Post-spectacular cities

"The Post-spectacular City" argues for a new urbanism, post-mass media. After running down the Situationist critique, Thackara turns to new developments: cell phones to connect people in p2p sharing fashion, both as consumers (I need to find something, I want to buy something) and producers (I'll tell you about my corner of town).
more:

The point is that the information age has been added to the industrial age. Telematic space has been added to Cartesian space. The one did not supplant the other.
And mobile phones and networks do not make the city disappear. On the contrary, they render the city itself more powerful as an interface.

Recent historical context:

We also thought we couild do without place.Nicholas Negroponte stated in Being Digital, the dotcommer's bible, that "the post-information age will remove the limitations of geography. Digital living will depend less and less on being in a specific place,at a specific time". Lars Lerup,dean of the architecture school at Rice University - and a dotcommer manque - proclaimed in a book approriately named Pandemonium that "bandwidth has replaced the boulevard. Five blocks west has given way to the mouseclick.After thousands of years of bricks held together by mortar, the new metropolis is toggled together by attention spans.". Brandon Hookway, 1999, PANDEMONIUM Princeton Architectural Press New York.
All that stuff was, in retrospect, piffle. But we all did it, including this speaker. He apologises, and pleads only that he is a tiny bit wiser after the event.

p2ptown, and distributed urbanism:

The reason I've jumped from the creative class, to mobile phones and networks, is this. If the post-spectacular city is about person-to-person encounter, technology can help us achieve that. The consequence can be a profound change in the ways that we operate, and live, in cities.

With networked communications we will be able to access and use everything from a car, to a portable drill, only when we need it. We won't have to own them, just know how and where to find them.

Did you know that the average power drill is used for ten minutes in its entire life? Or that most cars stand idle 90 per cent of the time? The same principle - of use, not own - can apply to the buildings, roads, squares and spaces that fill our cities.

But the killer app is access to other people. People is what makes cities different from other places. The creative city will be the city that finds ways to strip out all the transaction and infrastructure costs that make it expensive to hire people to help us do stuff...Mobile phone and wireless-enabled gadgets enable us to access people, or resources, or services - just-in-time, and just-in-place.

(thanks to Steven Kaye)