Place-based and IT Mediated ‘Community”

Neighborhoods and whole cities are increasingly being designed with a broadband telecommunications infrastructure that provides access to the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICTs) (for example CityPlace, Toronto, Canada; Arabianranta, Helsinki, Finland; Kenniswijk, Eindhoven, the Netherlands; and Playa Vista, California, U.S.A.). This access has ignited a debate into the nature of community and the effects of cyberspace on social relationships. On the one side, technological dystopians argue that in an information society where work, leisure and social ties are all maintained from the "smart house," people could completely reject the need for social relationships based on physical location. While on the other side, technological utopians argue that the Internet has created a whole new form of community, the "virtual community," which frees the individual from the restraints of geography and social characteristics like gender, race, and ethnicity. What this "either or debate," arguing community either to be lost or recreated, fails to recognize, is that community has long been freed from geography, and that new ICTs may hold as much promise of reconnecting us to communities of place as they do in liberating us from them.