mediascapes

"The city comes to life through the overlapping ambiences it hosts: as a kind of software, in cultural movements, or a kind of hardware, in the physical forms of the architecture of the city itself. The unique nature and identity of any urban location emerges in an irreducible resonance that is produced between that 'software' and 'hardware'. In the case of the contemporary global city, the intensification of this relationship has produced a more radical set of bifurcations, no longer resolved as the outcome of a binary logic ('physical versus virtual'), but rather as a cascading construct of parallel realities, life worlds, and temporalities. Design of the city now has to ask how we can harness globally networked systems of capital, transnational entities, and technologically enabled relationships and use them to energize the city. In truth, design of the city today means more than ever the design and construction of an entire world."

Ed Keller,
Parallel Realities, Trans-national Archipelagos, New Urban Ambiences