Book details of 'e-topia'

Title	e-topia
Author(s)	William J. Mitchell
ISBN	0262133555
Language	English
Published	September 1999
Publisher	MIT Press

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Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
This little book begins with a big claim: the city is dead, and cyberspace killed it. But Mitchell, it turns out, is too intelligent an observer to really mean anything quite so drastic. Despite his weakness for bold, catchy statements (and it is a weakness), this MIT architecture professor has both feet planted in the long and much-studied history of urban spaces, and he draws from it a pragmatic optimism that keeps his argument both hopeful and nuanced. His real thesis: Under cyberspace's influence, the city is changing, no more or less radically than it did under the influence of postal systems, electricity, and cars. And if we ride the new changes carefully, he insists, the places we live and work in can become "e-topias--lean, green cities that work smarter, not harder." As in his bestselling City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, Mitchell floats his claims on a brisk stream of technological detail, much of it eye-opening, all of it clearly presented. Low-earth-orbit satellites; small-scale, wearable computer networks woven into underpants; artificially intelligent houses; and the logistics of high-tech pizza delivery are just a few of the phenomena that go into Mitchell's sketch of the emergent digital city. Casually erudite nods to urban theorists from Plato to Lewis Mumford to William H. Gates III round out the portrait. In the end, Mitchell shows us the city doing more or less what it has always done: evolving away from its simple, ancient roots toward increasingly mediated complexity.
Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
"The time and the fashion for breathless, the-world-is-new, anything- is-possible rhetoric have passed." It is intriguing that Mitchell ends the first chapter with this statement, since most of the material leading up to it appears to be written in just this gee-whiz, blue-sky manner. The prologue announces the end of the city, laid low by the supremacy of digital networks. With further irony, this epitaph starts with an autopsy of the death of the village once the central well was made redundant by water pipes. The information superhighway may do a lot of things, but it isn't so hot at carrying water, power, food, sewage, and other mundane but necessary items. Chapter one heralds the birth of the information age as of 1993, when Wired magazine was launched, rather than back in the seventies, where most observers put it when the number of information workers first exceeded the number of production workers. The author also tends to use a lot of words like "obvious" and "unstoppable" without much analysis to back them up. After an initial statement about the existence of "privileged places" in networks (without defining what they are), chapter two primarily contains references to technologies that, while most remain in the realm of expensive toys, generally fit under the category of the man-machine interface. Embedded intelligence is the topic for chapter three. Some concepts, like Java, seem to be understood, others, like agent technology, are not. None are explained fully. Chapter four lists wearable and premises computers. In chapter five the emphasis shifts from a mere listing of technologies to some analysis of future needs in housing. Unfortunately, the author assumes that everyone will work from home, and even then manages only to conclude that real estate choices will likely change but will continue to be complex. Social relationships are reviewed in chapter six, but not in full depth. Work, information work at least, gets a once over in chapter seven. Chapter eight lists information, but not physical, services in the city. There is a rough history of communications technologies in chapter nine. Chapter ten says that we can create e-topia, but mostly if we don't want any physical things. This seems to be a work of poetry, rather than text, and of a doggerel sort. The life of the writing relies on popular referents and puns (rock and roil), with an occasional allusion to Brecht, just to keep us unlettered geeks in our place. The point, if there is one, is made early on: things are going to change, and we'd better design the future we want. How we are to do that is not explained in the book, and is left completely as an exercise to the reader. But then, architects are used to leaving the mundane details of their grand visions to engineers. There is nothing wrong with telling people to plan for the future. On the other hand, if that is all you do there isn't any particular point to the exercise. Mitchell says that our cities are going to be transformed by information technology, but the usefulness of his volume is severely limited by his lack of understanding of those technologies and their needs, uses, and restrictions. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1999
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Book description:

"Mitchell has done it again! This dazzling survey of the cyberfuture and its impact on urban life shows that he is still the world's foremost authority on the subject." -- Sir Peter Hall, Bartlett Professor of Planning, University College London "Few people understand the challenges and opportunities of emerging network society better than William J. Mitchell. A visionary with a program, Mitchell not only points us toward a new future but also shows us how to get there. Anyone interested in the shape of life in the 21st century should read this book." -- Mark C. Taylor, Director of the Center for Technology in the Arts and Humanities, Williams College The global digital network is not just a delivery system for email, Web pages, and digital television. It is a whole new urban infrastructure--one that will change the forms of our cities as dramatically as railroads, highways, electric power supply, and telephone networks did in the past. In this lucid, invigorating book, William J. Mitchell examines this new infrastructure and its implications for our future daily lives. Picking up where his best-selling City of Bits left off, Mitchell argues that we must extend the definitions of architecture and urban design to encompass virtual places as well as physical ones, and interconnection by means of telecommunication links as well as by pedestrian circulation and mechanized transportation systems. He proposes strategies for the creation of cities that not only will be sustainable but will make economic, social, and cultural sense in an electronically interconnected and global world. The new settlement patterns of the twenty-first century will be characterized by live/work dwellings, 24-hour pedestrian-scale neighborhoods rich in social relationships, and vigorous local community life, complemented by far-flung configurations of electronic meeting places and decentralized production, marketing, and distribution systems. Neither digiphile nor digiphobe, Mitchell advocates the creation of e-topias--cities that work smarter, not harder.