If the 21st century digital city raises serious questions about surveillance and information overload, the flip side is that mobile technologies put more eyes and feet on the street, a benchmark for success in any urban place. In fact, one of the paradoxes of digitized urban space is its apparent affinity for traditional urban and neighborhood aesthetics -- not the soulless supermalls and virtual suburbs one might expect. The design of Seoul's Digital Media City, for example, reflects an earlier era of narrow streets, dense alleyways and pedestrian plazas. Or consider the Intel People and Practices lab in Hillsboro, Ore., where researcher Michele Chang has designed a hybrid street game -- with real and virtual components -- steeped in nostalgia for old-fashioned street play such as hopscotch, kick the can and stickball.

"Street games, this really rich city practice, have all but disappeared," she says. "It's because cities have become more regimented, anonymous and commercialized." If some might blame computer games for taking kids off the streets, Chang wants to leverage digital spaces to counter what she calls the prevalence of "heads-down computing." Intended as a research tool to map urban practices, her digital street game assigns players random combinations of objects, practices and places to document stunts on the streets of New York. "The idea is very much technology is the medium and the city is the canvas," she explains. "The street game is a platform for creativity that randomly sets out different ways of discovering your city."

The neotraditional bent of the postmodern city perhaps explains the attraction of wireless technologies for more conventional urbanists working to mitigate the problem of place in American life. "Anything that's networked tends to work better where there are lots and lots of people," says John Norquist, former mayor of Milwaukee and president of the Congress for the New Urbanism, an organization that supports walkable neighborhoods and high-density, mixed-use development. "So Wi-Fi supports urbanism; it's one of the technologies that enhances it, unlike the interstate highway system that undermines the density of cities."

Wireless zones, says Ethan Kent, a program manager at New York's Project for Public Spaces, give people a reason to use public space "in an era when there are more reasons to be in our houses, offices and cars." Pointing to light-emitting-diode displays in Times Square -- in particular a Reuters sign that offers live news and photo feeds -- Kent said digital display technologies that reveal a building's inner uses offer the greatest potential for enlivening public spaces.

Ultimately, the reaction of the urban design and planning community to telecommunications trends raises the question: Who is the driving force behind the 21st century digital city? The correct answer is not the Project for Public Spaces -- or any planning organization, for that matter. Think of it this way, says Townsend. "Intel is the General Motors of the 21st century. It's very influential."

Backed by the big bucks, technology researchers are devouring tomes related to the theory of place. For their part, (underfunded) planners have yet to develop a comprehensive approach to emerging mobile and wireless technologies. An embryonic field, technology planning usually focuses on building an infrastructure network -- such as expanding municipal Wi-Fi zones -- or responding to citizen concerns about cellphone towers and radiation, says Scott Page, a Philadelphia urban planner who recently launched his own company, Interface Studio. "It's unfortunate that the planning profession has turned more of a blind eye to the potential of emerging technologies than they could have," he says. Urban telecommunications strategy needs to do more than plan for "lead users," he says. "You want to be feasible, not utopian, not just throw out a bunch of ideas and hope that everyone is going to own a cellphone in five years," he says, "because that's not going to be the case."

In conjunction with a local nonprofit, Page recently completed a comprehensive technology strategy for a distressed neighborhood in northern Philadelphia, including a community technology center where Temple University faculty will teach kids GIS (geographic information system) skills to build a database for the neighborhood, and public art that will double as a digital bulletin board accessible from a public place. "Technology becomes a visible part of a community's revitalization, and you get exposure to people who have never had exposure," he says.

In January 2005, MIT's Sensible Cities Lab and Center for Real Estate are hosting a digital city symposium bringing together real estate companies, tech companies, urban planners and designers, and cities that partner with tech companies. At the September 2004 UbiComp conference held in Nottingham, England, Intel's Eric Paulos co-organized an Urban Frontiers Workshop that brought together technologists, urban designers, geographers and architects to examine the ways mobile and wireless computing will be integrated into the urban landscape.

Perhaps more than any other project, the Urban Frontiers Workshop suggests that trends within the digital city movement mirror long-standing distinctions in the urban planning community: between those who view cities as compartmentalized centers of production and efficiency, and those who view urban spaces as a kind of barely organized chaos, favoring unpredictable encounters between diverse social groups. Thus on one side you have the Place Labs and the Friend Finder applications; on the other you have the street games and what Paulos calls "urban probes." These include a digitally augmented garbage can he designed to capture the pattern, flow and personal stories connected to trash usage and a "familiar strangers" project, a mobile phone application that logs and records the presence of people we see every day -- at the bus stop, in the grocery store -- but with whom we do not interact.

"Probably the big thing was try to bring the discussion away from the immediacy of things that promote efficiency or productivity," says Paulos, who cites influences such as the situationists, who staged unpredictable street performances, and Kevin Lynch, whose seminal planning book, "The Image of the City," exposed the difference between people's mental maps of a city and the physical plan. "Even though these are important goals, it's important to acknowledge that things we actually cherish in life in home or the city are not always about efficiency. They are intangible; they get at emotional experiences. It's what constitutes the richness of people's lives."

Toggled together, the pragmatic and playful digital city applications will change both the shape and the experience of public space. As for value judgments, it is too early to say. If the cellphone, as Goldberger and many others complain, is a technology that isolates people on the street, it is also a tool to engineer face-to-face encounters. If a pervasive silicon-embedded environment suggests an Orwellian politics of place, it also points toward a democratization of technology, an era in which individuals and communities control their digital future.

Townsend tells a story of being in Seoul during the Summer Olympics, where 500,000 people would gather to watch soccer on a four-story Jumbotron on top of a building. "It's a shared event, a shared sense of space," says Townsend, "where people choose to make a statement by being in large group."

"Emerging technologies are an enabler," says Page. "They can reinforce anything we want to accomplish." Besides, he adds, "it's traditional that cities change and adapt to technology. It's what cities are partially there for."

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