The city-center offers all the functions existent in a real city, extended however, by means of telecommunication. New possibilities are: walking in the virtual shopping-mall, doing business at the tele- banking counter or working in the tele-design-center or the tele-office. Later on you meet people in the Web-Cafe for a transcontinental talk.

In the city all the news from the big networked international agencies meet and could be published e.g. as daily online-news-brochures. Speech recognition- and translation-chips will play a big role in this international city-center making communication e.g.between English and Japanese possible. But Telepolis is more than a city in the network, it is a conglomerate of different cities: of the Digital City Amsterdam, of the International City Berlin, of the Virtual Polis San Francisco and serveral other networked city projects brought together in Telepolis. By doing this, the fundamental issue of democracy is raised. The question of unlimited and simple access for everybody to the information that is available worldwide, the right of free speech, to form interest-groups, to discuss questions of political nature, to do business or to work on ways of establishing a decentralized project-managment. Telepolis wants to offer more than an illustration of networked cities. Telepolis wants to actually lead them together, setting a precedent for global communication and interoperability.