Technology, Business and the Nature of Cities

When we contemplate the effects of technology on urban life, our thoughts first turn to its visible manifestations: the commuter with his headphones, the pedestrian on her mobile phone, the café dweller and his laptop. But these are only surface traces: the stuff of the times, as the newspapers or briefcases of yesterday. The primary impact of today's technologies of instant communication and digital creation comes instead from the changes they effect on the nature of business and work (among them, the creation of the "networked information economy" of Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks). The internet enables new kinds of companies, and with them, new priorities for the nature of our cities.

In The City in History (1961), Lewis Mumford describes the effect of the increasingly bureaucratic nature of business - enabled by technologies of communication and control - on the growth of cities:

"Plainly no great corporate enterprise with a worldwide network of agents, correspondents, market outlets, factories, and investors could exist without relying upon the services of an army of patient, clerkly routineers in the metropolis: stenographers, filing clerks, and book-keepers, office managers, sales managers, advertising directors, accountants, and their varied assistants, right up to the fifth vice-president whose name or O.K. sets the final seal of responsibility upon an action.

"The housing of this bureaucracy in office buildings and tenements and residential suburbs constituted one of the major tasks of metropolitan expansion. Their transportation to and from work, within a limited time-span, raised one of the difficult technical problems that confronted the city planner and the engineer. And not merely did the bureaucracy itself require office space and domestic space: the by-products of its routine demanded an increasing share of the new quarters: files, vaults, place for live storage and dead storage, parade grounds and cemeteries of documents, where the records of business were alphabetically arrayed, with an eye to the possibility of future exploitation, future reference, future lawsuits, future contracts.

"This age found its form, as early as the eighteen-eighties in America, in a new type of office building: symbolically a sort of vertical human filing case, with uniform windows, a uniform façade, uniform accommodations, rising floor by floor in competition for light and air and above all financial prestige with other skyscrapers." (p. 535)

Here we have technology driving business, and business, in turn, shaping the city: uniform, imposing, monotonous; the organization man with his procedures and his house in suburbia; business governed from the top and the growth of cities too; the importance of conformity in work, in home, in life.

The rise of the suburbs was driven not by the technology of house-building, nor that of transportation, but by the secondary consequences of the technologies of bureaucracy. We could long have built isolated sub-divisions of identical houses, but never before would we have lived in them. It required a population with little choice in the location or nature of their housing and jobs to give rise to this conurban sprawl. The suburbs were not the direct result of technology but of the patterns of employment, social mobility, and lifestyle it enabled.

This holds for digital technologies as well. Consider their immediate effects on the city. We find things to do online rather than in the local weekly, look for an apartment on craigslist instead of the classifieds, but this has little impact on the the activities or the apartments. The internet, mobile phones, in-car navigation systems, and the rest of today's electronic devices don't make it any more attractive to live in a city - after all, they work in the suburbs too - nor do they significantly alter the form that the city can take. The highway, the subway, the elevator, the electrical grid, the sewage system: none of these are digital technologies. The houses we live in, the way we get to work, the third places we inhabit: these are shaped by social and political forces that influenced only indirectly by technology.

Given all this, why the current resurgence in urban life? For the answer, we turn to Richard Florida and his book The Rise of the Creative Class. In it, he describes the invigorating impact of a new class of creative professionals on the desirability and vitality of traditional city living. This growing group of educated, selective professionals change jobs every few years, choosing not just a company, but also a place. Not content with any location, they look for one that offers a active nightlife, vibrant culture, and other amenities. No longer forced to live in the suburbs and commute to an corporate office park - or to work in a factory and live nearby - people are increasingly choosing not to. More and more, the city is becoming the center of the enterprise, its employees, and their homes and lives. The increased professional freedom enabled by technology thereby fuels the rise in popularity and affluence of city neighborhoods. It is this, not the ways that we use digital devices in the city, that is technology's true impact on urban life.