The Digital City: The American Metropolis and Information Technology (review)

In the July 2005 issue of Technology and Culture, in his article titled "Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy," Fred Turner wrote about "the origins of virtual community." Turner cited Manuel Castells's observation that "the electronics industry and its geographical hubs, including the [San Francisco] Bay Area, were among the industries and regions most dependent on network patterns of organization" (p. 505). Michel Laguerre, in The Digital City, also focuses on the Bay Area in his study of "the ways in which the city has expanded and transformed as a result of digitization" (p. xii). Concisely summarizing literature on digital, virtual, wired, and techno-cities, including early work from the 1970s, Laguerre asserts that "the continuum approach reveals the proper relations of the virtual to the real. These entities are co-produced by human actors who participate in both, . . . each one permeates the life of the other" (p. 15). Further, these relations are uneven and segmented, even within one location.

The Digital City is relevant to historians of technology because of Laguerre's concise analyses of complex systems, the spatial and temporal overlaps that characterize the virtual world, and the hybrid nature of human interactions. Laguerre describes the modern city as consisting of poles that affect its functioning: besides virtuality, there are formal and informal poles. "The process of digitization transforms aspects of the physical city," he notes, "adding a new dimension to the city as a whole, one that connects the practices carried out in the real and virtual worlds along a continuum between those two poles" (p. 8). The burgeoning of information technologies (IT) has drawn some regions together, but it has also socially fragmented the city, promoted telecommuting, displaced people because of rising housing costs, and globalized the local. People cross borders virtually while actually remaining in one place.

Laguerre's emphasis in his approach to IT and to globalization is on human agency, focusing on the microcomputer and its networked systems. Two case studies—that of the second election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti in 2001, and "the democracy movement that culminated in the events of Tiananmen Square [Beijing, 1989]"—provide examples of "how the internal politics of many nations is becoming globalized in ways that transform the national into the transnational" (pp. 126, 125). Laguerre notes that "[a]dding history to the dynamics of virtual diasporic spaces allows us to see the processes by which they are assembled and by which they change" (p. 134). Because of IT, immigrants can "intervene directly and immediately in the politics" of their homeland as well as of their host country, and indeed did so in Haiti and China.

Because of Laguerre's focus on people, readers learn about labor practices, social and temporal stratification, shifting gender roles and power relationships, the unequal distribution of resources, repurposing of systems, and policy decisions in the globalized city. Another of his case studies concerns a virtual city hall, showing how its digitization was "in synergy with the history of the microcomputer itself, as least the history of its availability to the public." In this regard, the IT team members "have become important players in the organizational politics of the city hall" (p. 99). The practice of democratic politics via the web is limited by, among other factors, what the IT team chooses to present and the public's ability to connect to the virtual city hall.

Laguerre's clear assessment of the roles of IT in urban areas in the United States is particularly valuable because he introduces useful (though sometimes awkward) terminology and critiques the web of interrelationships. For scholars constructing histories of human–computer interactions, Laguerre's small volume ought to be a helpful companion.