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THE PRIVATISATION OF PUBLIC (CYBER)SPACE
PART II

2. Potential for city centre cultures

2.1 Enabling Mixed-Use City Centre Space

The architect Richard Rogers, again in his Reith Lectures, indicates how the 'soft' industries of the information society could effectively enable the re-emergence of the city centre as a locus for production, whilst still enabling the structures of consumption and residential zones which appeared during the 1980s.

"Multimedia technologies and industries could end the division of the city into zones of housing, offices and factories. Indeed, the distinction between office and home, work and play, education and entertainment are themselves set to dissolve. This will give the city a more diverse texture of overlapping activities, which will facilitate the emergence of a more dynamic, greener, more community-based city."[14]

This mixed-use planning reverses the zoning of previous planning initiatives, through utilising digital media's immaterial nature In this case, the focus on city-centre living must stress the attraction of living in the culturally diverse environment that only cities can attract. The city-centre in turn benefits from producers and consumers residing there.

2.2 Revitalising Public Space

Rogers asserts that public space becomes even more important when a city's productive environment is teleworking. The nature of teleworking is potentially isolating, due to its rejection of the centralised office. It need not be so. However, this means that opportunities and spaces for physical interaction with other people must be encouraged and developed. We therefore have real impetus for the emergence of multi-function public spaces. As culturally diverse spaces for physical interaction, for developing the cultural capital of cities, and for collective teleworking spaces as an alternative to 'the office'. Policy pertaining to urban regeneration has, in recent years, shifted from thinking in terms of pure economic return, to realising that the quality of life is a fundamental function of cities. These revitalised public spaces will be crucial to the livability of a teleworking city. This is alluded to in Landry and Bianchini's work where emphasis on creativity is continued in their discussion on how urban planning must change to consider less tangible, more ephemeral concepts to do with the quality of life.

"... we must also address how people mix and connect their motivations, and whether they take responsibility and "own" where they live and change their lifestyles appropriately. It is increasingly recognised that economic development and quality of life are inextricably interwoven. It is the livability of cities which will determine their success."[15]

2.3 Flexible Living and Working

Many cities are still working to a timetable from an industrial age, where 9-5 hours for 5 days a week in a job for life applied. Public transport is overloaded for a few hours and then disappears. Shops shut as people finish work. The licensing hours in pubs and bars are hopelessly outdated and inhibiting. We are now living in postindustrial cities, where flexible working patterns apply, where the working patterns of the cultural industries are seen as suitable models for organisational change in general (Mulgan 1988). This means working at night, at weekends, on multiple projects simultaneously, in offices and studios but also in other spaces such as the SoHo (Small-office / Home- office), or meetings in café-bars, where the world of work seeps into the rest of your life. These patterns are probably all too familiar. Information technologies can enable this flexibility by dislocating information from a particular temporal or spatial location. Cyberspace effectively enables information to become instantaneous and ubiquitous. In a fully-accessible city-centre information culture, information can be retrieved within a variety of environments: in a studio, at home, in a bar, and can be transmitted from these spaces to any other connected space in the world. The instantaneity of digital media dislocates the information from any particular imposed timetable. This could be useful in more advanced city cultures developing a night-time economy. So these organisational transformations towards more fluid working patterns are mirrored by the fluid rhythms of digital media, in which, speaking slightly idealistically, individuals are in control of the information and their interaction with it, rather than pandering to an imposed corporate timetable, tied to a desk in bland office culture.

Bruce Tognazzini, designer of the Apple Macintosh interface and now working for Sun Microsystems, envisages this instantaneous information infrastructure:

"The only time the physical location of our computer and your information will mean anything will be when the hardware fails and you have to fix it or grab someone else's. When it's working, you'll be able to access your personal information space wherever you are, from computer environments similar to your office, and as commonplace as pay phones ... You'll feel as if your information is always with you. And, except for security, the boundaries of where your computer ends and the universe of networked information begins will be wonderfully blurred."[16]

2.4 Cultural Industries

Since the mid-1980s, postindustrial cities have been pinning their hopes on 'culture' to regenerate their deindustrialised wastelands. Initially, the role of culture was to reimage the city - to present a new face to the world, acting as bait for capital investment. However, contemporary cultural policy recognises the direct economic significance of the cultural industries (Wynne et al 1989). Here, Featherstone (1991) indicates the relevance of the cultural industries:

"The awareness that culture industries such as publishing, recorded music, broadcasting, and tourism generated by arts and cultural institutions, can play a growing role in national and local economies has grown alongside the general expansion in the production and consumption of symbolic goods in contemporary Western societies."[18]

Hamish McRae, writing in The Independent, sees cities as having a clear advantage in the sector of cultural production in the communications and entertainment industries due to having "the critical mass to generate the buzz that attracts creative people."[20] This metropolitan edge is invaluable in establishing a creative and innovative milieu, from which quality cultural production can emerge. McRae sees the new digital cultural industries in particular as providing the future economic base for cities.

2.5 Digital Public Art

For a deindustrialised city, a key attraction of focussing on culture is their reimaging. As O'Connor and Wynne (1995) have pointed out, cities are not competing on a national scale, but as the importance of the nation-state shrinks and the ability to compete globally increases, cities are 're- presenting' themselves to a world market. This means aspects we have already discussed, but the 'postmodernization' of the city also includes seriously focussing on the image of the city (Featherstone, 1991). This can be enhanced in a number of ways - digital media facilitates events and festivals through its networking capabilities, but also as a creative tool for imagining and producing spectacular multimedia events, such as Stormy Waters in Glasgow earlier this year.

Similarly, City Centre Research group, again in their report on the Northern Quarter of Manchester, suggest the importance of public art and environmental improvement. There is considerable potential for digital media to extend the scope of street art. The following quote from Roy Ascott indicates how digital media could provide unprecedented levels of artistic expression in the built environment when:

" ... whole walls of buildings can be digitally flooded with sound, colour and light, images and texts flowing in endless transformations, when whole environments respond to our body movements and the articulations of our voices."[21]

2.6 Democratising Public Decision-Making

A further aspect of digital media is it's inherent capacity for interaction. Any cultural policy pertaining to stimulating a model of digital cultural production must be based on this touchstone of interactivity. As we will see later, previous planning initiatives have often been well-documented disasters, largely due to lack of effective public consultation. Steve Jones (1995) addresses this in his book CyberSociety:

"The importance of the disappointment that engineered communities have brought cannot be understated. We can no more 'build' communities than we can 'make' friends..."[22]

Fortunately, the intrinsic nature of digital media is interactive. Rather than policymakers providing solutions for the masses, reinforcing anachronous hierarchical models of information provision, widespread access to technology could facilitate effective public competition for architecture, design and street art; could democratise aspects of public decision-making; could monitor use of public spaces and services; and could enable a more interactive dynamic local political culture. The potential for electronic democracy will be discussed later, along with a note of caution.

2.7 Strong Digital Popular Culture

With the productive base of the city focussed on the cultural industries, it is essential that the city possesses a strong and democratised popular culture to provide the creativity and innovation vital in cultural production. We are fortunate in this city, this country, and indeed, in this continent, that the embryonic digital media 'scene' may be particularly well-placed, as much of it is influenced by our strong music and design industries. There is considerable cross-fertilisation between intermediaries in urban dance music, youth culture, and the new techno-cultural industries. This may be responsible for the experimental 'punky' attitude which much European digital media possesses. This, in marked contrast to American cyberculture, whose influences seem to be principally apolitical libertarianism and reconstituted hippy ideology. The background of digital expression in techno, ambient, jungle and computer graphics may give our new digital cultural industries an edge over a tired attitude focussed on regurgitated sixties culture, whose tedious figureheads are Timothy Leary, Alvin Toffler and the Grateful Dead.

Furthermore, it could be argued that the locus of Europe's youth culture is the gritty yet vibrant reality of the deindustrialised city. American cyberculture longs for the isolated telecottage in a sanitised, hyperreal frontier, out of the reach of both the state and anything remotely resembling 'the other'. Julian Stallabrass (1995) characterises all cyberculture as "the mix of New age spiritualism and New Edge technophilia in which sixties political activism and social consciousness has been resolved into 'a particularly privileged, selfish, consumer-oriented and technologically dependent libertarianism'"[23]. While it does seem that this is a true and accurate description of (much) American cyberculture, it is hoped that the strength and attitude of much European popular culture may well resist these odious movements, and, through its creative and innovative expression, may contribute to a rejuvenation of the postindustrial city's production base.

Footnotes to Part II

[14] 'Building cities to move the spirit', Richard Rogers, The Independent, 13 March 1995
[15] 'The lifting of city limits', Charles Landry and Franco Bianchini, The Guardian, 21 February 1995
[16] 'In Your Interface', David Weinburger, Wired, No.2.05, September 1995
[17] 'Building cities to move the spirit', Richard Rogers, The Independent, 13 March 1995
[18] FEATHERSTONE, M. (1991), op cit., page 105
[19] 'Music industry wins ovation for its ú1bn exports performance', Chris Barrie, The Guardian, 10 February 1995
[20] 'Lucky to live in the eternal city', Hamish McRae, The Independent, 27 April 1995
[21] 'Time for a Planetary Collegium', Roy Ascott, Times Higher Educational Supplement, September 16 1994
[22] JONES. S, (1995), op cit., p.19
[23] STALLABRASS, J. (1995), op cit., p.10

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