ancient cities

392 Informational City
Nevertheless, ideal city is the principal challenge
for planning, design, and management of urban
landscape. It embodies the fundamental questions
of how to create better cities and to alleviate the
ills of existing ones. It also embodies the fundamental
problem that the ideal city for some people
may not at all be the ideal city for other people, and
furthermore, what is believed ideal now may be a
disaster tomorrow. Another challenge of ideal cities
is that many traits of actual cities throughout the
history of civilization—diversity, multitude,
crowds, pollution, dense habitation, opportunities
for different groups of people to mingle and
conflict—are part of what the very notion of city
entails, and therefore, ideal cities may in fact be
something different from cities altogether.
Finally, the ideal city is also a legitimate object
for research. The important fields of interest
include history of idealized artistic depictions of
the urban and ideal cities in the history of architecture;
the way conceptions of an ideal city guide the
actual practice of planning and design; and the
way the outcomes of attempts to realize the ideal
city are coming to be successful or unsuccessful.
Nikita A. Kharlamov
See also Architecture; Brasilia, Brazil; Lynch, Kevin;
Medieval Town Design; Mumford, Lewis; Renaissance
City; Urban Planning; Utopia
Further Readings
Kostof, Spiro. 1999. The City Shaped: Urban Patterns
and Meanings through History. London: Thames &
Hudson.
Kumar, Krishan. 2003. “Aspects of the Western Utopian
Tradition.” History of the Human Sciences
16(1):63–77.
Lynch, Kevin. 1984. Good City Form. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Mumford, Lewis. 1965. “Utopia, the City, and the
Machine.” Daedalus 94(2):271–92.
———. 1989. The City in History: Its Origins, Its
Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York:
Harcourt.
Rosenau, Helen. 1983. The Ideal City: Its Architectural
Evolution in Europe. London: Methuen.
Solinís, Germán. 2006. “Utopia, the Origins and
Invention of Western Urban Design.” Diogenes
53(1):79–87.
In f o r m a t I o n a l CI t y
Many cities worldwide face the prospect of major
transformation as the world moves toward a
global information order. In this new era, urban
economies are being radically altered by dynamic
processes of economic and spatial restructuring.
The result is the creation of informational cities,
or their new and more popular name, knowledge
cities.
For the last two centuries, social production
had been primarily understood and shaped by neoclassical
economic thought, which recognized only
three factors of production: land, labor, and capital.
Knowledge, education, and intellectual capacity
were secondary, if not incidental, factors.
Human capital was assumed to be either embedded
in labor or just one of numerous categories of
capital. In the last decades, it has become apparent
that knowledge is sufficiently important to deserve
recognition as a fourth factor of production.
Knowledge and information and the social and
technological settings for their production and
communication are now seen as keys to development
and economic prosperity.
The rise of knowledge-based opportunity has,
in many cases, been accompanied by a concomitant
decline in traditional industrial activity.
The replacement of physical commodity production
by more abstract forms of production (e.g.,
information, ideas, and knowledge) has, however
paradoxically, reinforced the importance of central
places and led to the formation of knowledge
cities.
Knowledge is produced, marketed, and exchanged
mainly in cities. Therefore, knowledge cities aim to
assist decision makers in making their cities compatible
with the knowledge economy and thus able
to compete with other cities. Knowledge cities
enable their citizens to foster knowledge creation,
knowledge exchange, and innovation. They also
encourage the continuous creation, sharing, evaluation,
renewal, and update of knowledge.
To compete nationally and internationally, cities
need knowledge infrastructures (e.g., universities,
research and development institutes); a concentration
of well-educated people; technological, mainly
electronic, infrastructure; and connections to the
global economy (e.g., international companies and