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place didn’t matter anymore
. Instead of
community being grounded in a particular location, a
new pattern of social relationships could be created
from weaving together the disparate strands of daily
life from a variety of generic locations. In this context,
argued Webber and other academic planners, tradi-
tional urban forms were simply irrelevant.
In Britain, the Archigram movement of the 1960s
and 1970s extended this thesis with inspiring images
of ‘walking cities’ that carried everything needed to
sustain life and culture in their famously massive
tortoise-like forms. A few years later, the same group
proposed a contradictory ‘soft’ architecture that placed
more emphasis on fast-changing technical systems that
could ‘plug in’ to any existing building situation and
provide environmental and cultural services that could
enrich all locations. The place didn’t matter, and the
character of the buildings in any location was immate-
rial. Drawing on a unique blend of science fiction and
science fact, Archigram elaborated the theme that
technology can render geographic location unimpor-
tant by supplying all necessary support systems with-
out primary recourse to the natural or urban worlds.
This shifting equation between propinquity and
accessibility has remained a central issue for archi-
tects, planners, geographers and cultural critics
(Sennett, 1971, 1974; Castells, 1989, 1997; Harvey,
1989; Soja, 1989; Jameson, 1991; Howell, 1993;
Watson and Gibson, 1995; Mitchell, 1995, 1999).
Many have expounded at length on this dilemma,
offering various interpretations regarding the urban
politics of power and place. For Webber and his col-
leagues forty years ago, the issue was originally one of
new equations between physical distance and ease of
personal travel, but the information technology revo-
lution of the 1990s has radically changed the parame-
ters of the discussion.
Webber, Archigram, and many other designers,
planners, and critics reordered physical space relative
to new technologies, but real space was still the
medium of human discourse. Proponents of our new
CHAPTER ONE
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PARADIGMS LOST AND FOUND
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digital society have argued that our computer-rich
culture, redolent with electronic spaces, has super-
seded all such discussions (Mitchell, 1995; Kelly,
1998; Gilder 2000 and others). The virtual spaces of
the Internet, available to everyone with a computer,
have brought Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’ to
fruition. Some even suggest that traditional commu-
nity life is obsolete, and that virtual space will replace
physical space as the primary medium of personal,
commercial and cultural dialogue. The ‘electronic cot-
tage’ in the wilderness is now a reality, and infor-
mation technology, these same critics argue, has
rendered traditional urban places obsolete at an even
more fundamental level than Webber predicted. Once
more the street is under attack. Michael Dear goes so
far as to say that ‘the phone and the modem have ren-
dered the street irrelevant’ (Dear, 1995: p. 31).
As designers of physical, inhabited space, many
architects are naturally loath to accept this conjec-
ture, preferring to investigate the writings of authors
who offer an alternative conclusion: in a society that
enables us to live and work anywhere we like, the
places we choose to inhabit become 
all the more
precious
and important.
The first argument against the dispersal and ‘death
of place’ scenario is that commerce still clusters. While
routine office work in the service sector has been
farmed out to towns all across America, and to cities
in developing countries, companies in key innovative
business sectors such as information technology,
design, financial services, law and health care operate
differently. They tend to concentrate their operations
in certain key places – Manhattan, Chicago, the San
Francisco Bay Area, Austin Texas, Boston or Seattle,
to name just a few. This phenomenon has given rise to
what is referred to as the ‘human capital theory’ of
economic and urban growth.
Simply stated, the theory of human capital argues
that traditional reasons for city growth – location
near natural resources or convenient transportation
routes – no longer apply. Now, the crucial factor for
future economic development is the human resource
of highly educated and productive people, not 
the conventional wisdom of reducing the costs of
doing business by making and transporting things 
as cheaply as possible. A leading proponent of the
human capital theory, Joel Kotkin, suggests that
through this new lens, wealth will accumulate wher-
ever ‘intelligence clusters’ evolve, whether this is a big
city or a small town (Kotkin, 2001, in Florida, 2002:
p. 221). Other notable economists such as Robert
Lucas and Edward Glaeser show in their research that
human capital – groupings of creative, productive,
original innovators and problem solvers – is the main
impetus of urban development and wealth creation
(Florida: p. 222).
Author Richard Florida takes this well-established
premise one stage further in his book