Egocities
What kind of urbanity for a mobile society?
Luca Bertolini
People from Milan. Photos Giuseppe Accardo (trakatan)
The ability to provide opportunities for human interaction has always been, and still is an essential reason for cities to exist. Modern transport and telecommunication technologies offer, however, a solution to the problem of space and time constraints on interaction radically different to that granted by the cities of the pre-industrial past. Transportation technologies have increasingly allowed people to shuttle daily between the corners of ever-larger urban regions, making the separation of places of residence, work and recreation possible. Telecommunication technologies are further broadening the variety of mobility options available, by adding virtual alternatives and by expanding the scope of physical ones. Does this last development mean that the city is now ‘everywhere’, or perhaps ‘nowhere’, as some contend? Nothing is further from the truth. Several analysts have demonstrated how face-to-face, informal physical contacts still play a central role in leading areas of the urban economy, including financial and business services and emerging cultural industries.
As far as consumption is concerned, continuing decentralization of shopping and leisure complexes coexists with activities thriving in densely built, diverse historic centres, as ever-new forms of urban tourism testify. This apparent paradox can also be discerned in the social sphere. Next to an ongoing migration of households towards suburban and even exurban locations and the emerging of virtual social networks such as on the Internet, there is also a new, if selective, popularity of dense urban neighbourhoods and of public spaces granting abundant opportunities for physical human contact. The continuing need for physicality is also indicated by the success of festivals, performances, and public events of all sorts, documenting the still great – and possibly growing – value accorded to all that can be experienced ‘for real’.
The resulting picture is highly complex, as different activities are selectively (re)occupying physical and virtual spaces, giving rise to a multiplicity of urban forms and centres. Urban dwellers ‘surf’ – both physically and virtually – among all these forms and centres in order to perform specific combinations of activities and following specific individual lifestyles and personal traits (related for instance to differences in sex, age, wealth, culture). Different, only partially overlapping ‘ego-cities’ are thus developing, encompassing multiple spatial and temporal scales, and strongly dependent on the sort of people or activities involved. Access to means of physical and virtual mobility not just allows all this, but has become an essential condition for active participation in urban life.
Technologies add virtual alternatives and expand the scope of physical ones. Does this mean the city is now everywhere or maybe even nowhere?
This evolution makes it a central challenge for cities to have effective strategies to positively link urban development to the development of the very means of mobility: transport and telecommunication networks. A better awareness of the role of infrastructures in affecting the quality of urban life – or ‘urbanity’ – is a prerequisite to this. Let us explore this relationship. Possibly more than anything else, enhancing urbanity is about enhancing two things: economic, social and cultural diversity and a lively public realm. Economic diversity points to the ongoing division of labour, which is able to flourish in an urban environment thanks to the plentiful opportunities for contact between closely related types of specialist activity, the host of opportunities for interchanges with other sorts of producers and direct interactions with consumers. The combination of this extensive division of labour with a multiplicity of physical and institutional marketplaces creates a typical innovatory climate with lots of scope for incubating new ventures, which is the essence of economic success. A parallel argument can be developed with respect to social and cultural diversity: a variety of lifestyles and cultures is a key feature of successful cities because it provides the unique range of life choices and emancipation opportunities that has always been one of the most powerful magnets attracting people to cities. This degree of opportunities for a diversity of economic, social and cultural paths is a distinguishing characteristic of cities of all times. However, while in the past such diversity was typically confined within more or less identifiable and shared territorial boundaries, now different individuals and organizations are increasingly creating their own ‘ego-city’, which has no given physical and administrative borders, but is rather a specific, changeable combination of places of activity connected by ever further-reaching transport and telecommunication networks. Key questions become then: how to cater for the diversity of mobility requirements – both fast and slow, individual and collective, physical and virtual – that seem to characterize contemporary urban societies? What are the possibilities and the constraints (think about the depletion of non-renewable resources)? What must the priorities be, and why (think about equity issues)?
People from Milan. Photos Giuseppe Accardo (trakatan)
While cultivating diversity is crucial to the success of cities, a crucial aspect of urbanity is also that there are enough places for the various economies and lifestyles to meet and confront each other, that is, enough opportunities for the development of a ‘public realm’. Traditional examples of urban places where this can occur are squares and streets, parks and markets. In today’s highly mobile urban society, however, places at the confluences of traffic flows – such as stations or airports, but also car-based and pedestrian nodes – are becoming just as, if not more important. These are invariably the places where the largest concentrations of different people are present at a given time, whereas many traditional public spaces tend to be dominated by a single group, be it tourists in the historical city centre, or local residents in socially homogenous peripheral estates and suburbs. Alongside these new possibilities, there are however also new limitations. The main problem of emerging urban nodes is that the reality is still too often one of strict separation between flows (for instance between the world of the pedestrian, the public transport user, the car driver, the mobile caller), and one of strong limitations to the range of possible uses (just profitable and controllable ones). Some relevant questions here are: which planning, design and management strategies would allow more and different flows to cross each other and more and different uses to develop where this already happens? And what is working against this?
Fostering urbanity essentially means creating positive conditions for economic and socio-cultural diversity and exchange. This has been an all time challenge everywhere. In a mobile society such conditions fundamentally relate to transport and telecommunication network features, as they combine with features of the urban morphology and the needs and desires of different individuals, groups and organizations. The ‘good city’ would both minimise forced immobility and mobility, and maximise the conditions for co-presence of different sorts, while acknowledging the limits of the resources available. There is more than enough to be done!
