Цитаты из книги e-topia

Peripheral information is by no means unimportant; in fact, it plays a crucial role in establishing the character of a place and and sustaining your relationship to it. When a room has a window, for example, it provides a continuous flow of information about the external environment - the cycles of day and night, the movement of sunlight and shadows, the succession of bright and cloudy moments, and the alternation of dry and rainy patches. You rarely pay explicit attention to all this, but you are peripherally aware of it, and you feel uncomfortably isolated if you are cut off from it.

This all-encompassing digital system will create new linkages between cities and within cities, and its intercity and intracity components should carefully be distinguished. To begin with, there are significant technical and cost differences among local-area, metropolitan-area, and long-distance networks. But more importantly, they differ in their implications for urban life and form.

Long-distance, intercity linkages are formed by interconnecting major switching centers with high-capacity fiber-optic cables, microwave links, or satellite links to create digital telecommunications backbones. The switching centers are usually known as POPs— points of presence. If they are on backbones that run at gigabit rates, they are gigaPOPs. And large centers built around satellite earth stations have sometimes been promoted as teleports.

Like their pipe-and-wire predecessors, however, digital telecommunications networks will not create entirely new urban patterns from the ground up; they will begin by morphing existing ones. Generally in the past, new urban networks have started by connecting existing activity nodes that had been made possible and sustained by earlier networks. (After all, what else could there be to connect?) Then, like parasites taking over their hosts, they have transformed the functioning of the systems on which they were superimposed, redistributed activities within these systems, and eventually extended them in unprecedented ways.

Specifically, 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. Products and services based on these various technologies are now produced and distributed on a wide economic front—by the telephone, radio and television, cable TV, semiconductor, computer, consumer electronics, software, publishing, and entertainment industries—and these industries have become increasingly interlocked and interdependent. Information has become dematerialized and disembodied; it is now whizzing round the world at warp speed, and in cortex-crackling quantities, through computer networks. And this vast global process is just booting up.

We must put in the necessary digital telecommunications infrastructure, create innovative smart places from electronic hardware as well as traditional architectual elements, and develop the software that activates those places and makes them useful. Finally, we must imagine the architectual, neighborhood, urban, and regional spatial configurations that will be sustainable and will make economic, social, and cultural sense in an electronically interconnected and shrunken world - a world in which distance has lost some of its old sting, but also much of its capacity to keep challenges and threats comfortably removed.

To pursue this agenda effectively, we must extend the definitions of architecture and urban design to encompass virtual places as well as physical ones, software as well as hardware, and interconnection by means of telecommunications links as well as by physical adjacencies and transportation systems. And we must recognize that the fundamental web of relationships among homes, workplaces, and sources of everyday supplies and services—the essential bonds that hold cities together—may now be formed in new and unorthodox ways.

It is, I suggest, a moment to reinvent urban design and development and to rethink the role of architecture. The payoffs are high, and so are the risks. But we have no choice; we cannot realistically opt out. We must learn to build e-topias—electronically serviced, globally linked cities for the dawning début de K.