Editorial

摘要

I recently gave a talk at TEDxLondon (2013) in one of a sequence of meetings entitled City 2.0. I must confess that before the meeting I did not think much about the title, assuming like many that this was a play on the widely used Web 2.0 cliche 'invented', or at least 'popularised', by Tim O'Reilly at his first Web 2.0 conference in 2004. The term essentially marks the difference between the early world wide web and its mature form which reflects its evolution from a passive source of information to a new medium in which its participants are able to interact, upload, and change the information that the web gives access to. In fact my talk was about the future of the city, where I made the point that by the end of this century most of us will living in cities of one kind or another and then the nature of the city is likely to be very different from the cities from which our contemporary urban world has emerged. City 2.0 is as a good a term as any to describe this new world and, if we then ask what is or was City 1.0, a definition would be 'all cities prior to the post industrial era'. In this characterisation, the world before the present day is the world of City 1.0 and the world of the future Citv 2.0.