City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn

William J. Mitchell

MIT Press, 1996 - Architecture - 225 pages

Entertaining, concise, and relentlessly probing, City of Bits is a comprehensive introduction to a new type of city, an increasingly important system of virtual spaces interconnected by the information superhighway. William Mitchell makes extensive use of practical examples and illustrations in a technically well-grounded yet accessible examination of architecture and urbanism in the context of the digital telecommunications revolution, the ongoing miniaturization of electronics, the commodification of bits, and the growing domination of software over materialized form.

What people are saying

Review: City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn

User Review  - Paul - Goodreads

I should have read this book when it came out in 1996. Bill Mitchell was very prophetic and about 80-90% accurate predicting what as come to be with our current state of ubiquitous computing. It all seems a bit dated now but there is some good visionary history here.

Review: City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn

User Review  - Goodreads

I should have read this book when it came out in 1996. Bill Mitchell was very prophetic and about 80-90% accurate predicting what as come to be with our current state of ubiquitous computing. It all seems a bit dated now but there is some good visionary history here.

Contents

• PULLING GLASS: 3
• ELECTRONIC AGORAS: 7
• CYBORG CITIZENS: 27
• RECOMBINANT ARCHITECTURE: 47
• SOFT CITIES: 107
• BIT BIZ: 133
• GETTING TO THE GOOD BITS: 163
• NOTES: 175
• SURF SITES: 209
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: 215
• INDEX: 217

Popular passages

Page 110 - In its present condition," Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow noted in 1990, "cyberspace is a frontier region, populated by the few hardy technologists who can tolerate the austerity of its savage computer interfaces, incompatible communications protocols, proprietary barricades, cultural and legal ambiguities, and general lack of useful maps or metaphors.‎

Page 24 - This will be a city unrooted to any definite spot on the surface of the earth, shaped by connectivity and bandwidth constraints rather than by accessibility and land values, largely asynchronous in its operation, and inhabited by disembodied and fragmented subjects who exist as collections of aliases and agents.‎

Page 120 - houses," organized into towns and cities with associated traffic arteries and shopping and recreational areas. We needed wilderness areas between the towns so that everyone would not be jammed together into the same place. Most of all, we needed things for 20,000 people to do. They needed interesting places to visit — and since they can't all be in the same place at the same time, they needed a lot of interesting places to visit — and things to do in those places. Each of those houses, towns,...‎

Page 97 - For the first time in history, it might be possible to locate on a mountain top and to maintain intimate, real-time, and realistic contact with business or other associates. All persons tapped into the global communications net would have ties approximating those used today in a given metropolitan region.‎

Page 228 - Sciences and Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.‎

Page 5 - The tests the follow re-imagine architecture and urbanism in the new context suggested by... the digital telecommunication revolution, the ongoing miniaturization of electronics, the commodification of bits, and the growing domination of software over materialized form. They adumbrate the emergent but still invisible cities of the twenty-first century. And they argue that the most crucial task before us is not one of putting in place the digital plumbing of broadband communication links and associated...‎

Page 5 - If we understand what is happening, and if we can conceive and explore alternative futures, we can find opportunities to intervene, sometimes to resist, to organize, to legislate, to plan, and to DESIGN (Mitchell-1997, p.‎

About the author

(2005), both published by the MIT Press.

Bibliographic information

• Title: City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn
• Author: William J. Mitchell
• Edition: illustrated, reprint, revised
• Publisher: MIT Press, 1996
• ISBN: 0262631768, 9780262631761
• Length: 225 pages
• Subjects: Architecture / Criticism; Computers / Networking / General; Social Science / General