Telepolis - Networked City

Concept

With the growing possibilties of computer-aided telecommunication, our way of life and our living environment will change radically. This will be true above all for the cities, the centers of modern society and the place where society originted. It was the function of a city to make communication and interaction possible by offering a geographical closeness. This function however will gradually be taken over by the networks, where geographical centrality and closeness will be oblivious, where the borders between city and countryside, privacy and public, spare time and work will need to be redefined. Crossings within the net can be established wherevere you may need them. The crisis of the cities, their "sprawling", the wild spreading of the pheriphery is a symptom for the expected process of change, that can be expected that will influence private life as well. In the virtual, decentralised organisations there will be more and more tele-workstations, tele-communities will develop when an essential part of life will happen in form of a tele-existence, that is so far unknown to us.

The necessity for geographical closeness was already eroded by cars and telephones and their street- and cable-networks that were made for individual traffic and -communication. A process which is continued by the expansion of broadband computer networks, creating a new, globally orientated urban space without frontiers, which is no longer permanently tied to one specific location, but which can be changed constantly, a space commonly known as the Cyberspace. The rural concepts like "global village" or "electronic cottage" that were initially imprinted upon it are more and more replaced by urban methaphors like "City of Bits", "Interacitve City", "International City", "Digital City", "Cyber City", "Computer City" or "Virtual City" of these cities that do not exist in the real but only in the virtual space, locations where you can meet, communicate, play or act. These locations that are partly public, partly private, are also characterized by architectural or urban terms and arranged in space. This organisation of the data allows the travellers and flaneurs on the data-places, -streets and -highways, that are clicking their way through the on their search for information, to orientate.

Logging yourself into one of the oldest networks, the Cleveland Free-Net, the screen offers you a structure, that is divided into institutions like "Administration Building", "Post Office", "Public Square", "Courthouse and Government Center", "Arts Building", "Science and Technology Center", "Medicine Building", Community Center and Recreation Area", "Business and Industrial Park", "Library" and "University Circle". In other networks you find shopping malls, museums, galleries.On the other hand computer terminals which are accessible for the public, are expanding from the private sphere to the cafés, streets and public squares. Laptops that can be linked to any telephone line or even to mobile telephones via modem, allow you to enter the space of the virtual cities at any time. A space that will possibly Cyberspace or telepolis are being opened up and populated today.

The cyberspace is not only a place it is a place for working, dealing, doing business, spreading information, forming alliances, enjoying recreatinal activites without having to leave the location of your physical presence or having to go to a specific location to enter the virtual space. Alongside of the living environment that is defined by the location and presence of the material body, the cyberspace evolves as the realm of tele-existence. Functions that did once demand the conglomeration of the cities, are now integrated in the cyberspace.

Even though the cyberspace is situated in the real and traditionally built space, its centrality is no longer defined by Berlin, which now has to be remodelled to become the capital of Germany again, did not only become the scene of an urbanistic and architectural debate because of the immense construction projects that are meant to form the character of a main city or a capital. It was rather the question of how the relation of a main city and a capital should be seen nowadays and above all, how the functions of the capital should be inscribed into the real architecture, that made Berlin the sence for this confrontation. Moving from Bonn, a middle-sized city of rather peripheric character, to Berlin already carries, with respect to the re-unification, characteristics of reproducing a centrality that had been lost before. The stability and monumentality that is documented in the material of the architecture of a capital, nowadays only seems like a nostalgic and helpless reaction to the mobility of processes within society and individual life stories, in the age of electronic media and networks, whose restriction to one location and whose fixation in an "image" is becoming more and more optional.