William J. Mitchell, e-topia: “Urban life, Jim – but not as we know it”
Cambridge, MA., MIT Press, 1999
ISBN 0 262 13355 5
184pp.
US$22.50
(Review copy supplied by MIT Press)
Uploaded 1 March 2000

In his stand-up comedy days back in the 1960s, Woody Allen used to tell a great story about mechanical objects with attitude. He details the relationships he has with various household appliances, such as his blender, his toaster, and the quirkiness of their individual personalities. He meets with them to discuss problems and on occasion has to chastise them (he hits his television set for jumping up and down). One day in a New York elevator, the voice of the automated operator asks him, “are you the guy that hit the television set”, and promptly bounces him up and down the building before dumping him in the basement.

Allen’s story is a farcical narrative of machinic conspiracy, of mechanical devices that have minds of their own and the ability to communicate with each other. William Mitchell tells a similar story in e-topia about the future of adaptive behaviour in machines, of smart, cybernetic houses in which “the distinction between building and computer interface will effectively disappear. Inhabitation and computer interaction will be simultaneous and inseparable” (60):

We should not have to explicitly instruct our appliances and environment at all; if they are really so smart, they should be able to learn what we require of them by watching us. Like the best waiters or personal secretaries, they should be able to anticipate our needs before we are even consciously aware of them. Otherwise, these complicated gadgets are often more trouble than they are worth. (63)

Mitchell would be advised to keep his opinions about gadgets to himself, as he undoubtedly spends a lot of time in elevators.

It’s one thing for technology to be responsive to our needs, but to anticipate and predict them is another matter. Cybernetic autonomy comes at a price, as Ray Bradbury demonstrated in his prescient allegory of adaptive behaviour, The Veldt (1952). Lydia Hadley is made redundant in her ultra-smart “Happy-life home” and the option to sweep the floor herself is a persistent and longed for nostalgia. Mitchell doesn’t seem to be too worried about the implications of machines that do our thinking and feeling for us (“close-fitting networks of implanted, wearable, and pocket devices to attend to our most immediate, ongoing requirements for maintenance of bodily health and comfort” (53)). The swag of metaphysical, political and ethical questions that arise when smart software devices “come in close proximity… automatically detect one another and establish a network connection” (47) don’t enter into the discussion at all. Mitchell may well ask how smart does a washing machine really need to be (64). But in identifying adaptive behaviour in cybernetic systems as the apotheosis of our interface with machines, he portrays a largely uncritical vision of twenty-first century life that, no matter how emergent it all seems, still smacks of The Jetsons.

Mitchell has some fascinating and amusing things to say about wearable computing (“put on your digital devices and network connections like boxer shorts” (55)), the future of work, the teleserviced city and e-commerce (“traditional service businesses will suddenly find themselves Amazoned by upstart dot-coms” (120)). His contrapuntal approach to the paragraph errs decidedly towards the witty turn of phrase and e-topia is well seasoned by pithy one-liners (“Dissect a Furby and you get an electronics lesson” (46)). But like his tendency to stray into the “cyber-smitten” techno-sprach that he elsewhere criticises (29), there is the occasional bon mot that should have been left in his lapidary box: “New urban infrastructures tend to be Viagra versions of older, tireder predecessors that cannot quite do the job any more” (16).

e-topia is an extension of Mitchell’s influential City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn (1994). The book, of necessity, echoes its predecessor, but those familiar with City of Bits will note frequent repetition. It would be unfair, though, to suggest that the one is merely a recapitulation of the other. If City of Bits explored the impact of digital technologies on the concepts of place and space in a very broad, conceptual sense, e-topia extends this by essaying some of the features of this impact, the spatial configurations “that will be sustainable and will make economic, social and cultural sense in an electronically interconnected and shrunken world” (8). e-topia offers a series of scenarios for the future of urban living, an analysis of how the fabric of the everyday will be modified by digital telecommunications. These relationships are vital to Mitchell’s professional interests in architecture and urban planning, since the intersections between civitas and urbs are inexorably caught up with the intervention of technologies of distance, beginning with writing, the telegraph, telephone, radio, television and finally digital connectivity.

Despite the excesses of ruminations on adaptive behaviour, Mitchell approaches his topic from the realistic and refreshing perspective that the effects of digital telecommunications do not necessitate a Gibsonian vision of cyberspace, in which humans and the their built environments are supplanted by liquid architectures and disembodied psyches. Mitchell’s most persuasive insight is simple and, at first glance, appears reactionary: “This all-encompassing digital system will create new linkages between cities and within cities” (19). It seems reactionary in that it flies in the face of the portrait of the digistadt as a dramatic, revolutionary event. It is simple in its perception that digital connectivity has the potential to create new forms of interconnection within and between cities, as well as heighten extant ones; or, as he puts it, greatly increase the “density of linkages” (21). His vision of urbanism and the city is far from alien, since digital connectivity is not proffered as an alternative to, nor substitute for residual modes of communication. It is, as the laws of media dictate, an extension of existing forms and therefore part of an ongoing continuum of superimposed and redistributed activities, in which “new urban networks” come into being by connecting “existing activity nodes that had been made possible and sustained by earlier networks” (15)

Since digital connectivity builds upon traditional forms of telecommunications infrastructure, Mitchell’s twenty-first century city (leaving smart houses out of it for the moment) is one that we can, by and large, imagine fairly readily. To consolidate his point concerning the superimposition of electronic forms of mediation, he draws a useful analogy with the role played by the railroad system in the nineteenth century on the development of urbanism. Whether it be the tracks of the American West or the tunnels of the London underground, there is an intimacy that we immediately associate with these systems of mobility and the rhythms and patterns of daily life they facilitate. Digital telecommunications will be no less intimate. Moving information in the taken-for-granted manner with which trains move people, wires channel electricity or pipes circulate water, digital connectivity will likewise “have the intimacy of underwear” (14). In terms of his overall thesis, then, Mitchell offers a sensible and clearly argued account of the emergent patterns of everyday life for the digitally enhanced cities of the coming century. His position is strengthened by a traditional historiography of urbanism which, as he evinces via the work of Lewis Mumford and others, has always been caught up with telecommunicative questions of connectivity.

Mitchell’s overall tone throughout the discussion is unmistakably speculative, despite the well-documented research and development. His failure to really tackle the realpolitik of his more extreme scenarios (such as adaptive behaviour) can to some extent be explained by the speculative nature of the book, which is contoured by the inflections of the future tense; “Software will continually, automatically upgrade itself via network connections” (65-66). Well, we’ll see. In fact, the book’s mix of likely, possible and highly improbable scenarios is very reminiscent of James Martin’s Telematic Society: A Challenge for Tomorrow (1978), in which certain things described as science fiction, such as on-line networking, are now commonplace, whereas others, such as virtual travel, are still science fictional.

Despite the overall good sense of Mitchell’s vision of a digital future that extends and intensifies telematic vectors with which we are already familiar, it is difficult to totally let him off the hook for his highly speculative approach to adaptive behaviour. This would be a real shortcoming of the book, were it not for an excellent penultimate chapter called “The economy of presence”. Earlier in the book Mitchell asks an important question that pre-empts his conception of an “economy of presence” (129): “What will we use the multifaceted and sometimes contradictory affordances of digital technology for?” (82) As Mitchell convincingly demonstrates throughout the book, digital communications are creating entire architectures of social interaction that occupy more and more of our time. As he puts it, “time spent interacting online is time spent not doing something else” (90). The “economy of presence” is a decisive and foundational notion for reflecting on the determination within our daily social reality of what forms of communication are relevant or appropriate. Mitchell, thankfully, resists the urge to ride the wave of infobahn hysteria, recognizing that there are simply times when good old fashioned face to face communication is the only way to go. In distinguishing between the modalities of asynchronous and synchronous communications, Mitchell persuasively argues that the rise of the modern city came about by depending on both forms of communication. The appropriate benefits and disadvantages of one form over another were determined by the ability of people to choose between them. This element of choice, grounded in a recognition of “the different grades of presence that are now available to us” (129), is reinforced in the age of digital connectivity, not supplanted by it. And it is this element of choice that counters the reductionist, techno-determinism of the extremities of adaptive behaviour, which would rob the individual of the autonomy to decide with whom and by what means and on what topic, they want to communicate.

Gadgets, do your worst.

Darren Tofts