Cyberspace as The New Urban Public Realm

Whilst the nature of the public realm of cities clearly varies across the world, we do believe that general forces exist towards urban fragmentation in which the traditional notion of a universal public realm becomes increasingly problematic. Such a context has encouraged a wide range of debates to emerge surrounding the potential of digital computer networks (or ‘telematics’) for supporting new types of public social and cultural exchange. Not surprisingly, such debates increasingly interconnect with those on the urban public realm.


In North America, a growing band of optimists have urged us to look to cyberspace—the ‘space’ of digital exchange, transaction and communication accessible via new technology—as the ‘new public realm’ (Schuler 1996; Rheingold 1994). To such authors, the apparent or alleged erosion of the public realms of cities, by implication, need not necessarily concern us: such realms merely need now to migrate towards the brave new world of electronic mediation (see Graham and Marvin 1996: Chapter 5). Michael Benedikt, for one, hopes that cyberspace will lead him toward salvation from the city, allowing personal transcendence

"from all the inefficiencies, pollution (chemical and informational), and corruptions attendant to the process of moving information attached to things—from paper to brains—across, over and under the vast and bumpy surface of the earth rather than letting it fly free in the soft hail of electrons that is cyberspace." (Benedikt 1991:3)

In fact, much of the current hype and hyperbole surrounding the Internet and ‘Information Superhighway’ rests on the Utopian assertion that such networks will inevitably emerge to be equitable, democratic and dominated by a culture of public space, enrolling multiple identities into new types of collective, interactive discourse and ‘electronic democracy’ (Bellamy et al. 1995). Computermediated communications, stretched over global distances will, it is argued, offer simple substitutions for face-to-face contact in specific urban places, as part of a generic shift to telemediated work, service access, health and education networks, and media flows.

Some US commentators already argue that ‘virtual communities’ on the Internet, geared towards both specific interest groups or place-based communities, represent solutions to the search of people increasingly alienated by the (apparently) repressive, commodified and instrumental character of contemporary urban life. As large cities become more fragmented geographically, socially and culturally, Howard Rheingold, a keen advocate of virtual communities, suspects that ‘one of the explanations for the [virtual community] phenomenon is the hunger for community that grows in the breasts of people around the world as more and more informal public spaces disappear from our real lives’ (Rheingold 1994:6). Doug Schuler believes that virtual communities offer perfect antidotes to the often atomised, fragmented and threatening world of the many North American urban areas experiencing growing violence, fear, alienation and the reduction in civic associations (Schuler 1996). Heralding early urban network initiatives in the United States like the Cleveland Freenet, Santa Monica Public Electronic Network and Seattle Community Network, he argues that local initiatives can help establish a new vision of community based on decentralised, interactive, one-to-one and one-to-many media networks, which are intrinsically more equitable and participatory than previous paper and mass broadcasting-based media. Run ‘by the community for the community’, such local IT networks will, he argues, herald ‘an overall democratic renaissance and civic revitalisation’ (Schuler 1996:x).

The promise of new cyber-based communities offering new interactive ‘public’ arenas is perhaps especially strong for the most marginalised groups, who have been hardest hit by economic restructuring, growing urban privatism and the increasing predominance of individualistic ways of social organising in cities. To Cristina Odone, for example,

"the disenfranchised are still seeking an alternative public arena that will afford them an opportunity to participate in that circulation of ideas that constitute society. Enter the Internet: a technological patchwork quilt that will provide the arena for public dialogues and gather together some of the most disparate social elements, generating solidarity amongst distinct and sometimes conflicting elements. The Net has already managed to promise a reordered world where the individual can sample a community life that has long been eroded by the rush for individual gains, the rending of the fabric of family life, the polarisation of an economic system that makes for haves and have notes. The Net has been cast over that collective space once filled by the family hearth, the church yard, the village marketplace." (Odone 1995:10, quoted in Belt 1996)

From : Loader, Brian D. (ed.). Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency and Policy in The Information Society. Routledge. (page : 59-61)

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