the assumption that telecommuting and electronic data transfer will promote the physical separation of business activities, there is growing evidence that precisely the opposite is happening, producing dramatic opportunities for the development of higher density, more vibrant, mixed-use communities.

To understand this counter-intuitive trend, we need to consider the effects of technology and the new structure of business on the daily life of the typical white collar worker. By and large, work has become more integrated into the continuum of life. The typical professional no longer operates on a regular 9am to 5pm schedule from a fixed office location. He often spends more time out of his office than in it, connected to business records and colleagues through e-mail, voicemail, fax and downloadable files. He occasionally begins the day at 4am to connect with colleagues in London on trans-Atlantic time. He drops off last night’s financial analysis at an associate’s house on Saturday morning, on the way to the local market or health club. He takes a break over a cappuccino at the nearby coffee shop while a large file is downloading, or drops off the dry-cleaning, takes the dog for a walk, picks up little Johnny from day-care, or any number of other household chores or entertainment activities, according to the opportunities locally available.

This is precisely the kind of lifestyle that creates demand for an integrated, live/work environment which provides a rich mix of services and entertainments within walking distance of home and workplace–the kind of mixed-use neighborhood that planning and urban design have been struggling so hard to achieve in cities everywhere for the last thirty years. The question is, how can we exploit this new opportunity? What kinds of changes in approach do we need to adopt to promote the unexpected advantages of the electronic workplace? And how can we speed up the adoption of the new techno-lifestyle as an answer to the continuing decline of inner city neighborhoods?

For a start, architecture needs to get past its traditional preoccupation with finding a precise alignment between form and function. Buildings of the information age need to be functionally non-specific and adaptable. It is no accident that the most successful inner-city, mixed-use neighborhoods tend to be developing in historic warehouse districts where the building type lends itself to reuse by a wide variety of functions and where business and residential activities can co-exist in changeable and often invisible combinations. The "loft", with its ability to accomodate home, office, studio, workshop, showroom, gallery, and any combination of these uses, is perhaps the most effective type of development unit for the electronic neighborhood. This kind of flexibility, however, needs to find successful expression in new construction as well as historic renovation projects.

This sort of development also implies a more flexible approach from planners, reducing our reliance on land use as a planning tool. Technological sophistications are breaking down the traditional definitions of land uses, to the point where they are no longer accurate or useful descriptors of function. If we continue to maintain them, we support the segregation of business and residential activites, limiting the possibilities for new, unpredictable combinations and reconfigurations of these activities as the technological future unfolds.

And we need to expand our repertoire of development incentives to more directly support the operational demands of the electronic neighborhood. Providing the latest in telecommunications infrastructure and wiring streets and buildings with appropriate fiber-optic connections is an obvious first step, but there may be other, more creative incentives worth considering. For example, networking all the buildings to central "super-servers" that provide affordable, state-of-the-art computing capabilities and services; or developing shared access "techno-stations" in one or more locations around a district where small companies, or service professionals and researchers working from home can hook up to a range of ultra-sophisticated date processing capabilities that they need occasionally, but cannot afford to acquire individually.

Finally, there must be redoubled attention to the development of a quality public realm, where public life can flourish and public space becomes an invaluable extension of the private domain. This is the challenge that faces urban design in every location, but it assumes an even higher priority in the electronic neighborhood where a satisfactory synthesis of public and private activities is central to the integrated live/work environment. The design of successful public spaces for these neighborhoods demands a more creative multi-disciplinary approach, in which planning, engineering, landscape and architecture provoke each other to see beyond the present paradigm and unlock the design opportunities of a future that embraces technology and all it has to offer.

Adapted and abridged from "Techno-trends: Urban Design Implications of the Electronic Age", in Benson and Roe (eds.), Urban Lifestyles: Spaces-Places-People, Rotterdam: Balkema, 2000. (ISBN 90 5809 169 4)