Shifting boundaries : territories, networks and cities

Abstract

Information Technologies and increasingly advanced infrastructural connections compress space and time, reshape territorial patterns and challenge boundaries. The traditional physical limits of cities and territories become meaningless, blurred by the networks that keep the “global village” together. The overcoming of the boundary walls of cities in the nineteenth century, the fall of the Berlin wall and the recent opening of international frontiers in Europe could be understood as steps toward the achievement of an ideal society without walls other than the minimum limits necessary for shelter and privacy. Yet, even while markets are establishing systems of planetary interdependence and metropolitan regions get more and more directly related to a global dimension, there appears to be a paradoxical tendency toward the reinforcement of local boundaries. In crime-ridden American neighborhoods buildings tend to be fortified like military bases. In gated communities the protection of privileged circles through the erection of physical boundaries is marketed as an attractive amenity. Primary urban facilities like large urban hospitals, universities and shopping malls, establish simulations of “public” venues within physically bounded and access-controlled environments. The “network society” establishes new paradigms of territorial occupation and control. The former boundaries are fragmented, removed and shifted to the edges of new citadels that become nodes absorbed into a fluid and globally extended system of connections. The glassy ramparts of corporate buildings, the brick and stone bastions of the temples of consumption, the aristocratic and exclusive stockades of gated com¬ munities, represent the new hard-edge boundaries of cities. Focusing on the establishment of large urban enclaves and on the systems of relationship they form with their surroundings, the paper considers the impact of Information Technologies and the rise of the contemporary “network culture” on the territorial structure of urban fields.