Sadie Plant
Sadie Plant graduated from the University of Manchester in 1985
and was awarded her PhD in Philosophy in 1989. She was
Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham for five
years, and was appointed as a Research Fellow at the University
of Warwick in 1995. She published The Most Radical Gesture, The
Situationist International in a Postmodern Age in 1992, and Zeros
and Ones, Digital Women and the New Technoculture in 1997.
She is now writing full-time, and her next book, Dangerous
Substances will be published in 1999.
THE MESHED CITY
The city has become a prominent motif in many discussions of
virtual space. The net is often conceived as a city or a network of
cities, and the identities which populate it tend to be implicitly
configured as city-dwellers too.
As a vast global sprawl of spaces and activities, with rooms,
homes, addresses, pathways, highways, and an eclectic mix of
red-light districts, administrative zones, banking quarters, cafés,
shops and malls, the net invites this comparison with urban space.
But are such representations of the city on the net actually working
as the city works? Or are they the digital equivalent of architectural
models, idealized scapes which resemble the city, but share none
of its real functions and activities? Given that the city's ability to
juggle complex interactions of many different kinds, scales, and
orders of activity - software, hardware, and wetware - has been
one of its defining characteristics, it is not even clear that a purely
digital zone could ever be considered a city in anything more than
the most metaphorical of senses. What exactly would a soft city
be? The phrase is always suggestive, but what is often its
sweeping use tends to distract from what are actually very real
and informative links between urban and virtual space.
*****
Contemporaneous with the emergence of cyberspace, cities
themselves have been changing fast. In the last twenty years,
many of the West's modern cities have had to rejuvenate
themselves as the large-scale manufacturing industries which
once sustained them have been subsumed by services and hitech industries. Those once in the Soviet sphere of influence have
been dramatically changed by the introduction of relatively free
markets and uncensored communication, and some of those once
relegated to the periphery of the Western world have grown with a
speed that makes the development of many European and
American cities seem remarkably slow. Cities have even been
built from scratch: Shenzen, now a city of several million people,
was still a Pearl River fishing village in the 1970s. Some are their
own experimental zones. In Malaysia, Cyberjaya is being built
from scratch as an intelligent urban zone. Singapore, which hopes
to be the first or the most intelligent city in the world, is integrating
its systems of traffic control, education, health and commercial
exchange to the point at which the life of the actual city becomes
inextricable from its electronic representation.
The last twenty years of digitization have also had an incisive
impact on more abstract analyses of the city. The computer has
multiplied and magnified the perceptible world, rendering much
that was imperceptible perceptible, and exposing molecular
complexity inside previously large-scale, simple things. It has
revealed repeating patterns, processes extending across complex
systems of many different scales and kinds: brains, bodies,
economies, cities, and information networks too. It has also made
it abundantly clear that such entities are more or less open
systems insofar as they interconnect and interact with each other
and their environments. And while too much openness can lead to
their collapse, too vigorous an effort to turn such systems into preplanned hierarchies risks constraining their potential and
obstructing the direction of their growth.
The French historian Fernand Braudel, renowned for his
meticulous attention to detailed historical material, distinguished
between two fundamentally different kinds of early European
cities. Those towns destined to become administrative capitals
tended to be landlocked, hierarchical, relatively self-contained Paris and Madrid are good examples. The other kind of town was
the port, such as Venice, Genoa, and Amsterdam, which was
often built in impoverished or difficult geographical circumstances
and was consequently heavily invested in trade. This was a style it
also tended to export: even the colonial off-shoots of such ports most notably New York - were established as strategically
positioned trading posts rather than territorial capitals. There were
plenty of hybrids as well: London, for example, was both a port
and capital. And they too tended to reproduce themselves: Hong
Kong and Singapore have both become administrative centres as
well as gateway ports. In a sense, every city tend to be something
of a mixture of these types. Even the most territorial capital city
must trade and interact with the wider world, and the most chaotic
port breeds its own kinds of order too.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Europe's rapid
industrialization had expanded populations and necessitated the
accelerated growth of cities which emerged as unprecedented
concentrations of people, processes, and ideas. As
communications within and between cities became increasingly
extensive, even landlocked capitals became gateway ports as they
emerged as nodal points on global networks of trade routes and
information flows. The nineteenth century city fathers did their best
to clean up the cities and impose order on what had developed as
an anarchic mess, but the sheer size and complexity of the cities
guaranteed that some chaotic elements have always survived.
The modern city was a zone of unprecedented regulation and
unprecedented freedom too. Many of the writers, artists, and
intellectuals who flocked to them cultivated a new urban sensibility
which defied the mainstream image of the city as a concentration
of commercial and administrative power, and instead found its
dreams coming true on the city's undersides and in its
undergrounds.
Regardless of the dramatic development of the twentieth century
city, many discussions of the virtual city continue to take their
flavour from the work of the futurists, dadaists, and surrealists,
whose fluid, almost hallucinatory conception of the city now finds a
realization in cyberspace. But even for the most romantic
nineteenth century flâneurs, it was the way the city worked, not
just the images it left, which gave the metropolis so much of its
appeal. Although many of the cities they enjoyed were landlocked
capitals, like Paris, Zurich, and Berlin, these cities acquired
gateway flavours of their own by providing the artists not only with
stimulation, inspiration, but access to information too. They gained
contact with each other and each other's works, access to libraries
and book shops, exposure to the emerging mass media, and a
variety of outlets for their finished work: agents, galleries, and
publishers all concentrated in the urban zone. The city even
provided them with readily available and cheap materials - paper,
brushes, notebooks, pens.
In spite of the sense of freedom and adventure which they
expressed with these materials, the dream of the sanitized,
fortified city has reasserted itself many times, often in an attempt
to reintroduce the structure and security of an older rural life to the
cities of the twentieth century. In the 1930s there were several
calls for the restoration of such structural stability. In Germany,
fascism condemned the metropolis as "the melting pot of all evil...
of prostitution, bars, illness, movies, Marxism, Jews, strippers,
Negro dancers, and all the disgusting off-spring of so-called
'modern art.'" [1] Stalin's Moscow epitomized the Marxist
sentiment that "architecture had to be expressive,
representational, oratorical. Every building, no matter how modest
its function, had henceforth to be a monument." [2] And in Rome,
Mussolini joined the call for a "vast, orderly, powerful" city whose
construction would wipe away "the centuries of decadence" which
had preceded it. [3]
Such idealized cities made beautiful blue-prints, but they proved
impossible to build. Cities are not objects of knowledge, things to
be planned and designed in advance, but immensely intricate
interplays of forces, interests, zones, and desires too complex and
fluid for even those who inhabit them to understand. As the
modern avant-garde had always known, it might have been
possible to appraise the rural village in a single glance, but the
sheer size and heterogeneity of the city demanded unprecedented
fragmentations of perspective and radical new ways of expressing
this radically new landscape. There is always more than meets the
most perceptive eye, and "one never retraces the same pathway
twice, for the city is in a constant process of change, and thus
becomes dreamlike and magical, yet also terrifying in the way a
dream can be. Life and its certainties slither away underfoot. This
continual flux and change is one of the most disquieting aspects of
the modern city." [4]
The possibility that such complex, multiplicitous zones could ever
be ruled has always been improbable. Even the most open-ended
plans can go awry when, in defiance of the blue-prints, all those
unpredictable and additional features which don't look great on
paper start to appear. Weeds and grasses lift the paving stones;
drugs, sex, and rock 'n' roll make their presence felt. This is not
only because the movements and desires of its inhabitants cannot
be captured by a city plan, but also because a city is simply not
the kind of thing which can be planned. It is not a structure, but a
culture, an open and dynamic system whose complexity bestows it
with a life of its own. It is more akin to an eco-system than an
object of knowledge to be programmed and designed. It is a
cybernetic assemblage, an intricate interplay of forces, interests,
trends and tendencies too fluid for even those who inhabit them to
get a grip on the whole thing. Plans and planners merely add to
the cacophony.
*****
Singapore is a shining contemporary example of the tensions
implicit in this mix. On the one hand, the city is a gateway, a port,
a nodal point in a network of both actual transport and virtual
communications. Wired to an extent which leaves other cities
standing - more than 30% of the population own a computer, and
10% are on the Net - Singapore is a important junction in
cyberspace as well as for the shipping routes and air-lines of the
world. And it is emerging as a meshed city, with virtual spaces
indissoluble from the actual dynamics of the actual city.
But Singapore is a capital as well. More than this, it is a city-state,
conveniently situated on its own water-locked territory, an island
or, as it often refers to itself, a lagoon, a nodal point of calm in the
ocean of ungovernable storms it knows as the rest of the world. Its
political and cultural atmosphere can be as stifling as its glass
house climate. It is precisely this tension between top-down,
centralised control and the desire to be a networked, gateway port,
which makes Singapore one of the most interesting of
contemporary cities. It has unwittingly placed itself on the front-line
of the battle between ordered hierarchy and distributed
intelligence. If it can maintain this tension, there is hope for even
more deliberately planned cities such as Cyberjaya. But if, as the
history of urban life suggests, cities are inevitably composed of too
many complex links and unknown factors for such top-down
control to contain them, the most dynamic cities of the future will
be those which have allowed both their virtual networks and their
actual architectures to emerge and converge in more bottom-up
ways.
If these tensions are crucial to cities of all kinds, they are of even
more immediate interest to researchers in the intelligence and
security communities. This is, after all, where it all began: Arpanet
was initiated in the late 1960s by the US Department of Defense in
an effort to develop secure and robust communications systems in
support of very large-scale, hardware based weapons of war. It is
difficult to resist the thought that the efficiency and security
advantages of such a network were lessons learnt from the
Vietcong, whose guerrilla tactics of ant-like distribution were
embodied in their famous systems of tunnels, a veritable maze of
underground passageways which could be damaged but not so
easily destroyed.
If they did once learn from the Vietcong, US Defence analysts are
now learning from the even more distributed strategies employed
by microbes, ants, and neurons. The small and the many are
replacing the large and the few in every context relevant to
security: weapons systems, military units, computers, corporations
and, indeed, ultimately states. And as central intelligence gives
way to distributed intelligence, defense analysts now talk about the
mesh, a system of systems which includes not only the links
between people and computers which compose the net, but also
all the networks which connect myriads of other, smaller systems
and pieces of equipment too. The mesh links the net to the
sensors and monitors embedded in elements of the actual world:
weapons systems, aeroplanes, traffic lights, remote cameras, toll
booths, shopping check-outs, automated factories and
warehouses, intelligent buildings, hospitals, weather stations,
satellites, utility meters, and so on. The material world becomes
enmeshed.
*****
It is with the emergence of such integrated, small-scale nets that
the virtual city comes into its own. At this point, it is not a digital
replica of the old city, a virtual rendition of the metropolis, but
instead a complex mesh which both includes and connects
cybernetic space. If a city is an open system, its interconnectivity
must extend across an immense variety of material flows to
become not a soft, but a meshed city, a system whose complexity
embraces flows of information, and also movements of population,
biomass, and heat. With apologies to Vladimir Vernadsky, it
becomes a kind of info-socio-bio-geo-chemical network, a
symbiotic entity in which information flows continually interact with
all the other forms, scales, and speeds of communication at work
in the world.
Notes:
1. From the party paper, 'Völkische Beobachter,' in BM Lane,
Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945, Harvard
University Press, 1986, p. 155.
2. A Kopp, Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City
Planning, Thames and Hudson, 1970, p. 227.
3. RC Fried, Planning the Eternal City: Roman Politics and
Planning since World War II, Yale University Press, 1973,
p. 31.
4. Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City, p. 3.
Some of the material in this paper was first aired in'No
Plans', Architects in Cyberspace, Architectural Design,
1995.