Mitchell. William J.: e-topia: “Urban Life, Jim – But not as we know it” Cambridge MA/London, MIT Press, 1999.

“Instead of forming new relationships of people and agricultural production sites as in the agricultural revolution, or of people and machines as in the industrial revolution, this global digital network will reconstitute relationships of people and information. It will increasingly become the key to opportunity and development, and the enabler of new social constructions and urban patterns.” [p. 14]

analogy of pipes and techno-inventions to digital network e.g. p. 15

possibly lit: Kryzysztof Wodiczko: Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1999. [ ref from p. 34]

“With augmented reality, different inhabitants of a city might see different, specially tailored annotations superimposed on it. A tourist might view guidebook information and reconstructions of the past overlaid on historic sites – or, if in a different frame of mind, indicators of crime and accident sites. A real estate agent might look at buildings labeled with their asking prices, a construction worker might be guided by building designs correctly registered on vacant lots, and a technician might consult repair manual diagrams conveniently positioned on malfunctioning machines.” [p. 41]

“In a world of proliferating screenspace and speakers, smart surfaces, video-projected displays, virtual reality, and augmented reality, luminous digital information is ubiquitously overlaid on tangible physical reality. As static tesserae were to the Romans, active pixels are to us. Signs and labels are becoming dynamic, text is jumping off the page into three-dimensional  space, murals are being set in motion, and the immaterial is blending seamlessly with the material.
Architecture is no longer simply the play of masses in light. It now embraces the play of digital information in space.” [p. 41]

Also: “We become true inhabitants of electronically mediated environments rather than mere users of computational devices.” [p. 43]

Heavy crossplatforming p. 48+49

“Curiously enough, there is venerable precedent for these notions of embedded intelligence and sensorily aware, responsive objects and spaces. The ancient Romans believed that each particular place had it characteristic spirit – its genus loci – that might manifest itself, if you watched carefully for it, as a snake. They had the right idea, but not the necessary technology.
For us, equipping a place with its genius has simply become a software implementation task. Lines of code can supply every electronically augmented environment with a tailor-made, digital genius that makes its presence felt through input devices and sensors, displays, and robotic actuators. It can respond to the needs of its inhabitants, adapt to changes in its surroundings, and – by making use of its network connectivity – focus global resources on current local tasks. By virtue of the rules that it encodes, it can facilitate some activities and discourage or exclude others. It can even enforce ethical and legal norms.
Code is character. Code is the law.” [p. 50]
(me: but is an electronically defined locus still the same as a natural one – and if not – might it lack a genus?)

body connected to digital domain p. 54-55

“Our buildings will become less like protozoa and more like us. We will continually interact with them, and increasingly thing of them as robots for living in.” [p. 59]

[ME just a side-note: remember the luxury of forgetting things which is outruled by eternal digitality]

“In the twenty-first century, then we can ground the condition of civilized urbanity less upon the accumulation of things and more upon the flow of information, less upon geographic centrality and more upon electronic connectivity, less upon expanding consumption of scarce resources and more upon intelligent management. Increasingly, we will discover that we can adapt existing places to new needs by rewiring hardware, replacing software, and reorganizing network connections rather than demolishing physical structures and building new ones.
But the power of the place will still prevail. As traditional locational imperatives weaken, we will gravitate to settings that offer particular cultural, scenic, and climatic attractions – those unique qualities that cannot be pumped through a wire – together with those face-to-face interaction we care most about.
Physical settings and virtual venues will function interdependently, and will mostly complement each other within transformed patterns of urban life rather than substitute within existing ones. Sometimes we will use networks to avoid going places. But sometimes, still, we will go places to network.” [p.155 = his final statement]