William J. Mitchell, ME++

In the early 1970s, the cybernetics pioneer Gregory Bateson described a blind man with a walking stick to illustrate his concept of “ecology of mind.” The blind man’s cognitive being does not terminate at his brain stem, nor at his fingertips, nor even at the tip of his cane. Rather, the walking stick is part of the man, a mental extension just like the city street upon which he walks.

William J. Mitchell, author, professor, and Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT, is also well-versed in networked structures—both mental, like that conceived by Bateson, and electronic, as found in the digital devices of the future-cum-present. In his most recent writings, Mitchell picks up Bateson’s stick, essentially adds a few circuits, and plugs it into a worldwide, computerized communications network, creating a silicon-enhanced ecology of mind. The three books—an “informal trilogy of real-time scholarship”—that Mitchell has written since 1995 expertly explore this cybernetic mind at the intersection of two radical network sciences: information technology and city planning. 

Mitchell wrote the first book, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, at a time when Dell sold computers over a hotline and Yahoo was still hosted on a Stanford server. It outlined the initial impact of the information superhighway on urban design and social relationships. The follow-up, e-topia: Urban Life, Jim—But Not as We Know It, examined the links between software and city planning, offering millennial advice on how to incorporate smart telecommunications into 24/7, mixed-use communities. Now Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City explores the role of the self within an electronically-geared architecture, updating Mitchell’s vision to account for ubiquitous cell phones and wireless Internet.

Mitchell’s decade-long project posits that the digital revolution that has just begun will alter patterns of human settlement and land use to the same degree as the industrial and agricultural revolutions. What Mitchell proposes for the future of cities is this: we will not have to choose between the actual and the virtual (as certain dystopian science fiction movie franchises would have us believe), but rather, we will interact with cities that are fluid mixtures of the real and the electronic. Mitchell thus addresses current fears about the viability of the city, insisting that just because telecommunications allows information to be accessed from anywhere, the city itself does not cease to matter but rather remains vital in its electronically augmented form. This interweaving of bits and matter will fundamentally change the way that we use space, distribute resources, and interact with our communities.

Mitchell’s book covers much of the same ground as other prescient pieces of tech writing, such as Howard Rheingold’s giddily enthusiastic Smart Mobs, or even the weekly “Circuits” section of the New York Times. But while other texts in the information technology genre concentrate on sociology or are content merely to talk about souped-up cell phones, Me++ delves into architectural theories and the urban condition. Where other authors are straightforward and use descriptive language, Mitchell’s tone is academic and loaded with bad puns and postmodern phrasings, such as “sensorium (augmented),” “Caveat surfer,” or even “Digital Doublin’,” the title of a chapter that re-imagines James Joyce’s Ulysses as a cybernetic adventure. And to an extent unseen in most tech writing, his work investigates the electronic gizmos that have grown out of the Internet and mobile communications revolution, devices ranging from Wi-Fi, SMS, and PDAs, to GPS, GIS, GSM, and 3G, and as far as NEMS, EmNets, RFID, FM, and GEO.* (Don’t worry, Mitchell throws in some easy ones, too, like www, MP3, SARS, WTC, and MIT.) Me++ untangles the acronyms in a way that neither intimidates the uninitiated nor bores the digirati. In doing so, Mitchell goes beyond mere prediction to advocate passionately for the use of shrinking technologies, accelerating processing speeds, and hyperconnectivity to foster the creation of “smart” communities that emphasize diverse social relationships and empower the citizen.

Crucial to Mitchell’s argument is how overlaying a digital network upon an actual landscape increases the multifunctional nature of spaces. Stationary buildings and plazas will be designed to provide versatile uses for their mobile visitors, occupants, and operators. While 20th century city planning segregated different functions into separate zones, so that polluted industrial areas, for example, would not adjoin bucolic residential tracts, Mitchell anticipates that 21st century planning guidelines, while maintaining distance where appropriate, will accommodate several activities at any given location. Previous attempts at spatial multifunctionality—which, like sofa beds or mobile partitions, were often cumbersome—will go by the wayside as an adaptive, intelligent architecture permits, or even provides, the different software that users need for their PDAs or laptops in order to accomplish a range of tasks in a single space. The rudiments of such a sophisticated “smart-chitecture” currently can be found in high-tech student lounges, multimedia conference centers, and Bill Gates’ dining room. Windows and walls serve as display screens, circuitry is integrated into drywall, and the metaphoric “Computer” of Star Trek is there for you whenever you wish.

Furthermore, because networked systems are “fluid and amorphous,” many of the activities happening at a particular place within the city will be unanticipated. Mitchell calls for the easing of much of city planning’s traditional rigidity in order to accommodate the ad hoc behavior of a plugged-in tribe. At Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan, for example, wireless access to the Internet lets users of Wi-Fi-equipped laptops check stock prices, purchase clothing, and renew driver’s licenses. None of these are conventional “park activities,” but this well-designed park is equipped to handle them, and even encourage them. Mitchell anticipates more diverse-use spaces in the future, such that office buildings, sidewalks, and automobiles will have second roles as spaces that provide access to electronic information. 

Delocalizing access to information will not diminish the distinctiveness of place, as Luddites might claim. Indeed, the specificity of place will only increase in importance. Of particular interest to Mitchell in the merging of the virtual and the actual is spatial metadata, data that both assigns real-space coordinates to electronic content and stores physical attributes such as size and shape in digital format. It is now possible to ascertain many precise characteristics of a place or an item, and its context, simply by looking it up with a computer. MapQuest, for example, uses “geocoding” software to link a street corner to a virtual address. Mitchell predicts that spatial metadata, together with the GPS networks and RFID microchips that locate mobile objects and “tag” their properties, will help contextualize a person’s experience of one place by making information about numerous other places immediately accessible.

Mitchell proposes two examples, in traffic management and grocery shopping, of how contextually-aware devices can be applied to future planning. Your car will be able to flash you a stop sign upon the windshield when you come to a trafficked intersection during rush hour and display nothing when you approach the same crossing at 3 am. Or, your shopping cart will remind you to buy milk when you pass it in the aisle, because your refrigerator tells it your milk at home is past the expiration date. A more nefarious, present-day use of spatial data is the gerrymandering of political districts by bureaucrats who employ new mapping software and voting history databases to cut through what was previously an impenetrable density of urban electoral behaviors.

One of the functions of a city is to make the location and accumulation of resources more efficient and to foster interactions among searchers and gatherers. Traditionally, cities facilitated the swapping of ideas and commodities through density, reliable transportation, and legible signage. But the function of urban space has already begun to change. The Internet speeds up search and transport times, as evidenced by the preeminence of Google and the buying and selling of obscure commodities on eBay. In City of Bits , Mitchell accurately predicted that much window shopping would be conducted via retail web pages and that showrooms and stockrooms would shrink. Virtual inventories may eventually supplant retail storage: a customer’s clothing will be saved electronically as detailed measurements, for instance, to be created materially only once ordered.

Miniaturization and digitization, too, have rendered weightless many of the objects at one time exchanged by hand. As an example, Mitchell cites the entire ancient Library of Alexandria, which now fits on a microchip. With each additional tablet or parchment that is downloaded, no actual weight or bulk is added to the desktop. Likewise, the zeroes and ones that represent your bank account are much lighter than the quarters you carry in your pocket and, despite their lack of physical mass, are perfectly legitimate, and sometimes preferred, forms of legal tender. Converting information-based commodities, like text documents, images, and audio recordings, to digital form eases the burden of transporting them and, in some cases, already is the prevalent method of distribution. Particularized object metadata—data that track and coordinate digitized goods—will ensure that the 18-wheelers on the Interstate of today are assisted by the 18-gigabyters on the Internet of tomorrow.

Finally, having shown how the virtual encoding of spaces and goods can improve the experience of actual spaces, Mitchell looks at how the so-called cyborg, the virtual representation of self, will affect civic life. Whereas Aristotle estimated the size of the ideal community to be 5,000 democratically active citizens, Mitchell scales it up to the entire global village of the web. Drawing on the formulations of Fustel de Coulanges, a scholar on the ancient city, Mitchell identifies civitas, the abstract sense of tribal community, as having been rooted in physical place only because ancient people had to settle collectively in cities. Now, cyberspace offers a home suitable to the abstract nature of civitas, and urban space need no longer be the sole civic territory. The key to successful cyber-civics is the Golden Rule: reciprocity. Citizens of the metropolis have always relied upon mutual trust to ensure their own survival. But now, within the Internet, all connected individuals have the ability to interfere with each other’s lives to a degree never before imagined—whether through viruses or the mischievous Bulgarian teenager who wants to reprogram your alarm clock from abroad. Mitchell urges us to treat each other decently, lest we have done unto us what we just don’t want done. He also worries that, to accommodate a lack of trust, overprotective policies and copyright controls may be instituted that limit common property and stymie cultural creativity.

Certain implications of Mitchell’s vision for a digitized, e-topian society are disconcerting. As the title of Me++ indicates, the emphasis of the networked city is egoistic. As individuals gain access to greater amounts of information, they are increasingly likely to seek out only what interests them, specifying themselves into niche markets and ignoring the wider world. Public life might then suffer at the expense of the flourishing private life, and worse, we might start to identify ourselves as customers and consumers to the exclusion of any sense of ourselves as citizens. Mitchell also awkwardly avoids considerations of inequity. He presupposes the nonexistence of the so-called “digital divide,” offering no options for overcoming it.

Mitchell set out to play the role of a “critically engaged designer whose business it is to reflect, imagine, invent.” He manages to be neither a strict utopian looking forward at what’s to come nor a nostalgic pessimist looking back at what has changed. Rather, his creativity, rationality, and reverence for his subject matter inform us of the next steps in urban life, preparing us for when our already diverse and dynamic cities become more tightly networked, acquire more finely arranged digital overlays, and achieve global connectedness to an even greater degree.

*In order: Wi-Fi: the IEEE [Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers] 802.11b protocol standard for wireless Ethernet. SMS: Short Message Service, commonly referred to as cell phone “texting.” PDAs: Personal Digital Assistants (like Palm Pilots and Blackberrys). GPS: Global Positioning System (gives coordinates to “you are here”). GIS: Geographic Information Systems (database meets map). GSM: the Global System for Mobile Communications, a digital telephony standard. 3G, or “third generation”: the spectrum reserved for enhanced mobile electronics usage. NEMS: nanoelectricomechanical systems, or machines with really really small parts. EmNets: networked systems of embedded computers. RDID: Radio Frequency Identification (think smart bar codes). FM: Facilities Management Systems (database meets floorplan). GEO: Geostationary Orbit Satellites.