The author detailed explains a logical transform from the modern city (the Machine City) to the postmodern city (the Cyber Cities). Referred to Michel Foucault, she examines the discipline as a most efficacious power that shaped the city. People’s dream of order, acts of comparing, contrasting and categorizing made the machinelike norm to establish authority over individuals, namely sovereign, which I believe very related to the 19th century and early 20th century’s urban planning. No matter Corbusier’s Radiant City or Howard’s Garden City, they all wish a fixed, rational and grand order that could last forever, yet, failed rapidly.
Nonetheless, with the development of computer science, people recognized the decentralization feature of intelligent computer networks. Though the author mentioned people’s worries about the lost humanity, hidden identity and an amoral indifference to human relations, which results in the sense of community diminishes. I partially agree with this but I don’t think this could be the end. Recently, I read a book called Complexity wrote by Melanie Mitchell, which proved that the order would happen from the bottom-up without human control in different aspects, for example, the Genetic Algorithm automatically develops the best-fitted system, and this is the ‘cognitive processes of smart computers’ mentioned by the author. This complexity theory, which came up in the 1970s, is well integrated with Jane Jacobs’s 1960s urban planning idea of diversity and small scale. The interrelationship between individuals and systems breaks human’s outdated anthropocentric modernism dream, i.e., the nostalgia of the whole and one, but constructs a postmodernism narrative of waging war on totality. I have to say I feel excited when reading this article.
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Although you claimed that Le Corbusier’s Radiant City or Howard’s Garden City “has failed rapidly”, again, I would like to note that the impact of the schemes don’t depend on its outcome of being a success or not. Radiant City has undoubtedly influenced modern city planning – for e.g. Costa and Niemeyer’s Brasilia; and Howard’s Garden City, more concretely influenced British New Towns designs – like Milton Keyes. Therefore, they do have their influence in the built environment albeit not being able to be fully realised.
I appreciate very much that you can relate the ideas discussed in Boyer’s text to other books and references. There is certainly a lot of movements in the cyberspace that aims to decentralise existing systems of operations through technology such as blockchains, DeFi etc. More recently, there are people who even starts to decentralise physical space through the virtual – perhaps something that Jacobs will love and hate. Overall, a good response to Boyer!