Magazine

When social scientist Roope Mokka sought to answer the question “What will the city look like in 2050?” he turned to the Internet. Mokka,whose think tank, Demos Helsinki, studies social change, saw in Wikipedia, social networking platforms and open-source software a new paradigm applicable to politics, production and real-space social organization. He’s offered a vision of a “Wikicity,” which functions like the Internet. Mokka’s idea might conjure specters of techno-utopias past (like Le Corbusier’s city-as-machine), but it’s also generating something rare in today’s future-city debates: excitement.