A spasso per la città dei bits. Walking in the city of bits

An invisible city made of information highways and virtual spaces is radically changing the physical landscape where we live, as it happened in the past with the railways, electricity or the telephone. The city of bits is a revolutionary environment where people will experience brand new forms of work, commerce, study and everyday life. Mediated communication is opening to the economy of service, the industry of information, the spaces of the fluxes and networking. Since the mid Nineties and way before cloud computing, William J. Mitchell describes the future of the present brought by the digital telecommunication and the use of software over the material architecture. In his book, walking in the city of bits through its electronic agoras and recombinant architecture is not just an exercise of narrative, but the design of a network infrastructure where every single element, the objects, the people, the buildings, become an integrated environment fading the difference between material and immaterial. The picture of the city of bits portrayed by Mitchell, is not the end of the place into the non-place, nor the end of architecture into non-architecture, but the emergence of multiple layers of spaces, where we are experiencing new forms of live and work, community life, social meeting places, decentralized production and distribution, entertainment and leisure. He is not describing an apocalyptic environment under the dominion of technology, rather he is recognizing the opportunity coming from the electronic media for shaping the new world. As a consequence, the design of the artefacts and the spaces we use and live in, should encompass the new technological realm and include the virtual dimension and the augmented reality in its program. Interfaces and high speed internet become the new building materials for the city of bits, as bricks and concrete were the solid resources for construction in the past.