Thinking About Cities

For Clay’s Thinking About Networks class we read a chapter out of each of The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage and The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.

The Victorian Internet is about the telegraph and how it was the first technology to really make the world perceptibly “smaller” by allowing information to travel signficantly faster than objects over large distances - news could outstrip ships and horses. It was interesting to think of the telegraph in these kinds of social and media terms, having thought about it in more technical terms when reading Code: The hidden langage of computer hardware and software by Charles Petzold. (A book I heartily recommend for anyone even remotely interested in computers and how they work)

The Jacobs piece was utterly engaging and incredibly easy to read and agree with. She spoke to a lot of my own prejudices in her contention that people exist more happily in human scale streets rather than in high-rise blocks of flats. The idea of a middle ground for socialising - a place that is public but that involves plenty of regular, quotidian contact with neighbours was new to me and it makes a lot of sense. The possibility of these kinds of connections makes it possible for people to meet without a need for the intimacy of invitations into one’s home. Where that is the only possibility for contact, many people choose no contact at all.

It did strike me though that Jacobs is perhaps overly enthusiastic for making all neighbourhoods like her own. For many years I’ve thought that people have an incredibly propensity for colonising the built environment, no matter how alienating it might seem. New York itself, which Jacobs holds up (with considerable justification) as a model for happy civic life must have seemed alienating and weird to people moving here from villages in Connemara where public space would have been defined entirely differently and day-to-day non-intimate contact would have had other rhythms. When I worked in Finglas in Dublin several years ago I remember thinking one day as I drove through the neighbourhood how a place that seemed so vast and uniform to me as an outsider was for my students a place full of social context that made each house and cul de sac and green patch individual.

It seems to me that it is in newly built areas, where the location for this middle ground communication hasn’t yet been identified, that people are most likely to be alienated from one another. Further to that I also believe that young people who grow up in an environment tend to find it easy to figure out how to live in it successfully and connectedly. Clay pointed out in class that this is analagous to the way that the young were the first to successfully use the Internet as a primarily social space, with applications such as Live Journal. This is an interesting idea, and one that I shall give more thought to over the next few weeks.

18 September 2005 | networks | Comments