ancient cities

198 Cyburbia
Street Seaport in New York and Penang in Malaysia
for redeveloping in a way that markets the most
consumable aspects of heritage with a view to
improving economic returns.
There is a growing awareness of the need to
judiciously use and protect resources with a view
to sustainability. Inherent in the idea of sustainability
is development and change: the idea of
making careful use of resources and finding ways
to replenish and enrich in protecting for the future.
In similar ways, conservation of heritage does not
mean a return to a premodern past but negotiation
of identities and forms of the past with the future
through sustainable development.
Jyoti Hosagrahar
See also Heritage City; Historic Cities; Public Realm;
Santa Fe, New Mexico; Urban Culture
Further Readings
Fitch, James Marston. 1982. Historic Preservation:
Curatorial Management of the Built World.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS)
(http://www.international.icomos.org/home.htm).
Jokilehto, Jukka. 1999. A History of Architectural
Conservation. Oxford, UK: Butterworth-Heinemann.
National Trust for Historic Preservation (http://www
.nationaltrust.org).
Price, N. Stanley, M. Kirby, and A. Melucco Vaccaro, eds.
1996. Historical and Philosophical Issues in the
Conservation of Cultural Heritage. Los Angeles:
John Paul Getty Trust.
UNESCO World Heritage Center (http://whc.unesco.org).
Cy b u r b i a
Cyburbia broadly refers to the study of how new
information and communication technologies
(ICT), also called new media and computer-mediated
communication, such as the Internet and
mobile phones, influence community and social
interactions at the neighborhood level. This
approach is distinct from traditional urban studies,
which privilege face-to-face relationships, and
studies of virtual community, which distinguish
between the virtual and the real. Instead, this
approach recognizes that the physical and the
virtual geographies of community overlap and are
intertwined in the maintenance and formation of
everyday social relations in the urban setting.
Urban Studies and Technological Change
Interest in how technological change influences
everyday urban interactions has its origins at least
as early as the Chicago School of Urban Sociology.
This early work was a reaction to the ways in which
changes in urban transportation and communication
technology, such as public transportation,
the automobile, and the telephone, transformed the
social and physical organization of the city.
Researchers such as Robert Park and Ernest Burgess
noted that while new communication technologies
expanded opportunities for social interaction, the
increased mobility offered by technologies like the
telephone was argued to be responsible for the deterioration
of local community and social relationships.
Concerns over the impact of new technologies
on social relationships endured through the twentieth
century, focusing primarily on the introduction
of the telephone and the television, and have
extended into the twenty-first century with the
growth of the Internet and related technologies.
ICTs and Social Networks
The study of how new ICTs influence social relationships
in the urban environment has been
explored as part of a larger debate related to how,
or if, social networks have been transformed as a
result of the Internet. This research has broadly
focused on the question: Is the Internet replacing
social contact, either in person or through other
forms of communication? The conclusion of this
body of research is that the Internet, in particular
e-mail use, has become an important and integrated
part of people’s everyday life. It supports
interaction with preexisting strong social ties as
well as more extensive social ties. There is little
indication that Internet use substitutes for other
forms of contact, such as telephone calls or faceto-face
encounters. Instead, the evidence suggests
that those who are in frequent contact with members
of their personal network by e-mail are also in
frequent contact in person and through other
media. Similarly, e-mail users tend to have more
social ties than nonusers. Although some have
argued that e-mail communication, or any form of