Cityscape
/ Cyberspace
Keith Lawson
Assistant Professor
School of Information Management
Rowe Management Building
Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia
B3H 3J5
klawson@dal.ca
When we try to describe cyberspace, we often use terminology developed
to describe urban space. I will show that applying this terminology to
cyberspace causes it to lose much of its concreteness. But, I will
demonstrate that lived experience of urban space, as it is captured in
literary works and personal records, also calls into question the
concrete language of urban planning. In other words, from this
perspective, both cyberspace and urban space resist order and attempts
at definition.
Kevin Lynch defines the “legibility” of urban space with the terms,
“path, landmark, edge, node, and district” (The Image of the City,
1960). Some have argued that Lynch’s ideas of urban design could be
practically applied to increase the legibility of the world wide web
(Dodge and Kitchin, Mapping Cyberspace, 2001) or that cyberspace, in
its structure, is creating the “still invisible cities of the
twenty-first century” (Mitchell, City of Bits, 1995, p. 5).
However, Lynch bases his ideas of urban structure on individual human
experience of the city, from the perspective of street level and of
day-to-day goals. Many authors have described the city from a similar
perspective (e.g. De Quincey, Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin (“The Paris
of the Second Empire in the Poetry of Baudelaire”)).
The city these authors describe bears a clear resemblance to
descriptions of cyberspace. I will focus my analysis on some of the
following: the untrustworthiness of urban space, the impermanence of
its structure, the difficulty of finding one’s path, and of maintaining
one’s identity, or even the conflict between idealized views of the
city and its concrete structure.