The Shape of Digital Things to Come
By Christian Peralta Planning, September 2002
Technology has always had a role in shaping cities. Electricity helped
create the 24-hour city. Air conditioning led to the Phoenix and Las Vegas
that we know today. Elevators changed the skyine.
If we imagine the Internet is to the 21st century what the automobile
was to the 20th, then the cities of the future will most certainly be
reshaped both by the Internet and by the telecommunications and information
technologies that support it. The impacts of the digital revolution are
poised to affect nearly every aspect of modern life, including the choices
we make about how and where we live and work.
Wired working
The Internet's biggest impact has been on the workplace, with the number
of telecommuters continuing to grow, says Patricia Mokhtarian, a civil
and environmental engineering professor at the University of California–Davis,
who has conducted research on telecommuting. Various studies say 18 to
19 million salaried workers — about one-fifth of the labor force
— telecommuted at least once a week in 2001. And that number doesn't
include those who work in home-based businesses.
In addition, about 70 percent of the nation's 4,000 two- and four-year
colleges offered online courses in 2000, up from 48 percent in 1998. Many
schools and universities are exploring ways to deliver online classes;
they are also developing digital campuses for students in remote locations
or those with tight schedules.
Joel Kotkin, author of The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution
Is Reshaping the American Landscape, says that technology workers
— a substantial proportion of the nation's telecommuters —
are moving in two directions: toward the suburbs and exurbs on the one
hand and, on the other, toward cities such as San Francisco, Portland,
and Denver, whose urban cores are being revitalized by tech savvy professionals
seeking chic live-work spaces.
Transportation planners hope that increases in telecommuting will help
reduce the total number of vehicle trips and their attendant emissions
and traffic congestion. Although the results thus far have translated
into small reductions — much less than one percent, Mokhtarian says
— future growth in the number of vehicle trips may be stemmed as
the number of teleworkers and telestudents grows.
The new e-conomy
Even with the current gloom in the Internet sector of the economy, business
on the World Wide Web has never been better. The U.S. Department of Commerce
estimates online sales totaled close to $10 billion during the first quarter
of 2002, up 19 percent from a year earlier. In addition, business-to-business
commerce, or B2B, has emerged as a major force in the new economy, cutting
millions from the costs of doing business. Worldwide online B2B transactions
reached $950 million in 2001 and are expected to approach $4 billion by
the end of 2003, according to one study by the Gartner Group, Inc., a
consulting and research firm.
The overall increase in e-commerce means that goods distribution channels
must be rethought. In general, this means two things for cities. First,
more capacity will be needed at seaports and airports, particularly those
near large urban centers. (See "The Long Haul," January 2001.)
Second is a potential shift in the amount and location of commercial and
industrial space that businesses will need to store and sell goods. Just-in-time
manufacturing and inventory have freed some companies from large warehouses,
whereas big online retailers now need big warehouses located near the
population centers they serve.
Most bricks-and-mortar retailers are now moving to a clicks-and-mortar
(also called bricks-and-clicks) model. National big box chains such as
Best Buy and Barnes & Noble, which offer goods that are easily purchased
online, have rushed to establish online stores in order to recapture customers
who had drifted to Amazon.com and Buy.com.
To prepare for these changes, some shopping malls are moving toward goods
that are best sold in person, such as fashion and home furnishings. Others
are developing into lifestyle centers offering entertainment and dining
options as well as shopping.
It is not yet clear to what degree these changes will affect urban commercial
real estate markets. Anthony Townsend, an associate research scientist
at New York University's Taub Urban Research Center, cautions that many
of the anticipated effects have yet to materialize.
Creating online communities
One of the key strengths of the Internet is helping people interact. Neighborhoodwide
intranets are springing up in communities across the nation.
Resident Interactive, an Atlanta-based company, has created a custom platform
for communities that want to provide household, neighborhood, and local
community content over the Internet. Founded by three former colleagues
at the Oracle Corporation, the firm has worked on several large projects,
including a citywide intranet for LaGrange, Georgia, which offered broadband
Internet service to all 25,000 residents.
With his firm's software, says founder Bill Roberts, "residents can
quickly and easily organize themselves into online communities of interest."
Homeowners groups, youth groups, and municipal governments can use a community
intranet to deliver information, conduct surveys and elections, even hold
online garage sales.
Local community information makes the Internet "much more relevant
to your day-to-day life," says Tom Reiman, founder and president
of the Broadband Group, a Sacramento, California, telecommunications consulting
firm that is working on community intranets at several new master planned
developments.
Extending the superhighway
Although Internet access is at an all-time high, many communities still
lack the broadband connections that make the Internet truly useful. To
increase capacity and connectivity, many cities have installed fiber-optic
lines along major highways and railroads.
Putting aside cities such as Cleveland and Los Angeles, which have become
major data hubs and have problems with the spread of telecom hotels, many
local governments have not yet planned for the technology facilities needed
to give their residents high-speed Internet connections.
Private developers are somewhat more up to speed on the need for Internet
hookups and the infrastructure that goes with them, says Reiman. That
is why many developers are building that infrastructure right into new
houses and apartments — and marketing those amenities to potential
buyers.
Reiman's firm has developed technology master plans for several high-profile
communities, including Playa Vista in west Los Angeles, and the redevelopment
at Denver's Stapleton Airport. Reiman says the major planning issues in
accommodating high-speed data networks include negotiating service franchises
to foster competition and creating easements for multiple telecommunications
carriers.
Most local governments have long-term relationships with existing service
providers, says Reiman, and that may make them reluctant to promote the
entry of other carriers and services. That may be one reason that developers
are hooking up with service providers.
Brambleton, a high-tech community being built in suburban Virginia (and
one of Reiman's clients), has partnered with Verizon to offer fiber-optic
connections directly to the housing there—one of the first developments
in the nation to do so. The developer is marketing to employees of nearby
technology firms such as America Online and MCI/Worldcom, many of whom
telecommute on occasion and therefore value connections to the Internet.
The new virtual reality
The popularity of digital communication and commerce has changed how we
interact with others. School children play video games with friends in
Singapore or Germany. Goods and services formerly bought at the local
mall are now being bought online and shipped from warehouses hundreds
of miles away.
My generation, now of college age, is the first to be completely swept
up by this phenomenon. During the past three years at the University of
Southern California, many of my fellow students and I skipped the long
lines at the college bookstore and ordered our textbooks online. Some
of us bought our groceries online through the late, lamented HomeGrocer.com.
We correspond with our professors via e-mail instead of meeting them during
office hours. We meet online to study and socialize.
People will always meet face to face. But as we interact digitally more
often, our cities and towns — the places where we live, work, and
play — will have to adapt to changing lifestyles.
Further, as the Internet steams forward and more and more Americans become
citizens of the World Wide Web, planners may want to keep an eye on which
social interactions are replaced by digital impulses, and which remain
in the physical realm. Then they will be better prepared to create the
places that the future netizens of America will want to reside in when
they choose to meet IRL — in real life.
Christian Peralta is a senior at the University of Southern California
majoring in urban planning and development. When not studying, he splits
his time between Urban Insight, a Los Angeles Internet consulting firm,
and Livable Places, a nonprofit housing developer and policy advocate.
He is the webmaster for APA's Los Angeles
section.
The New Geography, by Joel Kotkin (Random House, 2000).
"Electronic Cottages," by William J. Mitchell, in Smart
Growth: Form and Consequences, edited by Terry S. Szold and Armando
Carbonell (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2002).
This article first appeared on www.planning.org,
the website of the American Planning Association.
