Aveiro, Portugal: Making a Digital City

摘要

In recent years, attention has been increasingly drawn to the investigation of how the economic, social, and cultural aspects of cities interact with the proliferation of advanced computer-based telecommunications networks. Therefore, the co-evolution of cities and tele-mediated interactions is progressively emphasized in academic debates concerning the future of cities. As a result, the digital city concept has been defined as a means of creatively integrating telecommunications into urban policy and planning practices and strategies, in order to develop more inclusive and sustainable urban futures. One of the first contributions to this debate was made in 1994 when William Mitchell published the City of Bits. In this book, he suggested an exploratory vision by which the remote interactions, provided by the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in contemporary societies, would gradually transform urban form and function in such a way that we would have to enlarge our conceptions of urban planning in order to include virtual places as well as physical ones. In a later work, Mitchell clarified that this recent wave of urban infrastructural networking will not create entirely new urban patterns from the ground up, but will re-fashion the urban patterns that emerged and had been made possible and sustained by previous networks (transportation, water supply, electric power supply, or telephone networks).