E-topia: "Urban life, Jim--but not as we know it"

The global digital network is not just a delivery system for e-mail, Web pages and digital television.

It is a whole new urban infrastructure - one that will change the forms of our cities as dramatically as railroads, highways, electric power supply and telephone networks did in the past.

In this book, William J. Mitchell examines this new infrastructure and its implications for our future daily lives.;Picking up where his book "City of Bits" left off, Mitchell argues that we must extend the definitions of architecture and urban design to encompass virtual places as well as physical ones, and interconnection by means of telecommunication links as well as by pedestrian circulation and mechanized transportation systems.

He proposes strategies for the creation of cities that not only will be sustainable but will make economic, social and cultural sense in an electronically interconnected and global world.

The new settlement patterns of the 21st century will be characterized by live/work dwelllings, 24-hour pedestrian-scale neighbourhoods rich in social relationships, and vigorous local community life, complemented by far-flung configurations of electronic meeting places and decentralized production, marketing and distribution systems.

Neither digiphile nor digiphobe, Mitchell advocates the creation of e-topias - cities that work smarter, not harder.