Some believe the decline of our cities started in 1939 at the World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, N.Y. The most popular exhibition was The World of Tomorrow in the General Motors Pavilion. It featured an enormous model of a City of the Future, complete with elevated freeways, on-ramps and off-ramps and gleaming skyscrapers separated by miles and miles of asphalt.
For General Motors and for the rest of America, the vision became reality, as more and more roads were built across the country and more and more families were able to purchase their own automobiles
Only now, sixty years later, are we beginning to change the lens in our camera, and see the need for a new and vastly different vision of our future and the role of cities. In a very real sense, the shift from an industrial to an information society is the raison d'etre for revisiting the American love affair with the automobile and asking some very tough questions about its role in the new economy. By doing so, we will begin to open the door to new thinking about the architecture of our cities and renewing their place in our lives.
According to author Charles Handy, we live in an age of paradox. The more high tech our world, the more high touch we are becoming. The more global, the more intensely local our focus needs to be. The more competitive our markets, the more cooperation is a critical element in developing our business strategies.
One of the more interesting paradoxes, particularly for San Diego and other regions of the world struggling to divine "smart growth" solutions, is that the more we live and work in cyberspace, the more important real place becomes. While this notion runs counter to much of today's popular literature, we are already seeing the knowledge worker and the high tech knowledge-sensitive industries migrating to highly livable communities -- communities with mountains or lakes, open spaces, clean air and water, and, as in the case of Portland, Ore. and other communities which have established urban growth boundaries, less reliance on the automobile as the primary mode of transportation.
This growing concern with urban sprawl, coupled with the nostalgic yearning which the "new urbanism" movement represents, are evidence of sweeping changes in public attitude toward physical space. As the Internet revolution moves into full bloom, however, there is every reason to believe it will have a dramatic impact on the architecture and landscape of communities throughout the world.
No technology in human history is having, or is likely to have, such tremendous influence on life and work and play, and in the transforming process, on our physical space. While a "smart community" -- a community which makes a conscious decision to aggressively deploy technology as a catalyst to solving its social and business needs -- will undoubtedly focus on building its high-speed broadband infrastructures, the real opportunity is in rebuilding and renewing a sense of place, and in the process a sense of civic pride.
Athens, the place where civilization was born and where the city-state form of governance first began, remains a symbol of the dynamic potential of cities to create and provide the linkages among culture, commerce and civic pride that are so important to the wealth and well-being of a community. Over the years however, cities have been both cursed and blessed as they have been compelled to adjust to the underlying changes taking place in our movement to a global economy and society. Many cities have died already, others are in fiscal and societal decay.
The concept of cities as engines of civilization remains deeply embedded in our collective psyche. As cities of the past were built along railroads, waterways and interstate highways, cities of the future will be built along information highways -- broadband communication links to homes, schools and offices, hospitals and cultural centers, and through the World Wide Web to millions of other locations all over the world.
As past is prologue, surely some cities will become the ghost towns of the twenty-first century information age. By far, however, cities will succeed and survive in this next transition to a knowledge-based, global information economy and society. Indeed, cities of the future -- the smart and sustainable communities built for the digital age -- will play a central role in the rebirth of civilization in the 21st century.
One of the main reasons that information networks could have a profoundly transformative effect on people, businesses and communities is complex but very real. First, consider that every other major technological advance shrinking space and time also has remade society in fundamental and important ways.
For example, over the millennia transportation has done more than perhaps any other technological advance to bring the world's people closer together. Centuries ago, the great sailing ships of Magellan, Drake, Columbus, and many others were the vehicles that ushered in the first global age, opening Europeans' eyes to the realization that they were not alone on the planet. Thus, the great sweep of colonization emerged that, for better or worse, brought Western European science, art, philosophy, and government to all parts of the world.
In the United States, water, wagon, and rail transportation had a similar effect, allowing the inhabitants in the heavily colonized eastern part of the country to move westward, eventually creating settlements as far west as California. As these settlements matured into cities and states, rail transportation allowed for the mass transport of workers and goods throughout the embryonic nation. This made possible the kind of regional specialization and inter-regional trade that are the hallmarks of an efficient, highly productive economy. Rail transportation also established the foundation for the economic pre-eminence that the United States enjoyed throughout the 20th century.
Water, wagon, and rail transportation soon lost their importance to another new form of transportation: the automobile.
First appearing in significant but limited numbers shortly after World War I, the automobile not only permitted people and goods to travel efficiently from place to place, but it did so in a way that maximized individual freedom. No longer would Americans be restricted to train or trolley or stagecoach schedules, nor be dependent upon the slow pace of the horse-drawn carriage. They could now travel where and when they wanted to go. Thus the introduction of the automobile cemented and reinforced the drive toward individualism that is perhaps the leading distinguishing characteristic of American culture and society.
The automobile's impact did not end there. In the post-World War II era, as the automobile became a mass commodity within reach of the middle and even lower strata of society, it also made possible a large-scale exodus from America's central cities to the suburban fringe. This move was in response to, and ultimately accelerated, the many serious social problems that still threaten American cities today, ranging from the racial and social segregation of U.S. society to daunting problems of urban sprawl and environmental degradation.
Telecommunications developments, including telephones and their more modern kin, accentuated the trends inaugurated by transportation advances in three important ways.
First, by allowing for rapid communication between distant sites, they made it possible for business and social relationships to flourish over long distances, permitting workers and investment capital to migrate to the most desirable locations and those with the highest economic return.
Second, they extended the reach of these economic, social, and other relationships far beyond national borders, creating what is truly a global economy.
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, they made possible for the first time the nearly instantaneous transmission of information, collapsing both space and time in a way that no other previous technological advance had done.
The last of the 20th century's geographically transformative technologies was the television set, which ironically both unified and atomized American society simultaneously.
It unified U.S. culture and society by creating a mass cultural experience that could be shared at the same time by people throughout the country, regardless of race, gender, age, income level, or place of residence. It is also in the process of doing so, if less completely, internationally.
This mass experience extended not just to programs, but to products as well, leading the way to such economically influential trends as national marketing campaigns, branded product identities, and demographically targeted marketing. At the same time, television advertisements, like radio advertising earlier, fed consumer appetites, and the United States evolved into a highly consumer-oriented society, whose enduring effects extended throughout both economic and social spheres.
In a contrary fashion, television also atomized society by pulling people off their porches and front stoops out of their community centers, and into the privacy of their living rooms. There they could obtain the connectedness on which their humanity depends without having to bear the burdens of an interactive association with their neighbors. Thus, television ended much of the community spirit that characterized American towns and villages throughout the nation's first 200 years, and that remains today mostly in smaller communities outside of major metropolitan areas.
As a result of this cocooning or drawing inward, most Americans today know more about the lives of fictional characters on popular television shows like "Ally McBeal" and "E.R." than they do about the people who live next door.
This trend in the United States is paralleled in other parts of the world as well. However, regardless of the locus of analysis, the impact of these technological developments has been clear: transportation and telecommunications technologies have compressed and, in some cases completely eliminated, the traditional barriers of space and time, leading to profound consequences in the physical, social and cultural spheres of life.
If we are to capitalize on this paradoxical shift by which telecommunications becomes a substitute for transportation, we must renew our sense of place and rethink our attitudes and our policies toward civic life, the village green, and the fundamental and historical reason for the city; to bring people together in harmony with one another and with their environment for economic gain and glory.
Fortunately, a new breed of architects, planners and developers is beginning to pencil in that new vision of America in the Information Age. It is a bold vision that deals with the crises of growth and the current development sprawl, while returning to a cherished American icon; that of a "compact, close-knit community," according to Peter Katz, author of "The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community."
The prospect of a new century, says Katz, raises serious concerns about the quality of life that can be expected in a future era of diminished global resources. Vice President Al Gore believes we are on a collision course between our worldwide civilization and the ecological system of the earth. What that means to San Diego is unclear but the prospect of another million people living here over the next few years has at least captured our attention.
Many policy wonks argue the urgency of our dilemma has reached an acute stage. Thus, as we examine our current policies of land development and urban planning, new non-linear solutions are imperative. The thing that we must remember, urges Katz, is that all of the strategies must be examined, tested and tested again in relation to prevailing developmental models. Only then can we determine if a "new urbanism" can indeed be shown to deliver a higher, more sustainable quality of life to a majority of this nation's citizens.
An exciting aspect of the new urbanism movement is that the next paradigm could well be much more than the return to the close-knit community of small town America, with its village greens and mixed-use zoning. It could be a spiritual return to the kind of community enjoyed by the earliest Americans.
Tessie Naranjo of the Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico defines community as "the human dwelling place." It is where the people meet the needs of survival and where they weave their webs of connections. Native communities are about connections because relationships form the whole. Each individual becomes part of the whole community which includes not just the human population, but the hills, mountains, rocks, trees and clouds.
Until recently, advances in telecommunications and transportation have contributed to our disconnectedness, rather than cemented us as a people; atomized our sense of community, rather than provided us a sense of place. Yet without a cultural center, a shared history or a commitment to neutral goals and visions, there is little to cement communities together.
Chief Sealth, for whom the city of Seattle is named, cautioned: "This we do know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."
As the World Wide Web becomes part of the web of life, perhaps mankind's technology will ultimately enhance and secure our connectedness to the physical world, preserving and protecting it for future generations. If successful, the smart and sustainable community will dramatically reverse an adverse trend precipitated by the invention of the cotton gin and the industrial revolution which followed; by the automobile, and fifty years of untamed growth and land development; and worse, by the advance of a rootless culture without a sense of place, and help lead us out of the spiritual and physical wasteland we have created.
John Eger is the Van Deerlin endowed professor of communications and public policy at San Diego State University. He is also executive director of SDSU's International Center for Communications. jeger@mail.sdsu.edu