E-topia: urban life, Jim---but not as we know it

Reviewed by Chris Bodnar Carleton UniversiO~ Journalism and Mass Communication Program p art visionary, part pragmatic, William Mitchell approaches the subject of cities in the new information economy and society in his new book e-topia: Urban Life, Jim--But Not As We Know It. He approaches his subject with an eloquence of precision, devoid of academic utterances and jargon. The person, who five years ago in his book City of Bits predicted that it may, one day, be possible to send e-mail from your plane seat, explains how telecommunications infrastructure must now be viewed as an essential and integral part of the city and its planning--and vice versa. Mitchell states a bold outlook in the book's opening lines: "The city--as understood by urban theorists from Plato and Aristotle to Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs--can no longer hang together and function as it could in earlier times. It's due to bits; they've done it in. Traditional urban patterns cannot coexist with cyberspace. " Within this context, Mitchell, the Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, illustrates the fundamental dichotomies of the city and technology: as technology, and telecommunication in particular, facilitates increasingly decentralized production, socializing and commerce, the importance of space is increasing on an accelerated basis. Thus, the city is the paramount space of influence in the new economy. Mitchell advocates embracing the changes technology will bring. He examines how the city might be built to serve the new economy and encompass as many of technology's fruits as possible. This work acts as an insightful follow-up to his 1995 book City of Bits. Within a five year period, the amount of literature published on the state of the city has increased by tremendous amounts. In this time, Mitchell's own predictions, email in airplanes among them, have come to reality. This has sparked interest both within urban development circles as planners attempt to account for the building of cities for a new economy as well as within sociological disciplines as social scientists begin to assess the social benefits and consequences of the cyberage. While Mitchell highlights the increasing importance of space in the technological information economy, he also delineates a problem around access to the resources of such a society. He points out that "When it all shakes out, the guiding real estate principal turns out to be this: telecommunications networking can add great value to localities where relatively well-off people would like to live. But it doesn't do much for localities that have no intrinsic attraction. Nor does it help people who find themselves trapped in marginalized, under-serviced areas and are too poor to move. " In his credit, only a year prior to e-topia's publication, Mitchell has co-edited a reader of essays on access to technology. Nonetheless, in the craze of the information economy, the unofficial economies continue down paths of marginalization and lack of recognition. Mitchell does little to address this dilemma of the city in e-topia. One thing urban planners realize in contemporary times is the incredible impact telecommunications infrastructures are having on all parts of cities. The