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November 8, 2008
In New Urban topologies: The Desire for Public Place in the Age of Virtual Geography in Drain Michael Jenson says that the:
emergence of new technologies (telegraph and railroads) in the last century has heralded a new type of spatial structure that varies from the more traditional, urban one found in the cities of the day. A structure was based, not on traditional spatial configurations of the square and the street found in many American and European cities, but on the notion of the vector, the Cartesian grid and the point. These attributes ignored landscapes and were constituted specifically to allow for communication over great distances. It was a spatial structure built solely for the purposes of commerce
With globalization we have defining technologies such as computers, miniaturization, digitization, satellites and a virtual web in the form of the Internet have replaced the symbolic “walls” of the Cold War period with “expansive webs and networks”. Jenon says:
As one system is “deterratorialized” or “comes undone”[24], and the process of “reterratorialization” by another system begins to emerge with the radical social changes that occur within such a context, the uncertainty created facilitates the romantic urge to gravitate towards perceived fixed and stable conditions/ideologies.
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