Letters to the Editor
By John M. Eger, Time Magazine , March 18, 1999
Your featured story on urban sprawl was excellent, but failed to recognize that a fundamental shift to a knowledge-based economy and society is fast becoming a reality. This movement in which wealth creation hinges on our ability to create knowledge-based information products, and ushers in a new era in which sophisticated electronic infrastructures allow a wide variety of government, business and institutional transactions to take place electronically, which in turn obviats the need for travel to and from the government agencies and other places of business.
Though the bubble may yet burst on Amazon.com and other inflated Internet-based stocks, Foerster Research out of Cambridge estimates that 3.2 trillion dollars of commercial transactions will take place on the Internet by the year 2002. The Internet and the World Wide Web, growing at fifteen percent per month worldwide, is being integrated into the marketing, information and communications strategies of nearly every major corporation, educational institution, political and charitable organization, community and government agency in the United States.
Unlike towns and cities of an earlier era which were built along railroads, waterways or interstate highways, these cities of the future - - smart communities if you will - - will be built along "information highways," broadband systems of communications connected to every home, office, school, library and health care facility in the region. Such systems naturally reduce our dependency on the automobile and technologies which pose threats to our environment, but should also stem the tide of urban growth, and save and protect our open spaces. Promoting such smart communities and planning such information infrastructures as the County of San Diego is doing through the outsourcing of all of its telecommunications and information operations, represent a major step toward building the smart and sustainable communities of tomorrow for San Diego.
Importantly too, such infrastructures we know, are what are needed to attract the knowledge industries of the new information-based economy. What we are also beginning to understand is the that smart and sustainable, or livable communities, also attract the knowledge workers who themselves are migrating to places like Portland with its urban growth boundary and Seattle with its lakes and trees and precious open spaces.
Downtowns seem to be a particularly attractive haven for redevelopment and attracting the multimedia industries. Denver, with its Beaux Arts Historic Court is halfway through a decade-long downtown investment of one billion dollars and three sports stadiums, an aquarium and urban shopping complex. According to a report by James Brooks, of the New York Times, Denver, "following retail and entertainment development downtown now earmarking one billion dollars in residential construction. The total of 1334 apartments are being built or converted downtown, more than the total of the last four years."
According to a recent study by the Bookings Institution, this is part of a national trend. With mixed-use zoning, libraries, shops and live/work lofts all within walking distance of one another, these communities are fast becoming the most livable communities in the Age of the Internet.
John M. Eger, Van Deerlin Endowed Professor of Communications and Public Policy, is President and CEO of the World Foundation for Smart Communities