EUGENIA VICTORIA ELLIS, AIA Drexel University
Published in Writing Urbanism: A Design Reader (London: Routledge, 2008)
Abstract
A transformation of our cities is taking place such that the material space of the city metric, which was once measured by traditional western geometry, work, buildings and the machine, is being replaced by the ethereal space of the postindustrial city, which is beginning to be defined by the computer matrix, leisure, cyberspace and the information network. The postindustrial city is increasingly making apparent the sharp division between those who have technology and those who have not. Traditional public space is disappearing and being replaced by privatized pseudo-public realms, while simultaneously electronic space is being restructured into public space. The richness and character of any urban environment comes from the face-to-face comingling of different races, creeds, and cultures. This city is the city of dreams.
Ariadne's Veil
It has neither name nor place. I shall repeat the reason why I was describing it to you: from the number of imaginary cities we must exclude those whose elements are assembled without a connecting thread, an inner rule, a perspective, a discourse. With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else."
Marco Polo to Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities[1]
Theseus stood at the gates to the labyrinth, a ball of pitch in one hand and a ball of thread in the other: one to be used to silence the Minotaur's bite, the other to retrace his steps.[2] Theseus had been armed with these dual pelotons by Ariadne to face the two great dangers of the labyrinth: the monster within and the maze's entangling inextricability. Theseus was successful in both slaying the Minotaur and in escaping Daedalus's creation. His victory dance at Delos with the children who had escaped with him, first circling in one direction and then winding back, mimicked not only the path they took through the labyrinth on their escape, but also celestial harmony: the first pattern of the dance imitated the turning of the heavens from east to west; the second enacted the orbits of the planets from west to east; and in the third movement all stood still like the earth, around which everything else circles. It has been said that both the human architect Daedelus and the divine creator crafted their circular complexities as if with compasses, the center being the only certain point and origin of their creations.
Figure 1. Heavenly Jerusalem, medieval woodcut.
Since archaic times the idea of the labyrinth has been linked with cities and so, too, have most mazes been named after cities, for example, Troy, Jerusalem, Babylon, Nineveh, and Jericho.[3] Movement through a city's architecture was the dance; and the space of the city was the space of ritual. Neither architecture nor city were an abstract, geometrical entity.[4] According to Isidore of Seville, "urbs" is derived from "orbis" because ancient cities were always circular in form.[5] Jericho was circled by the Hebrews for seven days and, like Ariadne, Rahab helped the Hebrew spies escape from the city with the aid of a scarlet thread. Troy was the archetypal city for many medieval people, and the circling Trojan Ride became known as the founding of the Roman city.
The ritual dance was related to the ritual of the foundation of cities in Roman times,[6] when an essentially invisible ritual created an invisible wall that made the city secure; the ritual was so important that it had to be reenacted periodically to re-inaugurate the founding of the city. In classical times, the founding of a city began with the calling of its founder in a dream.[7] The city would then be inaugurated by a recognized seer, an augur who was especially gifted: one who could see heavenly bodies that are invisible to the ordinary mortal. The augur would project this celestial vision onto the landscape and oversee the plowing of a furrow around the site discovered by its founder.
The primordial idea of the city is contained within the labyrinth: a dialectic of seemingly opposing characteristics that reveals order out of apparent chaos. The labyrinth itself is a splendidly ordered complexity that confuses us only when we cannot comprehend its underlying system. Cities are labyrinths of a dual nature: inherent within their complex artistic order is a bewilderment experienced by someone so immersed in this order that its abstract pattern cannot be seen without the vision provided by the change in perspective obtained when elevated above the confusion. Ariadne's thread is required to provide that insight when one is tangled within the turnings of the maze. The maze itself has characteristic dualities that are all held in balance and are all perspective-dependent: blindness and insight, chaos and order, confusion and clarity, path and plan, unicursality and multicursality, vision from within time and from beyond eternity.[8] There are two varieties of labyrinths: the unicursal maze and the multicursal maze.
Figure 2. Typical circular unicursal diagrammatic
Figure 3. Example of an early multicursal labyrinth of the so-called Chartes type.
The unicursal model has its origins in the visual arts.[9] Its structural basis is a single path that twists and turns defining the most circuitous route conceivable and the longest possible way to get to the center; there are no choices, the maze-walker simply goes where the path leads. It has only two certain points: entrance and center. The characteristic quality of movement through the unicursal maze is steady and continuous, and involves time more so than decision. Ariadne's thread is not required.
The multicursal model derives from the literary tradition.[10] Its structural basis in contrast incorporates an extended series of bivia, or an array of choices. The multicursal maze is dangerous even if no minotaur is lurking, for one risks getting lost and remaining perpetually imprisoned. The characteristic quality of movement through the multicursal maze is halting and episodic, with each fork or alternative requiring a pause for thought and decision, and emphasizes an individual's responsibility for one's own fate. This maze is potentially inextricable and escape depends not only on the maze-walker's intelligence, memory, and experience, but also on the kind of guidance provided by Ariadne's thread: insight, instructive principles, signposts, or advice along the way.
In a unicursal maze one learns by precept; in a multicursal maze, by dialectic. The need for a seer or visionary to clarify the meaning of dreams and visions, to provide Ariadne's insight, illustrates the dual or multiple perspectives implied by mazes, which can be seen in part (from within) or whole (from above, or through memory and insight).[11] What seems to us to be an inextricable prison is simply what divine order looks like when viewed from within time, where a linear and sequential perspective is natural.[12] From a more enlightened or celestial point of view, the confusing maze is a simple and well-ordered structure.
The multicursal labyrinth has origins in the literary traditions of classical antiquity, and its attributes can be seen replicated in presentday computer systems logic, particularly in what has come to be known as hypertext. The unicursal labyrinth can be compared to analogue technology: the recording of sound and visual information through a serial or linear process, the access of which is sequential, for example, a cassette recording or video tape. The multicursal model is similar to digital technology, which removes the need for sequence by allowing direct access to a particular piece of information through a series of bivia (an array of choices) by branching through networks, for example, a compact disc.
The word text derives originally from the Latin word for weaving and for interwoven material. The electronic linking which has reconfigured text as we have known it has created a hypertext: a form of textuality that permits multilinear reading paths.[13] Hypertext can be conceived of as a vast assemblage, which is defined by Derrida in Speech and Phenomena as: "The word 'assemblage' seems more apt for suggesting that the kind of bringing-together proposed here has the structure of an interlacing, a weaving or a web, which would allow the different threads and different lines of sense or force to separate again, as well as being ready to bind others together."[14] In S/Z, Roland Barthes describes an "ideal text" that has attributes of a multicursal labyrinth and could be used to define characteristics of computer hypertext: "In this ideal text the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one . . ."[15] Hypertext, also referred to as hypermedia,[16] is a computer matrix composed of blocks of words, images, sound or other forms of data that are linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails in an openended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by the terms link, node, network, web, and path.[17]
In The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch studies the mental image of the city formed by its citizens; and accordingly, defines its clarity upon the ease with which its parts can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern.[18] Coincidentally, two of the elements Lynch uses to define the city's image are node and path. Paths are the channels along which the citizen-observer moves, such as streets, walkways and transit lines.[19] Nodes occur at the crossing of paths and are often the foci of civic activity. The texture of the city is dependent upon the weaving together of nodes and paths, which in turn determine the pattern and geometry of the city's fabric.
The reading of the image of the city is hypertextual and is perspective-dependent: moving through the city is a labyrinthine dance; its image unfolds through movement along a path; at each node there are alternatives that require reflection; there are many entrances and no right one; and there is an underlying order that can seldom be appreciated except at a distance. When retracing one's steps through the city, Ariadne's thread weaves a veil.[20] As with the labyrinth, inherent within the city and the computer is a dialectic of oppositions that both bewilders and illuminates, the attributes of which together define their contradictory spatial logics: one side of the analogy has to do with the construction of space, the other about the construction of information networks; one side is material, the other immaterial.[21]
Computer Matrix/City Metric
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.
William Gibson, Neuromancer[22]
The spaces we inhabit, the social relationships we form and our modes of perception have historically been influenced by the way we receive information. For example, prior to the printing press, information was relayed orally and its transmission relied upon memory. Thought patterns were based upon the ability to think in terms of the interrelationships encouraged through the use of mnemonic devices.[23] Before newspapers were readily available, people congregated in churches to hear sermons that were coupled with news about local and foreign affairs. Eventually the newspaper began to replace the pulpit and churchgoers learned about local affairs in silence at home.[24] The format of the newspaper, periodical and illustrated magazine with texts laid out in columns of disparate narrations and juxtaposed to illustrations, required the reader to develop a new way of processing information from fragmented data.[25] With today's electronic data processing and digital technology, we will have to develop new modes of perception that will allow us to navigate through the web-like disjunctive array of highly-mediated information.[26]
The computer matrix is a space of rupture and discontinuity that parallels the fragmented space perceived by a society continuously in motion: driving the freeways and shopping at the mall.[27] The space of the computer recedes into an electronic matrix that pulls the user into a total withdrawal from the world, distancing engagement with one's surrounds and the city itself.[28] A transformation of our cities is taking place such that the material space of the city metric, which once was measured by traditional western geometry, work, buildings and the machine, is being replaced by the ethereal space of the postindustrial city, which is beginning to be defined by the computer matrix, leisure, cyberspace and the information network.
The public realm of the ancient city was representational. Not only did activities of a public and collective nature occur there, but the public realm itself also symbolized those activities.[29] The medieval city belonged to the merchants and artisans. The church, the market square, the buildings of the guilds, and the city gates were its representational elements. The public realm was defined by its axial roads (paths) and their crossing (node) where the market square and church were usually located. The medieval city and its architecture were crafted according to the guild tradition whose principles were transmitted, like an aural literary tradition, by rules of thumb.
On the other hand, the Renaissance city belonged to the politicians and politics. The representational elements were its public monuments such as civic buildings, obelisks and coliseums, which in themselves were metaphors of collective or ceremonial functions. The medieval marketplace, which was generally located at its geometrical center, became the actual center of political power. The Renaissance city and its architecture were designed according to Platonic geometrical principles and conceived as total projects. The city and its buildings were an act of an individual mind and were constructed by builders who merely carried out the visions of this mind according to a preconceived plan. The mental image of the historical city, whether based on commerce or politics, is one of interaction, ceremony and ritual provided by a public realm that was representational of those activities.
The modern city, if it can be said to provide any mental image at all, merely represents an inventory of objects of material wealth. The metaphorical status of today's postindustrial city is one of a consumptive postmodern society gradually consuming itself.
The American city of today is a symbol of both the real and virtual distance created by the shift from 19th-century industrial production to contemporary information technology. This has been a long-term process which began in the 1930's due to the highways created by the Works Progress Administration and the singlefamily cottage subsidies funded by the Federal Housing Administration. Urbanism was replaced by suburbanism due to the diminished perception of distance provided by travel in an automobile over accessible and connected roadways. Like the market square and the church, but without the symbolic significance, the shopping center at the crossroads of highways began to appear to support these suburban communities.[30]
According to Fredric Jameson, features of a new type of postindustrial society began to emerge: a mobile automobile culture, new types of consumption, the pervasive penetration of advertising and media throughout society, and the replacement of the traditional tension between city and country with the suburb and universal standardization.[31] For this postmodern culture, reality has transformed into images and time has become fragmented into a series of perpetual presents.
The change from an urban society to a suburban society (complete based on the 1990 census that recorded a suburban majority for the first time in this nation's history) parallels the radical break from modernism to postmodernism: from an industrial economy based on the machine and the production of tangible goods and services to a postindustrial economy based on electronic technology and the production of the intangible commodity of information. Or, in other words, a basic shift from traditional manufacturing to more serviceoriented businesses. This shift has necessitated a restructuring of our cities in response to this change in status.
Today, the images associated with the industrial city are negative: declining economic base, pollution, the past and the old, a city on its way down. Being in the industrial city is associated with work and the world of production. In contrast, the postindustrial city is seen as the bright new future: clean, efficient, crime-free, high-tech, on the economic upswing, based on consumption and exchange. Postindustrial life is associated with the world of leisure as opposed to work.[32] The postindustrial city can be categorized into three broad classifications: cities of fragments, fortress-cities, and cities of the "new urbanism."
Cities of fragments are those cities like Houston or Atlanta, which have disconnected metropolitan fringes comprised of suburb after suburb.[33] The structure of these cities is formless, fluid, and homogeneous without center or periphery. They are defined by the automobile and the highway, are thinly populated with occasional spots of density, and appear limitless as they fade into the countryside. Their symbolic identity lies with the highways and beltways that define them as networks of endless circulation without space or dimension.
Cities like Detroit and Los Angeles might be described as fortress-cities that clearly demarcate social boundaries. These cities openly expose American apartheid: whites reside safely in the suburbs, while poor minorities live in the city.[34] For example, due to advances in technical production and the streamlining of factory processes, Detroit's urban automobile factories have been replaced by suburban distribution factories. Detroit's residents must flow out of the city in search of work and food, only to return to a neighborhood that is more reminiscent of a Third-World colony than an urban American community. Detroit's poor residents are held prisoners in a city with an urban center replete with the empty carcasses of abandonned skyscrapers, which were left by corporations who discovered it to be safer and more economical to operate from a suburban location electronically connected to the rest of the business world. This is a far cry from a decade or so ago when the urban skyscraper was a symbol of a corporation's power and success. On the other hand, Los Angeles has created a dense, compact, multifunctional core area of billion-dollar, block-square megastructures from the erasure of its historical core.[35] This new Downtown is comprised of superblocks and has a selfcontained circulation system, every amenity imaginable for the nine-to-five businessperson, and an impenetrable edge defining it as a citadel separate from the rest of the central city. The affluent in LA live in fortified enclaves outside the city limits complete with encompassing walls and gates, security cameras, restricted entry-points with guards, both public and private police services, and privatized roadways.[36]
Cities of the "new urbanism" can be conceived of as both cities of fragments and fortress-cities. These cities are being developed in suburban locations based on a nostalgic urban structure reminiscent of the historic city without the context provided by the density of population and cultural diversity.[37] These cities can be developed anywhere any time. They are loosely based on the notion of a small town of mixed-use occupancy in three- to four-story buildings, generally comprised of streetfront retail with residential on the floors above. This ideal urban core might then be accessed on foot by the newly-built surrounding neighborhoods. The urban planning of these cities is generally modeled on the desirable qualities of walkable cities such as Charleston, South Carolina or Venice, Italy. Besides the goods and services required for its inhabitants, the industry to support this type of city is anything within driving distance or that is accessible electronically to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, these developments ultimately attract a single-class of resident and are destined to become privatized middle- and upper-income enclaves.
The postindustrial city is increasingly making apparent the sharp division between those who have technology and those who have not. Traditional public space is disappearing and being replaced by privatized pseudo-public realms. The richness and character of any urban environment comes from a sheer density, which necessitates that there are people on the streets at all times of the day co-mingling races, creeds, and cultures. This city is the city of dreams: where people from different backgrounds and lifestyles brush shoulders with each other, which spurs an imagination of the unknown. The imaginable can only be triggered by difference. Diversity is the connecting thread of the city of dreams.
The Dance of Superabundant Life
The comparison between the forms of play discovered and created by men, and the uninhibited movement of play exhibited by superabundant life, can teach us that precisely what is at issue in the play of art is not some substitute dream-world in which we can forget ourselves. On the contrary, the play of art is a mirror that through the centuries constantly arises anew, and in which we catch sight of ourselves in a way that is often unexpected or unfamiliar: what we are, what we might be, and what we are about.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, "The Play of Art"[38]
The universal civilization and homogenous culture we find ourselves in today is a result of a global commodification, which was forecast by Walter Benjamin early in the 20th century when he wrote that the "world exhibitions glorify the exchange value of commodities. They create a framework in which commodities' intrinsic value is eclipsed."[39] Paul Ricoeur has described this situation as one in which mankind is approaching en masse a basic consumer culture where everywhere "one finds the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminum atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda, etc."[40] Globalization and unification of commodities has created a society that has lost the object of its desire. The object no longer has value in itself as an object inasmuch as its value is dependent upon something intangible such as the control, power, or prestige it might bestow on its possessor.41 According to Kenneth Frampton, this cultural change has created attitudes that "emphasize the impotence of an urbanized populace which has paradoxically lost the object of its urbanization."[42] In so doing, urban public space has transformed into pseudo-public realms defined by privately-owned megastructures such as hotels and shopping malls; while simultaneously electronic space is being restructured into public space.
The megastructure is a privatized public space: a new kind of commercial environment based on a rigid exclusion of undesirable populations, available only to those who can afford to be there, heavily policed, and equipped with high-technology surveillance to ensure optimal control and public safety.[43] Public space, which once was the theatre of the social and the theatre of politics, is disappearing.[44] Once a heterogeneous "scene" mirroring human activity, the public realm has now been replaced with the privatized and homogenized public space, such as the shopping mall, which acts as a screen and a network. This postmodern change began when the status of the object as a mirror of its subject changed and took on a new dimension due to the effects of advertising and its visual medium. Advertising is no longer an ecstatic scenario of objects and consumption, but the effect of an omnipresent visibility of enterprises and the social virtues of communication, which invade everything as true public space disappears. The "real" scene has become a screen or network of infinitesimal memory and endless stream of information. Architecture of a human scale has become a system of matrices: what once was acted out or projected mentally and psychologically here on earth as a metaphorical scene, is now projected onto the screen of absolute reality, without any metaphor, as an image of reality that is also a simulation of reality.
In the traditional city, space was like a mirror or scene which derived its qualities from an imitation of life through participation in the ritual of living. In ancient Greece, this "play" of life was reenacted through the ritual dance, which had its origins in religion and the festival, and it is from this dance that theatre developed in ancient Greek culture.[45] The uplifting experience of the festival is one that raises its participants out of everyday life and elevates them into a kind of universal communion. Participation in the festival is one of enactment, or re-presentation, in which time is suspended so that the past and present become one in an act of remembrance. This vital essence of the festival creates a transformed state of being that produces in the participant a dreamlike mirage of reality. The origin of theatre was in the streets of the city: where people gathered and were of equal significance to the actors; where the city's citizens were actors in the play of urban life. The primordial idea of the ancient city was contained within the labyrinth and the ritual dance. The space of the city was the space of ritual and architecture was the "dance" that re-presented the order of the world. Because today's postmodern culture is moving away from being a scene or mirror of life, the labyrinth can be taken to symbolize the city as a network of information and communication and as a screen upon which the play of life is projected.
The urban environment of the postindustrial city is disassembling from its historical roots, and reassembling as fortress cities. Urban public space is disappearing and re-appearing as pseudo-public realms disengaged from the city and located peripherally in the network of the suburban landscape. The postindustrial city is being evacuated by its community, leaving its empty space as a metaphor for a disembodied computer matrix. Activities of a public nature are being miniaturized and simulated in the electronic inner world of information. The lesson we are learning is that information does not need the public realm, which originally gave the city its form and representational value.[46] The information network is a labyrinth of a dual nature: the "public" is increasingly being redefined as a composite of privates by a global system of communication that is only available to those who can afford the technology. Societies can now be grouped into the information-rich and the information-poor: there are some areas of this country experiencing what has been called "electronic redlining" and are being denied video, voice, and computer communications.[47] The postindustrial city of inter-connected computers holds the promise of permitting a complexity of relations by bringing people together through information and communication without the physical limitations of geography, time zones, or conspicuous social status. However, communication on the internet is in isolation, which cuts the physical face out of the communication process.[48] Thousands of cues, not just facial, add up to a conversation. In the end, public space is relational and gestural, and is created over time through layers of context, interaction, ritual, and the physical environment itself.[49]
The postindustrial city is a universal global village whose public realm can be experienced at a distance from the privacy of one's own living room via a network of televisions and word processors. The postindustrial city is becoming a screen upon which life may be projected as a simulacrum substituting for an absent presence. In cities such as Detroit the vacant carcasses of abandoned skyscrapers stand as tower-museums of ruins. These cities can be seen as endemic of the future American city: devoid of its occupants, who now safely reside in cities of the "new urbanism" with global connections from the privacy of their own homes without the discomfort of brushing sides with the unclean. The postindustrial city may become a placeless space: a modernday labyrinth whose sole purpose is to be a node in the network of the endless flux of circulation, information and communication. Lacking the experiential, the postindustrial city may become a placeless space to pass through on the way to somewhere else. Without its citizens, the ritual dance cannot take place in the postindustrial city. There can be no scene involving the play of life.
In order for postindustrial cities to become viable public urban places they must be able to encourage the city's citizens to become actors in the play of urban life. Ideally, and with foresight, the postindustrial city will return to the labyrinth of the legendary Daedalus: a labyrinth that symbolizes the order of the city through capturing the trace of the ritual dance.
Endnotes
[1] Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, translated by William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 43-4.
[2] Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 68, 123-8.
[3] Doob, 116.
[4] Alberto Pérez-Gomez, "The Myth of Daedalus," AA Files 10 (1985): 52.
[5] Isidore de Seville, Etymologiae 15.2.3.
[6] Hermann Kern, "Labyrinth-Cities, City-Labyrinths," Daidalos, 3 (1982).
[7] Ivan Illich, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness (Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1985), 12-15.
[8] Doob, 189.
[9] Doob, 48.
[10] Doob, 46-48.
[11] Doob, 188.
[12] Doob, 130.
[13] George P. Landow, Hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 21-22.
[14] Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 131.
[15] Roland Barthes, S/Z trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 5-6.
[16] Landow, 4.
[17] Landow, 3.
[18] Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: the MIT Press, 1988), 2-3.
[19] Lynch, 47.
[20] The notion of the labyrinth as a network, and of meandering through the city and in the process weaving a veil, was inspired by Marco Frascari's article, "A New Angel/Angle in Architectural Research: The Ideas of Demonstration," JAE 44/1 (November 1990): 11-19; in particular ". . . a meander is a labyrinth that works as a net. In a net every point is connected with every other point." (p. 13)
[21] M. Christine Boyer, Cybercities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 15.
[22] William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), 51.
[23] Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1963), 136-137.
[24] Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, vol. I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 131-132.
[25] Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer," Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schoken Books, 1978), 224-225.
[26] M. Christine Boyer, CyberCities (New York: Princeton Architectureal Press, 1996), 8-9.
[27] Boyer, 19.
[28] Boyer, 11.
[29] Alan Colquhoun, "The Superblock," Essays in Architectural Criticism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981), 83-102.
[30] Neil Harris, "Spaced-Out at the Shopping Center," The Public Face of Architecture, ed. by Nathan Glazer and Mark Lilla (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 320-328.
[31] Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," The Anti-Aesthetic, Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 125.
[32] John Rennie Short, Lisa M. Benton, William Luce, and Judith Walton, "The Reconstruction of a Postindustrial City," Journal of Architectural Education 50/4 (May 1997): 244-245.
[33] Uwe Drost, "The Transformation of Urban Identity in a Post-Industrial Society," Body, Technology, and Design: Proceedings of the 11th Annual ACSA Technology Conference (1993): 122-125.
[34] Richard A. Plunz, "Detroit is Everywhere," Architecture (April 1996): 55-61.
[35] Mike Davis, City of Quartz (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 223-226.
[36] Udo Greincaher, "The New Reality: Media Technology and Urban Fortress," JAE 48/3 (February 1995): 176-84.
[37] Heidi Landecker, "Is New Urbanism Good for America?" Architecture (April 1996): 68-77.
[38] Hans-Georg Gadamer, "The Play of Art," The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 130.
[39] Walter Benjamin, "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 151.
[40] Paul Ricoeur, "Universal Civilization and National Cultures" (1961), History and Truth, trans. Chas. A. Kelbley (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 276.
[41] Roland Barthes, "The New Citroën," Mythologies trans. Annette Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972), 88-90.
[42] Kenneth Frampton, "Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance," The Anti- Aesthetic, Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 25.
[43] Rosalyn Deutsche, "Questioning the Public Space," Mark Lewis, Andrew Payne, and Tom Taylor, eds., in Public #6 (Toronto Public Access, 1992): 49-64.
[44] Jean Baudrillard, "The Ecstacy of Communication," The Anti-Aesthetic, Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 126- 130.
[45] Hans-Georg Gadamer, "The Festive Character of the Theatre," The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 57-65.
[46] Martin Pawley, Theory and Design in the Second Machine Age (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 178.
[47] Steve Lohr, "Data Highway Ignoring Poor, Study Charges," New York Times, 14 May 1994.
[48] Michael Heim, "The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace," in Cyberspace, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), 75.
[49] Neill Bogan, Chea Prince and Glenn Harper, "A Brave New World?" Art Papers (July-August, 1997): 16-22.
