Making the Digital City: The Early Shaping of Urban Internet Space (Design and the Built Environment) [Hardcover]

Alessandro Aurigi (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0754643646 | ISBN-13: 978-0754643647 | Publication Date: August 2005

Since the late 1990s, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been hailed as a potentially revolutionary feature of the planning and management of Western cities. Economic regeneration and place promotion strategies have exploited these new technologies; city management has experimented with electronically distributed services, and participation in public life and democratic decision-making processes can be made more flexible by the use of ICTs. All of these technological initiatives have often been presented and accessed via an urban front-end information site known as 'digital city' or 'city network.' Illustrated by a range of European case studies, this volume examines the social, political and management issues and potential problems in the establishment of an electronic layer of information and services in cities. The book provides a better understanding of the direction European cities are going towards in the implementation of ICTs in the urban arena.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Alessandro Aurigi holds a Laurea in Architecture from Florence University, Italy, and a PhD from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, where he is currently based. He has worked previously at University College London. His main research interest is studying the relationships between the emergence of the 'information society' and the ways we imagine, conceive, represent, and manage buildings and cities.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Ashgate Pub Co (August 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0754643646
• ISBN-13: 978-0754643647
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,890,116 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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4.0 out of 5 stars Berglund Center for Internet Studies Review by Jeffrey Barlow, April 26, 2011

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Berglund Center for Internet Studies - See all my reviews

This review is from: Making the Digital City: The Early Shaping of Urban Internet Space (Design and the Built Environment) (Hardcover)

Some books are very difficult to review because they defy classification. This can be because they are very broad and might be of interest to a number of audiences, or because they are written for a small niche audience. Making the Digital City is of the former sort, though everything about the title and the presentation screams to the contrary. At first glance it seems that it is meant for a very small group interested in city planning, or perhaps more broadly, in architecture and the Internet. However, its appeal is in fact much broader.

The central focus of the book is a study of two early European "digital city" projects. These were digital projects intended to take the physical existence of a city, with its varieties of spaces, inhabitants, and complex social and economic transactions, into hyperspace. He defines "digital cities" as "web-based urban information systems and virtual communities." This focus might seem a rather odd one, but much of post-modern thought emerged from, and in turn, influenced architecture. The underlying metaphor, after all, of "cyberspace" is of a physical space, though we are all aware that it exists firstly as stored digital data, and lastly as the browser's interpretation of that data. "A town" is fundamentally, as Le Corbusier, generally regarded as the master of modern architecture and planning said, "pure geometry." This work then, is as much about cyberspace and the many ways we think of it and use it as it is about urban planning. Given a serious interest in the impact of the Internet, this work is well worth reading.

For a full review see Interface, Volume 6, Issue 3.