ancient cities

796 Technoburbs
The urban historian Robert Fishman coined the
term technoburb to describe the breakaway of the
urban periphery from a city it no longer needs and
the emergence of specific types of decentered urban
forms that retain the economic and technological
dynamism associated with the city. As a consequence,
these peripheral zones have emerged as
viable socioeconomic units. Other terms for similar
phenomena include edge cities, outer city, satellite
city, posturban city, centerless city, exopolis,
and exurbia.
Urban scholars have often looked to North
American case studies to examine the emergence of
a polycentric metropolis that defies a traditional
urban geography classification of core versus
periphery. Los Angeles has frequently been cited as
the paradigmatic exemplar of “a city turned inside
out” with central functions of the central business
district dispersed to its surrounding hinterland.
Any universal claims drawing on specific urban
case studies interpreted as offering lessons for all
other urban areas is problematic.
Historicizing Technoburbs
A growing theme within contemporary urban
studies has been to examine the impact of transportation
and information communications technologies
on the urban form. There has been an
ongoing debate over whether the rise in communications
technologies will lead to a concentration of
economic, social, political, and cultural functions
in ever more powerful global cities or whether
information technology will lead to the geographical
dispersal of the population.
Predicted scenarios of urban change over the
last 50 years have frequently displayed an inherent
ambivalence about the city. There has been widespread
speculation that the growth of transport
and telecommunications technologies would lead
to the death of geographical distance and the
growth of posturban cities. In America, the proliferation
of the telephone and automobile was predicted
to lead to the mass decentralization of
urban metropolises like New York and Chicago.
An imagined pastoral retreat to rural America was
to create dispersed cities in which people would be
isolated but connected to one another via modern
telecommunications, giving rise to a new kind of
antispatial community based on individualism and
self-reliance away from urban centers. A number
of urban futurists speculated a rise in suburbia
could allow citizens to reembrace “the American
way of life” and tackle problems of crime, poverty,
and loss of community, which had eroded social
ties and beset traditional urban centers through
American history. The establishment of rural communities
at the edge of urban civilization was interpreted
as a solution to the uneven development
and social conflict that has characterized urban
development since the birth of the industrial city.
Anti-urban visions of technologized futures
remained popular throughout the latter half of the
twentieth century as the capacity of telecommunications
technologies was expanded. With the
growth of the Internet, a number of media theorists
predicted that digital forms of living via new
communications technologies would supersede the
functional need for territorial-based physical proximity
within cities. Connection to an anytime–
anywhere global communications network was
technologically determined to result in the disappearance
of the traditional urban core and a mass
shift outward to decentralized technoburbs. Antiurban
ideas have genealogies in modern and utopian
urban planning histories that are supportive
of a pastoral ideal based on a belief that modern
technology can restore social order.
Despite these anti-urban predictions, contemporary
urbanism is characterized by a simultaneous
dispersal and concentration of specific economic,
social, cultural, and political functions both within
and outside strategic urban centers. While global
cities like London, New York, and Tokyo remain
the most powerful financial centers, other business-corporate
functions have been decentralized
to technoburbs that are emerging as new sites
where suburbs are serving both the city and the
global market.
Technoburbs as
New Industrial Complexes
Robert Fishman identified archetypal technoburbs
as Silicon Valley in northern California and Route
128 in Massachusetts. Both have emerged in the
periphery of large metropoles to become global
centers for research and development activities in
high-technology industries. These developments
can be characterized by the presence of advanced