Submitted by David Vogt on June 9, 2006 - 9:15pm.
Ants and bees build amazing homes, but no creature can match the human obsession for augmenting living landscapes with built structures. And you haven’t seen anything yet. Think about our deeper obsession with media. What happens when we’re able to augment our built environments with media structures? Cities formed of bricks and glass are about to be reformed with media and meaning. Welcome to the semantic city.
The world is experiencing an interesting reversion of power from nation-states back to city-states. While recent world is flat thinking focuses on the growth of a planet-state, the real phenomenon is that nation-states are diminishing with respect to both the planet-state and city-states, so that creative city-states are peaking strongly on a flattening landscape. So yes, the world is already city-spiky. And the spikes will get much sharper as mobile media begin to reinvent urban experience. How and why? Urban lifestyle potentials will expand enormously as the semantic web couples with ambient culture and built infrastructure.
