Athens In The
Information Age
John M. Eger
San Diego State University
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 so important to the wealth and
well-being of a community. Over
the years, 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 already died; others are in fiscal and societal decay.
Nonetheless, the concept of
cities as engines of civilization remains deeply embedded in our collective
psyche. Will they succeed and
survive in this next transition to a knowledge-based, global information
economy and society? Indeed, what
role will cities play in this evolution?
What will cities of tomorrow look like?
As cities of the past were
built along railroads, waterways and interstate highways, cities of the future
will be built along "information highways" - broadband communications
links among 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.
This article explores these
revolutionary changes, explains the connections between technology and place,
and provides a framework for understanding the city of the future - the Athens
of the Information Age.
Key to the development of
the "Smart Community" effort is the university. Universities of the Future, like the
land grant universities of the agricultural past are now the bridges from an
industrial past to an information-age future. As universities are more interested in learning and linkages, more than other institutions public and private in a community, they are best able to create the vision and the plan and importantly the new "collaboratories" in a community to facilitate the process of renewal, reinvention and transformation so necessary to success and survival in the new global knowledge based economy and society. Through the community collaboratory, all the stakeholders
can begin the process of creating the 21st century learning society;
identify those things most important to the wealth and well-being of the whole,
and take ownership of the future of the region.
The Power and
Pervasive Influence of Technology
In less than a decade, the
great global network of computer networks called the Internet has blossomed
from an arcane tool used by academics and government researchers into a
worldwide mass communications medium, now poised to become the leading carrier
of all communications and financial transactions affecting life and work in the
21st Century.
The Internet's so-called
World Wide Web has been even more spectacular. With 300 million-plus users worldwide, growing at 15 percent
per month, it 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 world. No previous
advance - not the telephone, the television set, cable television, the VCR, the
facsimile machine, nor the cellular telephone - has penetrated public
consciousness and secured such widespread public adoption this quickly.
In recent years, it has become fashionable to refer to the domain in which Internet-based communications occur as "cyberspace"- an abstract communication space that exists both everywhere and nowhere.
But until flesh-and-blood human beings can be digitized into electronic pulses in the same way in which computer scientists have transformed data and images, the denizens of cyberspace will have to live IRL ("in real life") in some sort of real, physical space - a physical environment that will continue to dominate our future in the same way that our homes, neighborhoods, and communities do so today. Nonetheless, information
technology is a force that will reshape our world as never imagined.
Cyberplace and
the Emerging Cyberplace
According to Charles Handy,
author of The Age of Unreason, 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 must play a role in
developing our business strategies.
One of the more interesting
paradoxes 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, as in the case of Portland, Oregon and other
communities where they 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.
Once again, the University
can be the hub or "village green"- both literally and figuratively -
to help communities better understand that the Internet has replaced the
automobile as the engine of growth and redevelopment and the new landscape is
not so dependant on old ways of living and working.
The Rise of
Smart Communities
Already, communities and
nations around the globe - often without being consciously aware of it - are
starting to sketch out the first drafts of the cyberplaces of the 21st
Century. Singapore has launched
its IT2000 initiative, also known as the Intelligent Island Plan. Japan is building an electronic future
called Technopolis, or Teletopia.
France, as early as 1976, initiated a plan called Telematique, an
aggressive effort to place personal computers on every desktop and in every
home in the country. And in the
United States, the Clinton Administration pursued a vigorous National
Information Initiative, or NII, one of whose early goals to link every school
and every school child to the Internet by the year 2000.
Many communities -
Stockholm, Seattle, and Sacramento, for instance, have constructed large-scale
public-access networks that residents can use to obtain information about
government activities, community events, and critical social services like
disaster preparedness, child abuse prevention, and literacy education. The tiny university town of Blacksburg,
Virginia, has transformed itself into an electronic village, in which the
majority of the town's businesses and residents are connected to the local data
network. And counties like San Diego, as a result of its "City of the Future" project, are building even more sophisticated electronic infrastructures that, one day soon, will allow a wide variety of local government, business, and institutional transactions.
Recognizing that electronic networks like these will play an increasingly important role in a municipality's economic competitiveness, the State of California seven years ago launched a statewide "Smart Communities" program, which has been managed since its inception by the International Center for Communications at San Diego State University. More recently a World Foundation was established to help other communities around the world with their struggle to "get on the global information highway."
While the
Internet is for information exchange (email, audio/video, web, etc.), now
emerging is the global grid-computing network starting at San Diego
Supercomputer Center the future of which can provide almost unlimited
computing power as you can get water from a faucet. (See http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/waldrop0502.asp
http://www.sun.com/solutions/hpc/grid_computing.html
and
http://www.nature.com/nature/webmatters/grid/grid.html).
The Foundation defines a "smart community" as "a geographic area ranging in size from a neighborhood to a multi-county region whose residents, organizations, and governing institutions are using information technology to transform their region in significant, even fundamental ways."
A fundamental premise is that smart communities are not, at their core,
exercises in the deployment and use of technology, but in the promotion of
economic development, job growth, and an increased quality of life. In other words, technological
propagation of smart communities isn't an end in itself, but only a means to reinventing
cities for a new economy and society with clear and compelling community
benefit.
Digitalization
of telecommunications makes possible the sharing of valuable, expensive telecom
media, thus realizing drastic cost reduction. Global University System (GUS) is extending the principle of
sharing to the sharing of information and knowledge - and hopefully, even, the
opportunity to lead instead of just remaining a mere ivory tower in the
community. For sustainable economy
of expensive broadband Internet line, we need more subscribers to share the
cost, too and this is why of our community development approach is so
crucial.
Technology,
Culture, and Place
One of the main reasons that
information networks can have such a profound transformative effect on people,
businesses, and communities is that every other major technology advance that
has shrunk space and time also has remade society in fundamental and important
ways. Transportation, over the
millennia, for example, has done more than perhaps any other technological
advance to bring the world's people closer together.
But telecommunications
developments, including telephones and their more modern kin, accentuate the
trends inaugurated by transportation advances in three slightly different, but
very important ways.
First, by allowing for rapid
communication between distant sites, they make 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 extend the
reach of these economic, social and other relationships far beyond national
borders, creating what is truly a global economy. And third, and perhaps most significantly, they make 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 has done.
The Internet, the World Wide
Web, and their successors are likely to produce consequences that are as great
or greater than anything we have seen so far - and that are apt to be equally
unexpected. If we are to maximize
the positive contributions of these new technologies while minimizing their
negative ones, we must begin to appreciate now how these technologies are
likely to affect our people, our culture, and our perceptions of place in the
years to come.
The Technical
Architecture of the Smart Community
There are a few general
trends worth noting. The first is
the growing ubiquitousness of telecommunications networks. Because it is based largely on the
existing telephone systems, the Internet today spans the globe, with its
tentacles reaching into more than 130 countries and connecting, in one form or
another, an estimated 100 million to 350 million people. This expansion shows no signs of
letting up. Indeed, as the
Internet migrates from its almost purely copper-based telephone platform to
cable, satellite, and digital cellular systems, the methods of connecting to
the Internet will proliferate, access costs will decline, and the number of
users will skyrocket.
The second general trend in
the development of the Internet is the rapid expansion in bandwidth. In its original incarnation (which
lasted for more than two decades), the Internet was primarily a low-volume
text-based medium, and so required little transmission capacity.
The emergence of the World
Wide Web, with its heavy use of graphics, photographs, and animation, changed
this equation dramatically, and even top-of-the-line modem technologies - 28.8
kbs and even the 56 kpbs modems - quickly proved inadequate to the task of
transporting these billions of bits of graphical information, causing many
parts of the Internet to react like a two-lane freeway suddenly jammed with a
hundred- or thousand-fold increase in the number of vehicles.
The third and perhaps most
important trend in the development of the Internet is the proliferation of
access points. Heretofore, logging
on to the Internet has required a fairly sophisticated computer, costing in the
neighborhood of $1,000, while one-half of what it was just two years ago -
still has priced the Internet out of the range of a large share of low and
middle-income families in the United States, not to mention the vast majority
of the rest of the world's population.
This high cost of access has combined with the relative inconvenience of
using a computer - sitting before a computer, unlike a television set, is
hardly the most relaxing experience - to restrict the Internet largely to the
technologically oriented, well-to-do minority. This is one of the main reasons why many communities have
undertaken aggressive public access initiatives to install computers and kiosks
at community centers, public libraries, and other public sites in order to make
it possible for people who don't own a computer to use the Internet.
But this situation also is
changing. Already, several
companies, including Sony and Phillips, have introduced devices that allow
people to log on to and browse the Internet directly from their television
sets, and the number of such devices is likely to multiply over the next two
years, particularly as cable television companies become more involved in the
Internet-access business.
Similarly, other companies are beginning to distribute videoconferencing
equipment that will allow people to make videophone calls over the Internet, to
and from their television sets.
As a result of developments
like these, we are quickly reaching a point at which the world will be
interconnected by a next-generation Internet that allows for instantaneous
transmission of text, photographs, and broadcast-quality audio, video, and
virtual reality, not to expensive computers nor any other new technological
device, but to the ordinary television sets that are now in place in hundreds
of millions of living rooms worldwide.
With the
availability of broadband Internet, the availability of the aforementioned
global grid computing network will also be the reality in very near future for
everybody's use at anywhere, anytime.
This will bring about a more coherent global society and provide the
predicate for global peace.
The Changing
Geopolitical Context
These technological changes
are taking place at the same time that the world's geopolitical landscape is
being radically redefined. No
longer dependent upon national governments for policy ideas and information, no
longer content to be bound by the one-size-fits-all pronouncements of national
legislators, local leaders are taking social and economic matters into their
own hands, pursuing policies that will promote job creation, economic growth,
and an improved quality of life within their region regardless of the policies
enacted at the national level.
This "reverse flow of sovereignty" is which local governments are assuming more responsibility than ever before for their residents' well-being, has come about at a time when information and markets of all types are becoming increasingly globalized. News, currency, and economic and
political intelligence - not to mention products and services - no longer can
be contained within national borders, but flow, often instantaneously, to all
corners of the globe, making it difficult or even impossible for national
governments to influence political or economic conditions over which, not long
ago, they held unquestioned control.
The result is a geopolitical paradox in which the nation-state, too
large and distant to solve the problems of localities, has become too small to
solve the borderless problems of the world.
Locally based companies that
once competed with firms only in their own area code, for instance, now must
battle companies throughout the world for their customers' loyalty and
dollars. Local governments that
once had to compete for high-value residents against only nearby municipalities
and the amenities they could muster now must struggle to attract such residents
in a world where a growing number of people can live nearly anywhere they want
and still have access to the same jobs, the same income, and the same products
and services to which they have grown accustomed.
To meet these challenges,
many far-sighted localities have begun to transform themselves from fractured,
often highly contentious regions in which a thousand interests compete for
larger shares of a shrinking pie into something more akin to the city-states of
old than to the archetypical municipalities of modern-day political science
texts.
Those that are succeeding,
like Smart Valley and San Diego in the United States, Stockholm, Sweden, Hong
Kong, and Infoville in Spain, or Malaysia's Multimedia Corridor possess a
number of common features. One
characteristic is collaboration among different functional sectors (government,
business, academic, non-profit organizations, and others), and among different
jurisdictions within a given geographical region. These "collaboratories" are fast becoming the new
model for successful urban organization in the global age, and the only local
political arrangement likely to make it possible for besieged municipalities to
survive in the increasingly intense global competition that lies ahead.
This point, admittedly a
subtle one, is often lost in discussions of building smart communities, and
even in the implementation of many of the smart community projects
themselves. But it couldn't be
more important. Indeed, the
Foundation argues that the more time people spend in cyberspace the more
important real place becomes, and the more civic involvement and the real
values of community - places where common dreams and visions really become
reality - become apparent to success and survival in this new age.
This new competitive and
community spirit, however, will not come about automatically. Communities must develop a coherent and
compelling vision that makes it clear how the new information networks are
going to promote job growth, economic development, and improved quality of life
within the community; and communicate that vision broadly. This is the key element that is missing
from so many smart community plans today, and yet it is the most essential: for
unless a community knows precisely where it is headed and how it hopes to get
there, it is unlikely to reach its destination, to its detriment and all who
are stakeholders in this new but uncertain future.
Every community eager to
make the commitment and use technology as a catalyst to prepare their community
to meet the challenges of the new global information economy need to understand
that this is a campaign that will take some time, and that there is a logical
process, a series of steps they must take, that must be put in place.
There is nothing
magical about the ten steps below but they help a community organize itself and
importantly underscore the importance of seeing this revolution not so much
about technology, but as about reinventing the concept of community and
developing a governing mechanism to do so.
It is important
to remember that a truly Smart Community is a community that has made a
conscious effort to use information technology to transform life and work
within its region in significant and fundamental, rather than incremental ways.
The ten steps
represent an easy-to-follow program based upon ten years of research of what
the best communities are doing or need to do to best position themselves for
the emerging knowledge-based economy and society.
10 Steps to
Becoming a Smart Community
1) The Smart
Community concept must be well understood.
Becoming a smart
community is not so much about technology as it is about understanding the
basic shift in the structure of the economy and society. While technology plays a vital role as
a catalyst in transforming life and work in this new economy, jobs, dollars and
quality of life are the real benefits.
In undertaking the task of becoming a smart community, therefore,
everyone needs to know this is really a process of reinventing community for a
new age of information.
2) Ownership
of the Smart Community concept must be broadly communicated.
Because of the
devolution of power, or the reverse flow of sovereignty if you will, all
individuals and individual communities - down to and including the smallest
neighborhoods, now have the ability to take ownership of this concept to shape
their lives, that of their families and their closest neighbors. Policies and programs, therefore,
whether developed at the local, state or federal level, must be communicated
broadly and well understood by all stakeholders in order for them to be
successful.
3) A new
decision-making mechanism must be created.
Because power
has devolved, every individual must be persuaded, indeed enticed, to change the
way life and work take place within his or her community. The concept must not only be well
understood (2 above) but individuals and individual stakeholders throughout the
communities must understand that they will participate in the process. Toward that end, a new decision-making mechanism - we call it a "collaboratory"- involving all of the stakeholders, must be established. These
stakeholders include businesses large and small, academe at every level from
K-12 through the university, non-profit organizations throughout the community
and government itself. Such a
collaboratory will greatly influence and enhance the ability to create a smart
community.
4) The needs
of the community must be assessed and the community defined.
Geographical
boundaries - cities, towns, villages, and states, indeed even nation-states -
are being redefined by the convergence of technology and economics; the
technology of telecommunications and computers, and the economics of a global
economy. A first step to launching
a smart community initiative, therefore, is determining the size and geographic
limits of the community. Is it a neighborhood? A city? A larger region of several municipalities? Second, but most important, what are
the needs as the stakeholders perceive them? Can only understanding the needs and then developing a sense
of priority develop a well-rounded smart community initiative?
5) A vision
and mission statement must be developed.
Only after
understanding the interests and concerns of a community can a broad vision and
mission statement be developed.
Often, this can be done in one day through a facilitation of key
stakeholders and then codification into a one-page vision and mission
statement. It is important that
after the vision and mission statement is drafted, it be submitted to the city
or county and/or other political bodies in the community for ratification. Individual groups such as the Chamber
of Commerce, the Economic Development Corporation, and other governing bodies,
should be encouraged to comment on and support the vision and mission
statement.
6) Specific
goals and priorities must be established.
After a
community develops its vision and mission statement, the next step in the process
is to articulate specific goals and priorities. These are best developed and refined by a number of working
committees, which the collaboratory should establish. The committees should again be inclusive of all the
stakeholders. Committees should be
given timelines, an understanding of the importance of the mission, and some
assistance in developing the tasks before them. While each community may differ, most communities usually
organize around functional areas such as health care, education, transportation,
law enforcement, government services, economic development, and so forth. It is important to spend some time in
defining the committee structure before establishing the committees themselves.
7) A
strategic plan for the Smart Community concept needs to be drafted.
At this stage in
the process, after a vision and mission statement is created, committees
formed, and priorities established, a plan must be put in place to implement
the development of:
a) The hard infrastructure to create a broadband system linking every home, school, and institution within the community;
b) Those
systems and services that will most benefit the community; and
c) The agenda for the soft infrastructure - the laws, rules, regulations that must be changed in order to facilitate the development of both the new infrastructure and information services.
This step is one
of the hardest because it requires the collaboratory to synthesize the work of
its subcommittees and agree on how best to take these committee recommendations
from concept to reality.
8)
Responsibilities must be clearly defined and timelines established.
This is indeed
the hardest task because someone or some agency or committee or organization
must be assigned the task of implementing the recommendations. It must be clear in assigning the
responsibility what the expectations are and those expectations must be set
against a firm timeline. At this
juncture, it is also important to determine how this plan will be
financed. Private/public
partnerships and outsourcing may be the best methods for accelerating
implementation of the plan. This
is the opportunity to bring together private and public interests, to seek
collaboration among and between industry, government at several levels, and the
community at large.
9) Community
linkages must be made.
The vision of
the future must be coordinated with all other elements of the community that
affect, and are in turn affected by this fundamental plan. There is, for example, a new
"architecture" to be developed that will involve zoning, land use and
development; art and culture initiatives to provide a magnet for downtown
redevelopment. In addition,
information systems being developed by other agencies must be coordinated.
10) Metrics
must be established and progress constantly monitored.
After the
headlines and the ribbon-cutting, the real work must take place. Some things like development of a new
GIS system, or linking the schools and the libraries, or even launching a
Request for Proposal to develop a broadband grid, will not take place in a day
or a week or even a month. Indeed,
the business of creating a smart community is truly a multi-year and ongoing
process. Mechanisms must be
established to keep the energy and focus and commitment alive.
Toward a
Philosophy of Permanence
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. Former Vice
President Al Gore believes we are on a collision course between our worldwide
civilization and the ecological system of the earth.
Many policy wonks agree 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.
One of the more interesting
and exciting aspects 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 also 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.
We have the tools of this
new age - computers, telecommunications, and information appliances of all
kinds. We have the software,
too. Indeed, because of our hard fought
personal freedom and free enterprise culture we produce more books, movies, and
software programs for business, entertainment and society than any other nation
in the world.
But we need most of all -
each other, and places where culture and commerce, and civic pride are joined;
where we are refreshed, energized, challenged to be all the best we are capable
of. Cities do that; they promote
the context for our lives and the fabric of our existence - our actions and our
enterprises.
Cities of the Future -
Athens in the Information Age - will be truly smart communities, sustainable,
healthy, culturally strong, diverse, and exciting places to live and work and
play.
Author Biographical Sketch
|
John
M. Eger |
|
John M. Eger is the Van
Deerlin Professor of Communication and Public Policy at San Diego State
University (SDSU), Executive Director of SDSU's International Center for
Communications and President of the World Foundation for Smart
Communities. Earlier, he was
Senior Vice President of the CBS Broadcast Group and from 1973-1976, Advisor to
Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and Director of the White House Office
of Telecommunications Policy (OTP).
More recently he served as Chairman of California Governor Pete Wilson's first Commission on Information Technology; and San Diego Mayor Susan Golding's "City of the Future"Commission.