Space is a social practice. Over the last decades, mobility – of people,
goods, and information – across distances large and small has become an ever
more salient aspect of a wide range of social practices. New technological
regimes have been created to enable and control this movement and new
practices are remaking urban spaces. As an effect, one and the same space
might have vastly different characteristics depending on how people
interface with the technical grid. This ranges from new ways of coordinating
one's movements through space with the help of new mobile technology, to
electronic tagging technologies to monitor and restrict the movement of
people as a form of criminal punishment, to the construction of special
access zones (where certain people can either not enter, or not leave) which
create new areas of invisibility. Yet, there is also the promise of using
the civic and participatory potential of the new technologies to re-connect
people with the local places they live-in. The sociologist Manuel Castells
speaks in this context of the re-ordering of the space of places through the
space of flows. The analog logic of geography encounters the digital logic
of communication networks as lived space turns into a mosaic of practices,
sometimes intersecting, sometimes conflicting and often bypassing each
other.
For the first time in world history a majority lives in cities but the
cities' form itself is challenged and stratified into a grid of distinct
sectors. Virtual and physical space increasingly fragments into fully global
zones along intensely local spaces in a single geographic domain. Urban
development is defined by the vectors of knowledge and power. Information in
its social expressions manifests in physical environments, and in the
shaping of urban spaces. Metropolitan architecture has to accommodate
locations of the virtual and the new laboratories of the mind where humans
and machines shape each other in the production of meaning.
