From The City Of Bits to E-Topia: Space, Citizenship and Community as Global Strategy

Introduction

Given the growing significance of Mitchell’s (1995, 1999, 2001, 2003) work on the transformative capacities of information technology (IT), this paper shall reflect on the transition from the City of Bits to e-topia and concerns Graham and Marvin’s (2001)Splintering Urbanism reveals about the status of this thesis. Reflecting on these concerns, the paper uncovers what the emerging critique reveals about e-topia and goes on to expose what this paper’s critical reworking of the thesis tells us about the citizenship, community and governance of digitally-inclusive regeneration platforms.

The critical nature of these insights shall then be used to take this investigation into the space, citizenship, community and governance of digitally-inclusive regeneration platforms full circle. This shall be done by offering an outline of urban life as the place citizens shall come to know it! That is as the embedded intelligence: semantics, syntax and vocabulary, which unlike the discourse offered by the likes of Laclau and Mouffe (2001) and Zizek (1997, 2006a, 2006b), has the space for citizens to seek out a sense of community.

The focus of the paper is theoretical and offers an extended critique of the thesis e-topia is based on and whose limitations other leading academics in the field have sought to expose as part of a constructive realignment. In taking this form, it draws attention to the dis-content with the thesis and transformation of its environmental determinism, social hegemony and political subjectivity. As such the literature made use of is confined to the authors advocating the thesis and its critical reconstruction. In that sense the paper does not set out to review all the literature currently available on the subject, but be more selective, by restricting the literature review to those texts which demonstrate a strong insight into the transformative nature of the developments in question.

This is not to suggest the thesis has no practical relevance. This would not be true. For major software developers like Microsoft, Cisco, Hewlett Packard and Siemens, each have digital-inclusion programmes, all of them currently in the process of being embedded as the intelligence of networked cities.^{1 2 3 4} However, the object of this paper is to put the theory before practice and take the opportunity such an examination of e-topia offers to expose the criticality of space, citizenship, community and governance as key components of the global strategy all of these developments are wrapped up in (Deakin, 2007).