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September 25, 2000
Invisible Cities
Is the Internet making urban centers obsolete? Not a chance.
By Hal Cohen
Cities have no place in the new economy – at least, that is, according to the literature of the new economy. Alvin Toffler coined the term "electronic cottage" in the '70s to describe the successor to centralized urban structure, and in the '80s John Naisbitt cheerily waved good-bye to the "abandoned cities" of industrial America. A chorus arose in the '90s to agree: Nicholas Negroponte said that high tech "will remove the limitations of geography," George Gilder called cities "leftover baggage from the industrial era" and William Knoke described our "age of Everything-Everywhere" as a "placeless society" in a "spaceless world."Meanwhile, reality is headed in a different direction. If you want a good job as a programmer, new-media player or biotech researcher, you have a choice of living in perhaps a dozen big cities. Moreover, the most innovative firms tend to locate in highly concentrated urban districts such as Cambridge, Mass., Manhattan's Silicon Alley or the Loop in Chicago. Yet the techie prophets' forecasts of urban decline remain pervasive; there is a disconnect between reality and the popular folklore. In the last decade or so, a handful of academic urban planners – among them William Mitchell at MIT, Manuel Castells at the University of California at Berkeley and Mitchell Moss at New York University – have reached a somewhat different consensus. Their analysis lacks the thrill-ride futurism of Toffler's or the silk-suited, boardroom purr of Negroponte's, but it has the advantage of engaging the real world. As Mitchell, dean of MIT's School of Architecture and Planning, summarizes, they predict a complex and contradictory restructuring of economic geography, "where simultaneously some things will decentralize to get larger markets, other things will centralize in order to achieve economies of scale and still other things will mobilize because they are chasing labor." In other words, the future holds a world not so different from our own. Who is right in this debate – the futurists or the social scientists – is a matter of more than academic bragging rights. The disagreement over cities masks a larger debate about technology's capacity for deep structural change on the one hand, and the staying power of history, culture and landscape on the other. Our faith in a world of accelerating change has led us to anticipate radical transformation at every turn. It has trained us to see revolution everywhere, when we more often are witness only to evolution.
The cities-are-dead case is simple. Industrial capitalism, it argues, needed to concentrate capital, goods, services, shipping, labor and production in one place: the city. But as high tech rewrites the rules of economics, "location" becomes – quite literally – immaterial. Who cares whether fiber-optic cable is run under Houston or Helena, code written in San Francisco or Sault Ste. Marie, a homepage accessed from Boston or Beaumont? Knowledge, information and creativity are the new commodities, and they are all perfectly intangible. Space and place become irrelevant, and there is no longer a reason for urban agglomerations. An elegant and persuasive theory. So where did the prophets go wrong? Let us take a guided tour of their missteps. To begin, the theory hinges on the notion famously advanced by Negroponte that "bits" – information – are replacing "atoms" as the embodiment of value. Negroponte is careful to point out that, say, sweater manufacturers are still in the atoms business. Nonetheless, he says, the real money is in the world of bits. A vast and growing majority of high-tech commodities – from software to movies to a host of services from consulting to phone sex – are massless and placeless and thus can exist in absolute freedom, as if the world were one big info-ether. This is an excellent bit of rhetoric, as far as it goes, but it has led to many mistaken conclusions. Forget that atoms have proven their staying power, as the current obsession with the bricks part of the bricks-and-clicks equation readily demonstrates. In the real world, even bits have to go on things (CDs, Zip disks), through things (fiber-optic, coaxial), and into things (Internet servers, PCs) for them to matter. And each of these things does have mass and location. Bits, it turns out, are still bound by the same old laws, and this is the Achilles' heel of the whole cities-are-dying argument.
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