Mitchell, William J. : Massachusetts Institute of Technology
William J. Mitchell is Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, and Professor of Architecture and Media
Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sample Chapter
As the fin-de-K countdown cranked into the nineties, I became increasingly curious about the technicians I saw
poking about in manholes. They were not sewer or gas workers; evidently they were up to something quite different.
So I began to ask them what they were doing. "Pulling glass," was the usual reply.
They were stringing together some local, fragments of what was fast becoming a worldwide, broadband, digital telecommunications
network. Just as Baron Haussmann had imposed a bold spider's web of broad, straight boulevards on the ancient
tangle of Paris, and as nineteenth-century railroad workers had laid sleepers and steel to shrink the windy distances
of the North American frontier, these post-whatever construction crews were putting in place an infobahn -and thus
reconfiguring space and time relationships in ways that promised to change our lives forever. Yet their revolutionary
intervention was swift, silent, and (to most eyes) invisible.
At about the same time, I discovered - as did many others - that I no longer had to go to work. Not that I suddenly
became idle; it's just that the work now came to me. I did not have to set out every morning for the mine (as generations
of my forebears had done), the fields, the factory, or the office; I simply carried a lightweight laptop computer
that gave me access to the materials on which I was working, the tools that I required, and the necessary processing
power. When I wanted to connect to the network, I could just plug it in to the nearest telephone socket or to the
RJ-11 connections that were beginning to appear on airplane seats. Increasingly, I found that I did not even need
to be near an outlet; my pocket-sized cellular telephone could do the job. Nor, in the age of the Walkman, did
I have to go to the theater to be entertained. More and more of the instruments of human interaction, and of production
and consumption, were being miniaturized, dematerialized, and cut loose from fixed locations.
How was the laptop on which I am writing these words (in an airport lounge) designed and built? Neither by an old-fashioned
craftsman, lovingly contriving it like a Stradivarius violin, nor in some sprawling, smokestacked, Fordist factory.
Its components and subassemblies were engineered and manufactured concurrently at locations scattered throughout
the world-from Silicon Valley to Singapore. Computer-aided design (CAD) systems, computer-controlled processes,
and industrial robots were used at every step. Component fabrication and product assembly operations were geographically
separated, and component deliveries were carefully paced and orchestrated to avoid both shortages and unnecessary
stockpiling. The various design, component manufacture, and product assembly tasks were performed not within a
single industrial corporation, but by different members of an intricate international alliance. The finished product's
software-which I chose and installed myself-is as crucial as the hardware. Now that this complex artifact is in
my hands it is intensively used, but its useful life is short; soon it will be obsolete. When it can no longer
connect me to the electronic information environment as effectively as some competing product (even though it still
works perfectly well), I shall simply transfer my software and data and throw the superseded carcass away; the
information ecosystem is a ferociously Darwinian place that produces endless mutations and quickly weeds out those
no longer able to adapt and compete. Neither handicraft of the sort so passionately defended by Ruskin and Morris,
nor durable, standardized, mass-produced, industrial object of the kind that fascinated the early modernists, my
laptop is an emblematic product of the electronic information age.
The texts that follow reimagine architecture and urbanism in the new context suggested by these observations -
that of the digital telecommunications revolution, the ongoing miniaturization of electronics, the commodification
of bits, and the growing domination of software over materialized form. They adumbrate the emergent but still invisible
cities of the twenty-first century. And they argue that the most crucial task before us is not one of putting in
place the digital plumbing of broadband communications links and associated electronic appliances (which we will
certainly get anyway), nor even of producing electronically deliverable "content," but rather one of
imagining and creating digitally mediated environments for the kinds of lives that we will want to lead and the
sorts of communities that we will want to have.
What does it matter? Why should we care about this new kind of architectural and urban design issue? It matters
because the emerging civic structures and spatial arrangements of the digital era will profoundly affect our access
to economic opportunities and public services, the character and content of public discourse, the forms of cultural
activity, the enaction of power, and the experiences that give shape and texture to our daily routines. Massive
and unstoppable changes are under way, but we are not passive subjects powerless to shape our fates. If we understand
what is happening, and if we can conceive and explore alternative futures, we can find opportunities to intervene,
sometimes to resist, to organize, to legislate, to plan, and to design.
Review
"City of Bits is yet another impressive and important feat by Melbourne-born Bill Mitchell. Coolly illustrated,
the slimmish volume digests much of what is known about infotech's impacts on the world, in a succinct, personalised
and accessible manner. Peppered with hip slogans and jaunty jargonic jingles, the book speaks to the lay cyborg:
people like you and me, enhanced by and utterly dependent on technological devices.
This is not a discourse on paradigm shifts & agrave; la David Harvey, Manuel Castells or Martin Pawley, nor
a researchy tome like Saskia Sassen's work on techno-impacts on the financial services industry in the world city
triad of London, Tokyo and New York. More akin to Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital, Mitchell's volume revels
in a gizmotic world of techno-toys and feats -- celebrated nonchalantly despite widening divides between information-haves,
have-nots and have-beens. [...] Mitchell conveys awareness of some of these troubling conditions -- but this does
not deter him from providing a seemingly value-neutral rendition of infotech's impacts on the way 'we' live and
work and build and dwell. It's a SimCity world, but one waiting for TangiblePolicies to deal with RealInequalities."
--Peter Droege, University of Sidney in Architecture Australia
"You may never have thought of architecture as an interface, but [William] Mitchell does, while also proposing
that architecture may teach us how to design the public virtual spaces of the future in which there will be schools,
libraries, museums, shopping malls, and theatres. How, he asks, will we build the bitsphere? If the real world
is any guide, inconsistently."
--Wendy Grossman in New Scientist (5 August 1995)
"In his lucidly written and intelligently argued text, William Mitchell explores the future of this new non-geometrical
'space' from the perspective of architectural and urban design, convinced that in the 21st century we will inhabit
not only 'real' cities and spaces made of concrete and glass, but more and more the simulated cities and virtual
spaces created by the new electronic media. No map can be drawn up to help people navigate their way round the
new space since it is a space which defies cartographical delimitation.
Mitchell maintains that the most important tasks facing us are not technical ones to do with such mattes as how
to devise the digital plumbing of broadband communications. Rather, they are architectural and environmental ones
to do with transformation of civic structures and spatial arrangements being brought about by our evolution into
the virtual. Everyone will have a[n] electronic identity in the future, and 'identity' that is more complex and
metastable than any before, such as name and number.
[The author] is surely right when he claims that an exploration of the new space becomes crucial when we realise
that the design of the digital era will profoundly affect issues such as access to economic opportunities, the
nature of public discourse, questions of governmentality, forms of cultural activity, and the make-up of our everyday
routines.
Mitchell's architectural journey through the virtual cities of the future is a welcome addition to the burgeoning
literature on the topic of the near and unstoppable future. His exploration succeeds in showing that libertarian
concerns, and not simply technical issues, lie at the heart of the politics of cyberspace. His is a voyage well
worth undertaking and remains optional only for those who prefer a more back to basics strategy of adaption in
the face of the future and its evolution. The future will hit you like a comet."
--Keith Ansell Pearson in the Financial Times (29-30 July 1995)
"Mitchell argues that online communities, transcending geographic boundaries and social contexts, offer new
ways of thinking about urban design, private and public space, the separation of work and home life and personal
identity. In more speculative chapters, he walks us through the changes in civic institutions such as libraries,
hospitals, museums, banks and bookstores, changes made possible by computer technology. Complete with architectural
blueprints, illustrations of digital gadgetry and an index of related Internet 'surf sites,' this is a particularly
clever and evocative look at the "soft cities" of the 21st century."
--Publishers Weekly (21 August 1995)
"The book's stress on architecture analogies gives a very new way of looking at old issues. For example, the
ancient Greek 'agora' (or urban public space) features heavily. But when it comes to cyberspace, don't most legislators
the world over suffer from electronic agoraphobia?
'Cyberspace, as implemented for example on the Internet, supports a truly radical conception of free speech,'[the
author] says. 'Highly redundant packet switching networks that transcend national boundaries, and incorporate technologies
like encryption, anonymous re-mailers, etc, are truly unsensorable. As someone remarked, the Internet interprets
censorship as damage and routes around it.'
He stresses how the new 'city of bits' can condense scattered rural communities. A similar scattered community
is the electronic diaspora, and some would argue that the Irish have a relatively high presence in cyberspace due
to its traditionally high degree of emigration. or is the idea of 'diaspora' a misnomer in a post-McLuhan world?
'We may be entering an era in which nations are defined more as dispersed, electronically interconnected communities
of interest and common culture rather than as geospatial entities,' he says. 'Ireland and Greece, and other traditionally
cemigrant cultures may well be the first to evolve in this way...'"
--Michael Cunningham in The Irish Times (4 September 1995)
"Mitchell's City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn, though not entirely uncritical, is basically positive
in its depiction of the glorious electronic future that lies ahead.
Unsurprisingly for a dean of architecture and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mitchell's
book lays out its arguments with the linear logic of one of Le Corbusier's early city grids. 'The keyboard is my
cafe', he writes, celebrating the Infonet and the new spatial freedom that it brings. 'Without leaving my office
at MIT,' Mitchell marvels, 'I can teach a class in Singapore.'
He is bullish on everything from virtual museums, which can obviously be more complete than anything found in the
limited realm of the three-dimensional, to the coming marriage between persons and machines, a cybernetic bit of
bonding that will make the Roy Rogers-Trigger ties seem trivial. Shopping malls, theatres, skyscrapers, schools,
and prisons could all conceivably be dispensed with if enough virtual options were offered online.
Even better, freedom must flourish, because on the Net thought has become harder than ever to censor. 'Fahrenheit
451 is becoming irrelevant,' Mitchell assures us. 'You can burn books, but not bits.'"
--Mark Harris in the Vancouver Sun (2 September 1995)
MIT Press Web Site, December, 2000
Summary
Entertaining, concise, and relentlessly probing, City of Bits is a comprehensive introduction to a new type
of city, an increasingly important system of virtual spaces interconnected by the information superhighway. William
Mitchell makes extensive use of practical examples and illustrations in a technically well-grounded yet accessible
examination of architecture and urbanism in the context of the digital telecommunication revolution, the ongoing
miniaturization of electronics, the commodification of bits, and the growing domination of software over materialized
form.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Pulling Glass
Chapter 2. Electronic Agoras
Chapter 3. Cyborg Citizens
Chapter 4. Recombinant Architecture
Chapter 5. Soft Cities
Chapter 6. Bit Biz
Chapter 7. Getting to the Good Bits