In 2005, President Bush holds a teleconference with US troops in Iraq. With the rapid advancement of communications technology, procedures from military activities to urban planning have been made more streamlined worldwide. Photo courtesy lwb10463.

Periodically in intellectual history, new movements of ideas arise when familiar institutions are viewed in unfamiliar ways: Keynes and his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money; Adam Smith's reinterpretation of markets and labor; Marx's reappraisal of class structure; Freud and the familial household; Dewey and the schoolroom. We are now on the brink of a similar evolution in our concept of cities, emerging from a 20th-century view of urban life and management that was shaped by colonial, early industrial, and traditional agrarian philosophies.

Powerful forces are converging to create an increasingly interconnected urban infrastructure that is essentially a new stratum of the geopolitical landscape. These forces include international finance, security needs, environmental developments, and technological advancements. The result is a growing phenomenon of global urban connectivity: cities around the world are creating a new transnational political and economic realm separate from traditional nation-to-nation interactions. While there may yet be no reason to expect economic and technological relations between London, Beijing, and New York City to overshadow macro-relations between Britain, China, and the United States, inter-urban cooperative structures will increasingly influence national and international affairs. Current urban telecommunity theory illustrates some of the practical impacts of this trend as well as its profound implications for urban philosophy.

Urban Telecommunities As Regional Growth Engines

A good microcosmic example is an initiative to develop the town of La Plata, Maryland, into a pioneering telecommunity (E-Burb or wired suburb), presenting significant implications for the future of greater Washington, DC, as well as for urban regions throughout the United States, for which the La Plata project offers a growth engine model. The project envisages a telework community in which many residents will remain physically in La Plata while working virtually in DC or elsewhere, linked around the clock by fiber-optic internet and video. The project's controlling idea is a telecommunity concept developed by Dr. J.J. Hellman.

This "urban telecommunity" is not telecommuting as commonly understood—employees working from home occasionally or a loose network of geographically separated people linked periodically by the internet—but a formal group of substantial size, whose members, both remote and proximate, are continuously connected via a combination of on-screen and other contacts for public or private purposes of collegial cooperation, with most members sharing a common geographical locale. The idea of a dedicated social organization using teletechnology in this way to support a widely distributed urban workforce, metropolitan services infrastructure, and rurally located small community is an innovation of far-reaching practical and theoretical importance. It brings into useful illustrative convergence a cluster of concepts that together portends a new era in urban philosophy, embracing information technology as a positive and crucial contributor to both the social and infrastructural architectures of community.

Teletechnology’s Impacts on Urban Evolution

The La Plata project illustrates a chain of teletechnology impacts on urban evolution. Seven of these relate to the town: erosion of the belief in internet homogeneity, natural ecosystems, security, educational institutions, the management of cities, and the design of urban buildings.

First, because La Plata is in many ways a typical American small town, how it responds to its telecommunity options offers a model for similarly situated communities across the United States. Dating from rural beginnings in 1888, the town is an 8,400-inhabitant bedroom community serving Washington, DC. The telecommunity project proposes to change that concept, envisaging a La Plata workforce servicing DC managers via internet from home offices and neighborhood telework centers. The town would be populated 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with all that means socially and economically: creating new demand for recreational facilities, restaurants, shops, and other amenities needed to support a higher level of social activity.

Secondly, urban analysts will likely be interested in how the transformations expected from this envisaged telecommunity, and the studies on which it is based, contradict popular belief about internet homogeneity: the notion that global teletechnology is uniforming. The internet in its present form liberates personal individuality through expressive tools such as blogs; similarly, evidence indicates that networking encourages regional differentiation. The La Plata proposal is linked to a municipal plan developed to reassert the area's original small-town character and distinctive personality. Transitioning from bedroom community to "living community" status will create economic and social demands for a village hub that's both livelier and more uniquely identifiable than the town presently is.

Thirdly, this social benefit is envisaged as being paralleled by a natural-environment one. By reducing commuter traffic, telecommunity is expected to curb pollution substantially, especially if other towns follow suit. Such reduced highway commuter reliance, fourthly, is in turn seen as part of the model's security rationale. By phasing out high-risk urban resource concentration and by curtailing highway congestion that impedes crisis response, a more telework-based, geographically distributed workforce would reduce vulnerability to disruption of economic activity and government services by terrorism or natural catastrophe. President Eisenhower introduced the national highway system as the Defense Highway System—a crisis tool for resource mobility—but experience has shown that in emergencies it's difficult to use congested highways for defense, evacuation, or anything else. To emphasize the La Plata model's strategic desirability in this regard, the proposal recommends that the pilot teleworkforce be Washington, DC-serving staff of the Department of Homeland Security, distributed not only to La Plata but to a network of telecommunities in Maryland, Virginia, and elsewhere. These locations would be remote for strategic protection purposes but close enough for telework colleagues to meet over lunch periodically. This distribution rationale would apply to the security, crisis response, and strategic continuity-of-services interests of many cities.

Fifth, the model proposes that such E-Burbs be linked to educational institutions with teletechnology support capability. Qualifying universities and colleges would be integrated into the telecommunity grid. An example of how some educational institutions are adapting to the recovery and mobility options offered by teletechnology is Grantham University, an accredited online university. When its Slidell, Louisiana, campus was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, Grantham continued to function without interruption to over 8,000 students around the United States and other countries because, as a result of Hurricane Ivan two years earlier, Grantham CEO Tom Macon had all the university's data digitized and stored on a secure server in Virginia. A plan to open a satellite campus in Kansas City, Missouri, was quickly converted to provide for the proposed branch to become the university's new headquarters. Forty employees relocated from Louisiana to staff the Missouri campus with 150 newly hired locals.