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nonplace urban realm [echo]

\'Non-place urban realm\' was a term bandied around by American urban geographers of the 1970s to describe the city of the future in which motor car-based personal mobility would make place-of-residence immaterial. In this model of society, we would operate within a network of personal and business contacts in which spatial rel-ationships are relatively unimportant. While it is true that out of town retailing and enter-tainment complexes have destroyed many American city centres, the geographic notion of place has not disappeared, mainly because personal mobility is not as uninhibited as predicted in the car-obsessed 1960s and \'70s. Historically, innovations in transport have been the catalysts for change in human geography. Last century it was the railway that enabled people to live further from their place of work, laying the foundation for suburban living. In the USA the car stimulated the development of vast urban sprawls. But roads and cars have merely caused congestion and rail commuters in the south east of England seem to have a pretty grim time of it. The next catalyst for change is likely to be telecommunications.Suburban has become a metaphor for bland, characterless places that are neither urban nor rural, lacking the facilities of the inner city, but not quite achieving the tranquillity of the countryside. Eva Pascoe, Independent columnist, reckons that if the daily need to commute to work was removed, most suburban dwellers would flee either to villages or the inner city. For some people the Internet has already severed the link between place of work and place of residence and some are opting for a more stimulating lifestyle amongst the cafes, theatres and bookshops of the inner city. Electronic shopping with home delivery systems could remove the need for large out-of-town supermarkets with vast car parks that blight the landscape. In Pascoe\'s future world telecommunications must become the key element in urban planning and development. But what will life really be like in this utopian world where the city slickers and the country bumpkins have managed to free themselves from the unhappy compromise of suburban living? French philosopher Paul Virilio has just published a book, Open Sky, in which he conjures up some pretty scary visions of the future. Computer-based communication is dissolving the distinction between \'here\' and \'there\' which means that many business and personal transactions require only a virtual presence. This prospect appals Virilio who goes on to speculate that information technology will become part of the human body, our eyes and brains wired up to enable us to see what we want when we want. In an effort to find out how far we have travelled towards this virtual world, Neal Ascherson (Independent on Sunday 23/11/97) makes the astute observation that, as a result of email and mobile phones, we are already losing the dimension of \'absence\'. We can never be out of contact and \'between the mobile phone and the electronic tag on the thief\'s shin, there is an ominous and growing kinship\'. What are we to make of this paradox? On the one hand we are being offered the freedom to live where we want, while on the other a virtual ball and chain will ensure that we never get too far way. A refreshingly practical assessment of what has happened in the last three years is provided by Robert H Reid in Architects of the Web: 1000 days that built the future of business. This illuminating concoction of technical explanation and business analysis contains case studies and biographies of key individuals and companies responsible for the explosion of the web. The analysis conveys the excitement felt by pioneers such as Kim Polese (Marimba), Jerry Yang (Yahoo), Marc Andreeson (Netscape) and Andrew Anker (Hot Wired) as they hacked their code and formulated new business models. One of many examples is that of Amazon Books which offers one million titles compared to the 170,00 stocked by New York\'s largest bookstore. Perhaps Eva Pascoe\'s vision of reducing the acres of land devoted to retail parks in not so far fetched.A key point emerging from the book is that the challenge is not how to do things on the web but how to use the web to do things differently. Having described how it all happened Reid is in no doubt about the future: \'The hissing infiltration of the Internet\'s open protocols and rules of engagement has already shifted the landscape of the technology industry beyond recognition... and is building a network that will soon extend into every major organisation in the world, fundamentally changing the way businesses, individuals and perhaps even nations mind their affairs and deal with one another\'. Paul Virilio. Open Sky. Verso, 1997.Robert H Reid. Architects of the Web: 1000 days that built the future of business. Wiley, 1997.IAN WATSONThe author writes in a personal capacity.

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