November 20, 2004
cities are dead?
Steve Fassman makes an interesting point in the comments of my latest Paris post:
Cities are dead.
With the internet the prime reason for the existence of cities is gone. Cities exist to make it easier to talk to other people to conduct business. The Internet has taken on that mantle and you can have your conversations between basically anyone, anywhere.
I fear that the great cities like Paris will not be able to keep up with the times.
I can relate to this certainly, though I think cities will be with us for a long while yet. Just that now there’s a new game in town, and cities will have to get used to competing more with other viable alternatives. Being stuck in the boonies is no longer the life sentence it once was. And perhaps living in the city will no longer offer the obvious economic advantages over staying down on the farm.
Before we see the decline of the cities, though, I think we’ll see the decline of the skyscaper office building, for similar reasons we saw the decline of the battleship in the 1940s, in favor of the aircraft carrier. Limiting firepower, even massive firepower to a single delivery locus (with HR as the main form of ordinance) is an inefficient way to do it.
So suddenly we see the internet replacing the elevator…
[LINKLUBE:] Go visit Steve’s blog, engineer2entrepreneur.
Viewing cities merely from a economical factor doesn’t do them justice.
There’s a social attraction in the blend of cultures that occur when some odd million people gather in one place. Something you don’t find in the homophilic suburbs.
I know this sounds a lot like someplace else we frequently go. But before we get full immersion VR equipment the physical representation of the Internet will be the cities. Somewhere along the line we’re going to have to re-evaluate the defination of a city (much in the same way we’re redefining societies) but I think culture (in which our personal development exists, yes it sounds hippie but we’re not all who we’re supposed to be just yet), culture will suffer if we break down the cities. People will instead gather simply with people who shares their beliefs and interests, retrieving no new information. By erasing cultural and geographic boundaries we will have a society where new messages spread rapidly but where nothing new gets created.
Wow, I never thought it would have gotten this response.
The Internet has already replaced the elevator. Haven’t you ever gotten an email or IM instead of someone coming to your office who was just 50 feet away?
Look at the replacement for the WTC, it doesn’t come close to replacing the office space destroyed.
Look at outsourcing lots of knowledge jobs have moved to different places. Ironically some outsourcing hasn’t moved job offshore but rather to rural America for much the same reason, lower cost of living.
Will cities disappear, doubtful, but they will need to change their paradigm.
As one who has moved to the boonies and relies pretty heavily on the net for any cultural fix, I think I can speak to this concept. What I get out of living in the sticks is cheap real estate surrounded by miles of relatively unspoiled wilderness, which is nice enough for what it is.
What I can’t get here: restaurants, face time with people of like mind that doesn’t involve an hour’s drive, high speed internet (maybe next year, they tell me, in the mean time its 28K dial up. welcome to the 1990s redux). I guess I can in fact communicate with most people and buy most products online, and do. But I really miss places to go, things to do and people to see within walking distance. I think cities will always be the best way to get these things. The suburbs are the worst of both worlds, combining the drive time I have with the ugliness of bad urban planning.
Planned communities are AN option, as discussed above, but they miss out on one of the other things that I like best about cities: diversity in population and thought…
“Just that now there’s a new game in town, and cities will have to get used to […]”
At least speech they’ll stick around.
1. Wear black and strike haughty avante-guard pose
2. Declare something (anything, man!) is DEAD
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
Ugh, so if cities are dying what is going to be the replacement? More suburban sprawl? Please noooooooo. I think we need to go back to the cities and leave nature the hell alone. We are destroying this planet fast enough we don’t need millions of liberated tourists destroying the last places of beauty. Expanding outside of cities means we further encroach on the natural habitat of plants and animals that are going through mass extinction. You want to live away from cities but you still want your big house. You still want to be able to pack up the kids and travel to the city in your resource wasting vehicle. There is no culture in the boonies except for that of a 9 — 5, strip malls, and Walmarts. Streaming over a high speed connection will NEVER replace the experience of being able to witness an artist’s work in real life. We are social beings who need face to face contact. At the same time we have a knack for destroying our environment. These two traits come together to scream CITY! Keep the destruction concentrated and the people together. Technology will allow us to bridge distances but that does mean cities will die. Skyscrapers are still being built. As soon as one skyscraper makes the record there is allready another being built that will be even taller. As a mobile employee my replacement for facing my boss and co-workers everyday is to spend more time with family and friends. Email, IM and cellphones are not going to decrease face to face contact. They simply give us more choice of who we share that more intimate contact with, and where we live when we share it. People aren’t going to lock themselves in a box just because they can. Or live like a hermit because technology allows them to.
I live in downtown Kansas City, the eye of the hurricane in a city where downtown dies every Friday at 5 when everyone moves back to suburbia and doesn’t wake up until 8 on Monday. It’s much more like the boonies than any subdvided suburb, and my main complaint about living here is that, seeing as there are few residents, there is a shortage of grocery stores around. Meaning that if I need to get milk, or cereal, or a frying pan, I have to drive at least twenty minutes out of town. Cities will not die because of milk, cereal, and frying pans. You can communicate, interact, and order things through the internet, but you can’t get a gallon of milk.
Anonymous: LOL, more like sweats on the recliner.
john, I am not saying that we should go back to the tribal village, nor am I advocating more sprawl. We are actually in a transition period and it will be a while before this transition period ends. I don’t know what it will look like and I doubt anyone else does.
Mega-cities like BosNYWash are no better then suburban sprawl.
Things are too concentrated. All those people need to be supported with water, food, electricity and other raw material.
It seems to me also that some majors forces that have influenced the shape of cities has been groups that have exerted power for their own gain and not for the best interests of the people living there. For example JKF Airport in NY couldn’t have a subway line because of the taxi lobby. Paris is the way it in no small part because of the stone masons guild.
What we have now is a lot of sub-optimal solutions to artificial scarcities. Macy’s used to have the largest department store in the world in NYC and the average Walmart is not all that bigger, it is just a lot easier to build a Walmart in the middle of nowhere then it is to get space for one in a city and that comes from greed on the part of other retailers influencing local government.
I want buildings worth living in. Mega-cities are too concentrated to build in the zero energy style. And sprawl is too diffuse to make mass transit any use at all.
We have a lot of good pieces but have a long way to go before the puzzle is done.
I’m pretty sure that cities are *more* efficient in their user of energy, water, etc. than the country/burbs. It’s true you can’t go off-the-grid, but I think there are more people out there driving SUVs than composting.
Me
I got to meet one of my blogging idols yesterday, and I’m delighted to report that the smart and talented Evelyn Rodriguez is every bit as terrific in person as she is on the web, plus way cuter. And yeah,