Daniel Kaplan - Portail documentaire du Ministère de l'Ecologie

THE NETWORK AND THE CITY: URBAN PLACES IN VIRTUAL SPACES
The purpose of this paper is to consider the role
and significance of information technologies in the
urban experience. The evaluation deals with two
main streams: the first explores the representations
of cities on the Internet in the form of “virtual
urbanism”. The particular interest is on assessing the
case of virtual Turku. Relationships have been
drawn between the physical and material urban
representation with its actual buildings, environments
and places, and more abstract ideas of image
creation by the city related to the mental ideas that
these two aspects create in the mind of an observer.
Secondly, the debate of loss of public space in the
cities caused by high-tech advancements is under
critical examination. The stress is on evaluating
arguments about the decline of public life in the
urban realm. The connection has been established
between theoretical approaches ranging from
technological determinism, and ideas of substitution,
to refusal of techno-boom and other
sceptical approaches. Evaluation of spatial aspects
and experiences created in/by networks, particularly
in the Internet, is included. It is argued that the
Internet creates a crisis of boundaries between the
real and the virtual, and between spaces of near and
distant. The common factor is the usage of the
Internet as a media to awake and stimulate imaginations
in relation to a real world counterpart. This
article concludes by considering the implications of
spatial ideas on urban and virtual relations in
contemporary society.
Key words: urban life, virtuality, technological
substitution, information society.
Introduction
Questions in urban research have always been
connected to the social interaction within and mental
experiencing of urban space. Now, at the beginning
of a new millennium, new technological advancements
have made possible a new kind of urban
experience that has been described as a virtualelectronic-
or cyber-life. A causative factor in this
respect has been the Internet, an expanding entity
with a logarithmic growth rate. Since 1990 contemporary
societal research has paid more and more
Dr. Tommi INKINEN
University of Turku, Department of Geography
attention to this new transformative force that alters
the behavioural patterns of individuals and also has
implications on the aggregate factors like economic
power and political decision-making. The multitransaction
of voice, moving real-time pictures,
textual and numerical data and their simultaneous
usage has given an enormous boost to this global
information channel. In addition, older and more
traditional forms of media, like newspaper, television
and radio have created an extensive hype about their
new partner and companion. Now advertisements
effectively promote ideas of virtual tourism and new
opportunities to consume.
There have been several discussions in contemporary
literature concerning issues dealing with
urban – electronic relations (e.g. Graham & Marvin
1996; Mitchell 1995; Light 1999). The variety of
argumentation is enormous, but three broad
aggregate types, in a geographical sense, have been
proposed by Graham (1998: 167–180). He argues
that the societal evolution is evidently affected by
technological advancements and makes the
distinction between proposed genres into the
following: firstly, the techno-dream of substitution
and transcendence – the transformation of life
in/onto the net resulting in spaces/places and their
dynamics being substituted and replaced by new
technological innovations. Secondly, the recognition
of parallel co-evolution – the notion of that the
societal and technological evolution are tightly
bound together. Finally, the recombination
perspective – the acknowledgement of relational
interactions between human actors and the
contextual nature of man-computer relations (see
also Law and Hassard 1999: 1–16; Bingham 1996) in
which the focus is on assessing the diversity of human
interactions and their differences through different
sets of human actor–technology recombinations.
In this paper I’m going to explore two essential
questions. Firstly, to evaluate the virtual tourism by
using Turku as a case study, and secondly, to assess
the capability of these technologies to substitute
public life, an argument that has been analysed e.g.
by Light (1999) and Crang (2000). The connection
is drawn to actual human experiences in the form of
an empirical slice. The two questions are interwoven
and therefore strict separation of the issues is
impossible. The themes are synthesised together
and a critical approach will be proposed.
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