The linking of digital communication networks is commonly described as a variation, or even a new dimension, of the kind of manifest network that a city consists of. City' is a seducing metaphor. There are hardly any limits as to what can be contained by this concept. Perhaps it is the richness and openness of it that makes it so attractive as a cultural mirror. As we have learned to know during the last three decades, there are no easy solutions for Society.
Life is ungraspable and still liveable, just like the city.
But the urban metaphor, of course, also runs a risk to become too general, even meaningless. The reference to Bauhaus is not nostalgic. In the 1920s of Bauhaus, the unifying aim had to fight all the surrounding society, and was, as we know, not successful in the end. Instead, the gap seemed to open and grow even wider during the post war era. Sharp tension emerged between contrasting notions of reality on different sides of the scholarly society.