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So, having developed these two alternatives, how can we aim for the latter, avoiding the pitfalls of the former? The key to the more positive outcome is providing the residents in our cities with an accessible and well-understood information culture, capturing the potential of the advanced information and communication technologies as they relocate in contemporary culture, rather than unthinkingly succumbing to their inherent capability for social division.
"I think that momentum in a machine creates drive, the momentum in a fluid creates turbulence, and technology is a machine, but society is a fluid. The situation that we face now is that the machine is immersed in the fluid." [24]Bruce Sterling's quote indicates that computer technology is shifting into the public domain, and how this shift may have unpredictable results, in his analogy "turbulence means eddies, backwaters, and niche environments"[25]. How can we use this turbulence effectively and creatively? How can computers be dislocated effectively from their original image as techno-scientific calculator, and relocated within accessible popular culture? And how can information technology enhance cultural policymaking for urban regeneration?
3.1 Democratic Access
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Modernist design principles, based on the planner as expert, on the
obliteration of difference,
rationalising cities, separating their functions into discrete 'zones' (City Centre Research, 1994), led
to disasters in this city such as the infamous Hulme (the ruins are a few hundred yards to the south of
the Institute for Popular Culture, for real cultural tourists) or the soul-destroying Arndale Centre
(which will be crushingly familiar to devotees of the zombie-movie
Dawn of the Dead). If we are to accept the analyses of
contemporary cultural change which posit a postmodern 'age', more useful models are likely to be based on recognising heterogeneity, on acknowledging the relevance of
culture, on creative interpretations of local tradition, on serious public consultation.
Again, information and communication technologies may enable the last point - effective public consultation - more effectively than ever before, with elements of electronic democracy enabling public competitions for architecture and design, and democratising public decision-making. Dick Hebdige (1989) advocates increased emphasis on public consultation as one of the potential positive aspects of postmodern theory, particularly postmodern architectural theory. Similarly, Landry and Bianchini (1995) state in The Creative City that "participation must be more than just a slogan"[26], that the effects of participation are more than simply paying dues to a democratic process, but that it creates a sense of ownership and may help instill an element of public belief in the intentions of policymakers and city governments.
The private sector, such as the retail and marketing trades, have extensive experience in capturing people's opinions, through digital point-of-sale surveillance as well as other methods of more open and sophisticated public consultation. If city governments were able to creatively feed off this energy and expertise in private sector marketing, and reformat those capabilities into democratising public decision-making, then the true public consultation recommended by Landry & Bianchini (1995) and Hebdige (1989) is within reach. If public access terminals become truly ubiquitous within a well- understood and accepted information culture, citizens views on decisions could be articulated and polled easily and effectively using information technology, with the perceived benefits suggested above. Not sensing the dynamics of a marketplace, but sensing the dynamics of sections of society and culture.
In advocating the use of information technology to enrich public consultation, it should be noted that there are serious implications here, and that we should not unthinkingly use it as either a token gesture to 'open government', or at the other end of the scale - to sanction the tyranny of the masses. There is a brand of libertarian laissez-faire government which can be traced in the popularity of Ross Perot, Newt Gingrich and in Wired magazine. All advocate subverting parliamentary democratic process using 'push-button democracy'. Their declared mission is to circumvent the Washington beltway mentality, which supposedly strangles American politics, but with a subtext to cutback on state welfare and benefits. Umberto Eco, writing about the notion of Ur-Fascism - the fundamental essence of fascism - has alluded to the Internet as a potentially dangerous tool for presenting a synthetic 'Voice of the People', as a tool for challenging the legitimacy of parliament, which for Eco is a sure sign of proto-Fascism[27]. Europe has a very different political history and culture to the US, and whilst the current incarnation of our political systems are perhaps felt to be out-of-touch, this imported anti-state stance seems largely irrelevant to democratising British or European political culture.[28]
However, if we can detect and avoid these potentially dangerous impulses, we may have a method for enriched public consultation, which will be invaluable in developing our cities.
Having established a potential for more democratic decision-making, what other aspects of public access to advanced information and communication technologies are there?
Most policymakers discussing access to cyberspace focus on the numbers, or supply-side, issues i.e. the obvious, tangible issues of the numbers of available PCs on the streets, the pricing structures, the cables in the ground and so on. There are less tangible components of access that are often neglected, which importantly coordinate the demand for information culture. This demand must be stimulated if cyberspace is to become an inclusive public space. These neglected aspects include the aforementioned potential for public consultation, to enable citizens to have a say on the quality of access they require, to enrich cultural policy-making for urban regeneration. Furthermore, the necessity for specialised training is often ignored. Generalised Internet training takes little account of local difference in social and business communities. This is especially the case with communities marginalised by the currently limiting cyberculture.
Presently, the most conspicuous public access space in our cities - the cybercafé - highlights further neglected subtleties of access - the quality of the interface - virtual and physical - between public space and cyberspace. Also, the effective dislocation of computers from their original image as techno- scientific calculator, and their relocation within accessible popular culture. And perhaps most importantly, the need for an supportive creative local environment to develop skills in productive digital media, incorporating effective training and purpose-built resource spaces.
3.2 Cybercafés and Reimaging the Computer
Cybercafés enable casual surfing - they provide the postmodern flâneur with more avenues to stroll down, this time constructed from the cold crystalline perfection of logically-ordered data. Cybercafés do play an important role, that of reimaging the computer: from calculating tool to cultural tool. This change in perception of personal computers is needed if they are to become acceptable to a wider culture. My obligatory reference to cyberpunk writer William Gibson isn't in his fiction, but an observation of his, regarding a public perception of computers. During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Gibson noticed that the looters on the streets of LA were taking TVs and stereos from the bountiful consumer electronics stores, but ignoring a store full of Apple Powerbooks laptop computers next door. Whilst it is hardly surprising that the looters didn't pause to consider, say, the counter- hegemonic potential for empowerment embodied in the machines, to be unaware of even the high cash value they possess indicates how little these machines were actually understood by the average citizen. More recently, Manchester's City Life listings magazine ran a questionnaire on the Internet and consumer technology over two issues in April 1995, with a cash incentive for respondents. The editor, Mike Hill, related that they received only 150 replies, as opposed to other recent questionnaires on general consumer-related products, which, running in one issue, usually attracted around 1000 responses. His conclusion was that the average City Life reader is unaware or uninterested in this technology as consumer products[29]. Why is this? Bearing in mind Mitchell's work on the interface between public space and cyberspace, it may be that even the aesthetic design of the machine is indirectly obscuring access for some people. At present the PC still bears the stigma of it's childhood years in the male-dominated, unrepresentative computer industry. For a "quintessentially postmodern device"[30], the personal computer has remained strangely 'unstylish' throughout its lifetime. The Independent's design critic Jonathan Glancey writes:
"The desktop varieties are the worst offenders. Designers have the opportunity to shape their wares in any number of different, likable and ergonomic forms. But do they? Hardly ever. Nearly every desktop computer is ugly, bulky and designed for a robot rather than a human being. Colours are nasty - the bureaucratic equivalent of magnolia in the home ... As bland as the office interiors they dominate, desktop computers have adopted a form that is meant to be discreet and yet, because it is so low-grade, screams for attention ..."[31]The desktop PC could essentially be any shape, but quite obviously the PC has been primarily designed for the office environment. With its emergence in other public and private domains (in cybercafés, town halls, leisure facilities, living rooms), the functional and aesthetic design of the common PC, it's software, and the physical space it is accessed from, may need rethinking. Most intermediaries of the interface between public space and cyberspace pay little attention to this. It may be that the effect of ignoring this aspect of space is to scare the curious cautious 'cybervirgin' away.
The pricing model of cybercafés is illogical. One effectively pays around £3 (on average) for a service for half-an-hour of continuous usage, yet is this how these services are best used? The nature of cyberspace is ephemeral and non-linear - it is something to be skipped-in and -out of on a whim. The notion of 'doing half-an-hour of cyberspace' is misplaced. The most obvious solution is to not charge for access and allow people to come and go. The relatively cheap long-term cost of providing Internet services suggests that this could be feasible, certainly if underwritten by cultural policy-makers as an initial 'loss-leader'.
Cybercafés are concerned principally with re-imaging the computer within a context of popular cultural consumption, or enabling the most basic access. Their essential role, despite the column inches they have generated, is to stimulate curiosity yet they cannot provide a useful space to further develop the necessary understanding to take the next step from idle consumer to a skilled producer. They are currently the most visible aspect of public access to cyberspace, yet how much use is this idle browsing over a cappuccino when compared to the working information culture enabled by, say, a purpose-built, 24-hour telematics site based in the city centre, but also with equivalents in locations out of the café-bar zone? The effects of cybercafés alone are likely to privatise cyberspace in favour of trendy, well-off socialites, perhaps at the expense of people with less cash, but more interesting and creative ideas for cultural production.
In this city, a more useful model of universal access is being developed, based around the cultural industries in the Northern Quarter of Manchester city centre.
As part of a long-term regeneration strategy, the Northern Quarter of Manchester city centre is being promoted as a 'Creative Quarter', an area of cultural production and consumption with an emphasis on the innovative and experimental. Within this, the Northern Quarter Network project is intended to capitalise on the creative potential of new technology. This means developing a working information culture for the cultural industries of the Northern Quarter, in which networked organisations use email and the Web and so on but also, fundamentally, understand how to creatively use productive information technology.
The key element is training. The project offers free training as well as free web pages, as a 'loss leader' in order to develop an initial level of understanding. These are coordinated by the Manchester Institute for Popular Culture and Manchester Music Network, who have direct experience and knowledge of technology-use in the cultural industries - experience often lacking in more generalised training. This initial interest is intended to be developed by a purpose-built telematics centre, which is envisaged to include facilities for teleworking, accessible welcoming public access areas, a venue for digital gigs and performance, video-conferencing areas, and training rooms. This centre is also intended to be complemented by a variety of other access points in the area.
The project is being augmented by the city's evolving information culture which hopes to combine accessible training, purpose-built public access space in a variety of locations[32], managed workspace [33], the reimaging enabled by cybercafés, a strong digital popular culture built on the existing expertise in the city, widespread access to both narrow-band and broad-band technology, accessible from city- centre and suburban sites. The Northern Quarter project in particular fits into more holistic strategies which are intended to develop the networked mixed-use communities and revitalised public spaces mentioned earlier, which aim to build on the potential of information and communications technologies, rather than succumb to the latent marginalising and dislocating forces they possess.
So, cyberspace need not spell the end of cities - far from it. The challenge for post-industrial cities is encapsulated within a quote from the organiser of the Stormy Waters event in Glasgow last July:
"I have always been fascinated by networks. You can live in the north of Europe in a politically disenfranchised city and become the centre of the world for 20 minutes." [34]Without wishing to demean what was an extremely innovative and successful event, the fact that a city can be centre of the world illustrates the potential of cyberspace, yet here it is only for 20 minutes. As the original functions of post-industrial cities fade, in this case, Glasgow's ship-building rusting away, and the city is relocated within an information economy, how is it to feed its citizens by a 20 minute gaze from some portion of the world's cybertourists? The post-industrial city must seriously think through the implications of the information society. Its repositioning from industrial space to cyberspace must mean more than privileged flâneurs browsing the Web in café-bars. Its spatial representation in information must comprise ubiquitous access for its citizens within a skilled information-based local economy and popular culture if it is to avoid becoming a virtual ghetto and a physical ghost-town - a black hole in a digital universe.
Finally, an optimistic quote, again from William Mitchell (1995), which indicates that cities will not simply sink into a sea of information, ripped apart by the distancing forces of cyberspace: Mitchell posits that " ... the activity linkages that now hold large urban agglomerations together"[35] may well be weakened by some of the effects of technology, however :
"there is no reason to think that this novel condition will make us indifferent to our immediate surroundings or suddenly eliminate our desire for face-to-face human contact in congenial settings. We will still care about where we are, and we will still want company. So cities ... will probably find opportunities to restructure themselves - to regroup housing, workplaces, and service facilities into reinvigorated small-scale neighborhoods ... that are effectively nourished by strong electronic links to a wider world, but simultaneously prize their differences from other places, their local institutions and hangouts, and their unique ambiences and customs." [36]Perhaps this is a possible future for our cities, that we can find new ways of revitalising the physical city by building on the productive potential of the virtual city, and through the inherent flexibility of cyberspace enabling fluid use of city-centre space. That well-understood and carefully implemented models of public access hold the key to finding a new role for our postindustrial cities in an information society.
Footnotes to Part III
[24] STERLING and VIEMEISTER (1993), op cit.,
p.145
[25] Ibid., p.145
[26] LANDRY and BIANCHINI (1995), op cit., p.25
[27] 'Pointing a finger at the fascists', Umberto Eco,
The Guardian, 19 August 1995
[28]For readers interested in pursuing the implications of technology for democracy,
Charles Raab at Edinburgh University is doing excellent work on definitions of democracy and the possible
effects of advanced information and communications technologies. And for those interested in critiques of
Wired's ideologies and of the influences on American
cyberculture in general, an excellent place to start is 'The Pinnochio Theory', an essay by Richard Barbrook of
the HyperMedia Research Centre at the University of Westminster -
available from their website at .iso/marchweb/mirrored/manch/nomirror.gif)
http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/
[29] From personal phone conversation with Mike Hill,
10:45am, 28 June 1995
[30] From publicity material for the 'Anti*Rom' CD-ROM by SASS multimedia collective.
[31] 'Take me on a flight of fancy' by Jonathan Glancey,
The Independent, 10 July 1995
[32] Such as the innovative Electronic Village Halls
positioned around the city and the existing cybercafes, such as Dry
Bar and Atlas Bar, for complementary support.
[33] Such as the project led by the Idea@Mcr1 consortium
for a city-centre building of managed workspaces for cultural industries
(potentially also in the Norhern Quarter).
[34] 'Glasgow's hi-tech gig Nets a worldwide audience',
The Observer, 23 July 1995
[35] MITCHELL (1995), p.170
[36] Ibid., p.170
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