From The City Of Bits to E-Topia

Abstract

Mitchell's book on the City of Bits, sets out a vision of urban life literally done to bits. His next book e-topia, provides the counter-point to this vision of urban life and scenario where the city is no longer left in bits and pieces, but a place where it ‘all comes together'. As Mitchell states in Me++: the Cyborg Self and the Networked City, all this ‘coming together' becomes possible because the trial separation of bits and atoms is over and the dissolution of the boundaries between virtual and physical space now makes citizenship worth playing for. The landscape which this paper uncovers is different. For it reveals the middle ground between the ‘high-level' issues surrounding e-topia and those lying at the ‘grass roots' level of me ++ and the cyborg-self. This is because it is here and with the likes of Laclau and Mouffe and Zizek, that matters which concern the ‘city of bits' and notion of ‘e-topia' as the ‘me++ of the cyborg self', get ‘bottomed out' as the space, citizenship and community of global strategy.