How will information & communication technologies change urban development?

November 11, 2007 12:13 PM

Transportation systems have always dictated the form of cities and places. How does the advent of modern information & communication technology change this?

Before the Industrial Revolution, cities and their dynamics hadn't changed radically for several thousand years... because the technology of transportation had not changed much. Foot, animal, sail - these were the modes of transportation, and thus of trade and economic growth.

The internal combustion engine changed this dramatically. The steamship, the railroad, and the automobile have all radically affected how and where we live and work. For a good part of this process, though, economic growth was still directly linked to transportation - to moving goods and people from one place to another. Until the advent of modern information & communication technology, and the global information economy, that is.

I'm interested in how this will change the way we build towns and cities. I'd love to hear what you have to say on this subject - your first impressions, thoughts, disagreements.

posted by andrewmarc to technology (7 comments total)

I think cities changed significantly with the widespread adoption of gunpowder, well before the industrial revolution.
posted by aubilenon at 12:21 PM on November 11, 2007

I disagree with your view of the development of cities--the seventeenth century, for instance, transformed London and Paris beyond recognition.

But I don't think the Information Age will transform the city significantly. The public information infrastructure of the eighteenth and nineteenth century--coffeehouses, taverns, newspaper offices, etc.--has already been largely dismantled in the second half of the twentieth century, because of television and radio. I think atomization will continue, but it will have no measurable effect on urban planning.
posted by nasreddin at 12:48 PM on November 11, 2007

Welcome to a large and hotly-debated topic in urban studies. Here is a syllabus for a course more or less on this topic; many of the suggested readings will provide perspective on this question. Manual Castells gets into this in his book The Network Society, described here on Wikipedia. And of course, Richard Florida's work (Wikipedia) relates to this question, particularly in presenting one answer to the "what should cities do?" question. And there are many, many, many more theories of this; the truth is that no one really knows for sure how it will play out, because we are in the middle of it and it is hard to project forward with any accuracy. For example, not long ago no one would have guessed that cellphone networks could be used to leapfrog over poorly implemented telephone systems in developing countries -- but now that it is happening, what is the effect this will have on urban form?

All that said, I think that your assertion:

Before the Industrial Revolution, cities and their dynamics hadn't changed radically for several thousand years

is quite wrong. There are a lot more engines to urban growth and development than just transportation technology (political and economic systems come to mind, for example). Think of the physical and social differences between early Paris, late renaissance Venice, and Rome at its imperial peak, just to pick some European examples. Depending on what you mean by "several thousand years," go back a bit further and look at the Greek city-states. Or for radical change in a fairly short time, think of the New World -- the pre-conquest cities, their decline, and the very different growth of post-conquest urban centers under the Spanish and English colonialists. (Yes, obviously transportation and information systems played a major role in all of these, but were hardly the only factors.)
posted by Forktine at 1:01 PM on November 11, 2007 [2 favorites]

not long ago no one would have guessed that cellphone networks could be used to leapfrog over poorly implemented telephone systems in developing countries

Incidentally, Marshall McLuhan did predict something like this (as a general idea), if I remember correctly.
posted by nasreddin at 1:08 PM on November 11, 2007

I still see people clustering in groups (cities), known as "FIOS available".

But really, a lot of people go a bit nutty when they don't get out and see others in person, and a lot of people live at pretty extreme ranges for doing so already (hello, two hour commute)...so I don't think information technology is going to change things too much more than it already has in developed areas. Flying cars, otoh.......
posted by anaelith at 2:39 PM on November 11, 2007

With improved communications there is slightly less demand for long-distance commuting which may slightly reduce roadbuilding.

And people may tend to be a bit more interested in moving to distant cities if they can still telecommute and otherwise communicate with where they came from.

Bottom line is there may be a tendency for cities not to grow as much, since there's less need for people to concentrate in cities.
posted by JimN2TAW at 8:52 PM on November 11, 2007

Bottom line is there may be a tendency for cities not to grow as much, since there's less need for people to concentrate in cities.

I have no figures in front of me, but I'm reasonably sure that this is not what is happening, particularly if you define "city" not as the central administrative area (the area administrated by the New York mayor's office, say), but rather the urbanized metropolitan area (which in the case of New York goes out into three or four states). Certainly in developing countries, large and medium cities are continuing to grow very rapidly, both through immigration and natural growth. And even some US rustbelt cities are showing some signs of improvement.

Where I think you will see a difference is in the relative rates of growth of the largest cities (New York, Mumbai, London) and smaller cities, with improved information technologies allowing for smaller cities to play larger roles in world markets. And I think that within cities there will be interesting impacts on urban form -- perhaps towards more polycentric cities, or the recent rediscovery of central city living by people without children.

But I think the long term jury is still very much out on all of this, and any definitive claims should be treated as provisional for a long time yet to come. A lot of the more utopian claims about the emancipatory impacts of information technology have not turned out to have much basis in real life, for example; on the other hand, neither have the most pessimistic of Big Brother predictions.
posted by Forktine at 4:20 AM on November 12, 2007 [1 favorite]