Chapter Three

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CHAPTER THREE Towards A Future

THE CYBER FRONTIER

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Apparently, the world of cyberspace offers the individual who has access to it infinite possibilities for communication, business transactions, and a world that is far removed from the operations of space that I have been discussing - that is Downtown L.A. and its peripheral areas. Many critics have argued that this new ‘world’ has the potential to create a revolutionary spatial frontier; one that is democratic, ‘free’, and most importantly, infinite. These critics have termed this space a ‘city of bits’ (Mitchell, 1995), ‘CyberCities’ (Boyer, 1996), a ‘cyberville’ (Channel 4, 1994) and the ‘informational city’ (Castells, 1989). These descriptions are vague, yet do have their uses, for it is clear that although these critics are attempting to establish a new terminology for this space, they are firmly embedded within the vocabulary that has been used throughout the development of urban and spatial theoretical discourses. This suggests that although many believe that ‘cyberspace’ offers the individual new possibilities and potential to experience an ‘alternative’ world, one understands and realises that this individual will be firmly rooted within the urban and social fabric that resembles the contemporary public space I have mentioned throughout. I say this because despite the utopian landscapes that many critics and commentators imagine and portray, the world of cyberspace merely offers the user an escape route from the ‘reality’ of the city, from suburbia, or from rural life. It is an alternative space in which to communicate and ‘interact’ with others, or rather other individuals whom the user may not experience or wish to experience in urban social space.

Susan Christopherson’s example of shopping malls being illustrative of the white middle-class consumer’s desire to escape from Los Angeles’ heteropolis is a useful analogy when used in conjunction with cable TV shopping and ordering goods via the Internet. These two established telematic-based devices (via the ‘invisible’ space of fibre optics) allow the user to remain in the safe space of the home, a place that may resemble the fortresses discussed in the previous chapter. This is a very basic example of the manner the emerging information society further distances traditional perceptions and concepts of public space. Within this informational space one is able to remain in isolation within the comfort of the ‘smart home’, for it is a space that

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encompasses the public realm (shopping and window shopping) yet is exclusively private. This relationship between the public and the private spaces of the information superhighway and specifically the Internet, becomes imploded when one closely analyses it.

To log-on to the Internet one immediately ‘looks’ through the interface to the undetermined space of cyberspace, in search of ‘anything’ one desires. It is essentially a private event. There is rarely anything to interrupt the relationship between the user and the terminal, and the individual generally conducts this one-way relationship within the confines of an enclosed and private space (the home or office). It is when the user ‘chats on-line’ to other users around the world that this space collapses, for it is a ‘public’ conversation (other users can intervene) that is transmitted across a computerised public sphere, yet is an activity that bears no resemblance to conversations in a public space such as the coffee house, for it is initiated in the ‘private’ space of the home and generally concluded within the private realm.

To chat on-line, the user does not experience the ‘dangers’ of urban life, yet does communicate in a way that resembles ‘actual’ human interaction. At this stage the private event becomes public, because the Internet encompasses a space that is open to everyone and anyone (in relation to accessibility), and more importantly is a space where no one really knows each other and can thus put on computerised disguises and can act in ways that do not pose any threat to their physical well-being, or that would be deemed inappropriate in ‘real’ city space. If it is a space that the ‘utopians’ believe will affect the way the human subject interacts and the manner in which communities are established, where the user conducts his/her everyday life from, then public space will implode into private space and the public realm will become an arena for those who have been left out of the information society because they are either unemployed, technologically inept, or merely members of the underclass.

LOS-CYBER-ANGELES

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For Los Angeles, this means that there will possibly be a new underclass, one that is similar yet different to the one that is current and prevalent today. The Internet will increasingly become yet another ‘private public space’. Similar to the gentrification of urban space during the 1980s, the Internet and cyberspace is likely to be privately owned by larger corporations who will use it as a tool for profit rather than one of knowledge, and will be managed and controlled for the use of those fortunate enough to have access. For L.A. this will mean that those who live in the prosperous suburbs will become further ‘despatialised’ from the urban core and multi-cultural aspects of urban life, and the poor of the inner city ghettos will be excluded from the information society and from advanced capitalist society in general.

Michael Dear has commented that L.A. ‘is a city split between the extremes of wealth and poverty, in which a glittering First World city sits atop a polyglot Third World substructure’ (Dear, 1995: 43) and within the world of the information society ‘the phone and the modem have rendered the street irrelevant; social hierarchies, once fixed, have become “despatialised”’(Dear, 1995: 31). The ‘electronic spaces’ of the city’s peripheral areas accentuate and encourage the established polarities that are inherent within L.A.’s social urban space. As the suburban home becomes more and more autonomous and dependent upon new technologies, public space is deemed irrelevant and invisible for the activities of public life. One is able to live a life that embraces electronic interaction (via techniques such as e-mail, video conferencing, and telecommuting), yet is a lifestyle that leaves behind the vibrancy and heterogeneity of city life. Increasingly Los Angeles appears to be emerging as a city that will be populated by those who remain in the ghettos and those who venture into the centre out of necessity to conduct business: again a scenario that may take the citizen one step closer to the dystopic imagery of Blade Runner.

This dramatic re-spatialisation of the city and the suburbs is in accord with my proposed theory of an ideology of fear being prevalent in Los Angeles’ postmodern space. The (sub)urban sprawl of L.A. expands even further to encompass the ‘glocal’ world of cyberspace. I say

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glocal because, as space is rendered obsolete through fibre optics and the Internet, both ideas concerning globalism and localism are imploded in a similar fashion to the compression of time and space (for further aspects of time-space compression see Harvey, 1990). What was deemed to be global space can now be experienced and ‘produced’ within one’s home - perhaps the most compact form of localism. This amalgamation of these binaries allows the electronic user to ‘log on’ to the outside world in a fashion that distances oneself from the paranoia of contemporary urban life. In a recent television documentary it was said that:

‘cyberville looks safe indeed compared to urban decay. Paranoia, violence and pollution are eating at the soul of America, driving it inward - to the protection of the home, private security, entry-codes, and video surveillance-controlled gated fortresses. Escaping to virtual reality…is just one step further into the sanitised anonymity of suburbia’(Channel 4, 1994: 5).

It is a world that encourages one to escape from the ‘realities’ of everyday life, an escape from the controlled environment of public space into a world that resembles and recreates a sense of conviviality that is thought to be lacking from the urban space of L.A. What remains however is an accentuation of the fortressing techniques that is emphasised in the writings of Mike Davis discussed above. The home now becomes a space that bears no relation to the mythical symbolism of the television programme The Waltons, rather it is a space that accentuates the uneven distribution of power and social hierarchies that characterises the ‘informational city’. Telematic-based tools are able to redefine and reorganise city space in such a way that it may signify the end of the city. This is achieved because of the breakdown and compression of geographic space and also because of the increasing social inequalities that continue to characterise the late capitalist transnational economy. The danger of this cyber world is that it will probably create ‘electronic ghettos’, new spaces that may expose explicit re-definitions of the way in which urban space is considered and theorised.

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Mike Davis suggests that within the endless world of cyberspace and the information superhighway ‘South Central L.A. is a data and media black hole, without local cable programming or links to major data systems. Just as it became a housing/jobs ghetto in the early twentieth century industrial city, it is now evolving into an electronic ghetto within the emerging information city’(Davis, 1992a: 14). What this proposes is that the new information infrastructure will be a space that is appropriated by the ‘electronic’ rich and will help to accentuate their spatial authority and control over those who will remain in the ghettos. There is a possibility that within this scenario, the inner city will become an area that is exclusive to those who do not have access to this new and profitable space, where the space of business and opportunities is repositioned into the safe haven of the home and the peripheral areas of central L.A. This has clearly happened during the last two decades with the emergence of Orange County and Silicon Valley, these are areas that have repositioned wealth and business, areas that could be said to have encouraged lack of welfare benefits and high unemployment figures within Downtown L.A.. Since the redundancy of many workers within these profitable and advanced corporations situated in the peripheral areas, it is becoming apparent that the future of central city life and its traditional appropriation and production of space may itself become a fortress through a lack of social benefits and the increase in the policing and militarisation of this space.

It is within the field of access that cyberspace poses difficult questions regarding space and its corresponding social inequalities and polarities. Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin believe that it is the contrast between the information poor and the technological wealthy that is most characteristic of the change in social space:

‘The areas of ghettoisation, growing poverty, high structural unemployment and rising crime are also the sparse regions on the network maps…and the districts where access even to basic information and communications services is problematic. By contrast, the affluent segments of cities are the centres of most rapid development of infrastructure

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and services and the beneficiaries of the market-led processes of telecommunications development…this trend reflects the use of electronic spaces to maintain and exercise social power and the wider structural patterns of exclusion.’(Graham and Martin, 1996: 330)

What contemporary society may be left with, after the information revolution, is a collection of exclusive enclaves, where increasing wealth is channelled into the zones of profitable informational and technological access. This can already be seen with public libraries as an example of spatial restructuring and accessibility. Having already become ‘fortresses’ (libraries such as the Goldwyn Library mentioned before), these public buildings are now establishing virtual and on-line methods of research and information. Instead of the traditional method of cataloguing books by index cards, libraries are now favouring ‘an all-computerised records system’ (Reed, 1996: 16). Apparently this method will not encompass complete catalogues or volumes and is thus flawed in comparison to the traditional method. The reason I mention this is that it is a further illustration of how access is being denied to what is interpreted to be beneficial for the ‘public’, and how public space is continually entering the space of the private. If libraries are to become fully computerised, then it will only be those who have the education and tools with which to access files that will benefit. It is a building that encompasses a space that is considered public, yet is transformed to become not only a high security privatised fortress, but also a technological one. Those who live in the ghettos and experience a poor level of education because of lack of state funds and lack of prospects, are further despatialised within the city of Los Angeles, because ‘their’ space is shrinking in a world that is both expanding and being transformed into electronic enclaves and spaces. The question to be asked though is whether this new realm of electronic and cyber space will actually have an effect upon the way cities are structured, and whether it will completely distort and respatialise the urban core of cities?

THE FUTURE(?)

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It is true that when William J. Mitchell comments that ‘the worldwide computer network - the electronic agora - subverts, displaces, and radically redefines our notions of gathering place, community, and urban life’(Mitchell, 1995: 8), that traditional concepts of space and time are restructured through the invisible space of the fibre optics. As mentioned above, it is this new space that appears to be redefining constructs of individuality, the world of business and geographical location. Yet what does it hold for the future of cities such as Los Angeles, particularly its Central and Downtown areas?

Davis believes that ‘in the age of electronic culture and economy, the city redoubles itself through the complex architecture of its information and media networks’(Davis, 1992a: 13), where it may be possible for the cyberspace protagonists of novels by William Gibson and Neal Stephenson to come to life through virtual reality systems. Indeed the city does appear to be in more places than one through the information network: one can ‘be’ in Tokyo when one is actually situated in Downtown L.A.. Yet urban space is clearly not being resituated or becoming obsolete, for the simple reason that many citizens live in an urban environment and will continue to do so because of its relation to the global economy. Downtown L.A. will continue to be characterised by polarisation, just as many other urban areas will be. The contemporary city depends upon the global economy for business and for its very existence. Electronic networks aid the compression of space and time, allowing for an increase in efficiency and improvement in time management, yet they also encourage space to be fixed and stable, for an individual or corporation no longer needs to travel far distances so regularly because business transactions can be executed via fibre optics and the computer screen.

The urban social space of cities may become further fragmented because of these emerging telecommunication links, just as it did during the industrial age of the late nineteenth century. What will remain though is a hierarchical structure, dominated by the information-rich. It is this characteristic of a late capitalist economy and society that will ‘produce’, control and

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sustain spatial operations through ‘electronic’ restructuring. Whether electronic networks and the space of cyberspace will completely transform Los Angeles is impossible to say. Yet it can be said that there will be a ‘double-coded’ relationship between electronic and urban spaces, where one determines the other, and dominate and control the spaces in which they interact. Both spaces are extremely varied in their construction and operations of spatiality and it is impossible to generalise about the future composition of cities because of the omnipotent control by major corporations, the commodification of urban space, and social polarisation. Although the urban social spaces of Los Angeles are ‘unique’ in that they encompass many different cultures, excessive security and surveillance techniques and a massive respatialisation into the suburban enclaves dominated by an ideology of fear, one wonders whether it will remain a city of economic power and mass media, or whether this space will be re-positioned to another city or area.

It already appears that Seattle is emerging as the next most powerful and successful city to dominate the Pacific Rim (especially if one looks at the success of Microsoft and other major corporations in comparison with the “downsizing” of companies in the peripheral areas of L.A.). Los Angeles will remain the city of minorities, where inequality and social polarities persist, yet it could also become the city that has no centre. I say this because businesses are relocating away from the centre, as a result of the information age, where production can take place anywhere in the world, leaving the centre a place for consumption. This has already happened with the shopping mall effect. As more and more corporations and individuals extend the peripheral areas, the centre becomes increasingly difficult to define and find. Areas such as Downtown and Watts are indeed in danger of becoming the electronic ghettos of L.A., and may be getting nearer to the dystopic images of a Blade Runner scenario, rather than the utopian ideas of an equal and democratic information society where everyone benefits from the information superhighway. The withdrawal of citizens to suburbia (both urban and electronic) does have the potential to collapse both the public and private spaces of the city of Los Angeles, yet traditional and recognisable features of the urban core will persist purely because

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of what cities represent: business, conviviality, an ideology of fear, social and spatial polarisation, diversity, a sense of identity and community, and more importantly to continue as political and cultural centres.