Customer Reviews

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

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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.