0.18 Urban renewal: some lessons for hypercities from the preserving

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Seeing the world in a grain of sand is a familiar fantasy for technorati. In 1992, David Gelernter published a book called Mirror Worlds , in which he describes, for a lay audience, what it will take to (as his subtitle has it) “put the universe in a shoebox.” Gelernter, in addition to being a Yale professor and (only one year after) Unabomber victim, is also an unreconstructed Platonist; he blithely throws around the conceit of a mirror world—“some huge institution’s moving, true-to-life mirror image trapped inside a computer”—as if two millennia of philosophical footnoting, culminating in, say, Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , hadn’t happened. For Gelernter that’s okay: the mirror world is simply the natural culmination of a march of technological progress, replacing the metaphor of computers as giant brains with the crystal ball, or palantir. Hands-on, containable (shoeboxes fit easily under the bed), but containing multitudes.

Neal Stephenson was also there, at pretty much the same time. Snow Crash (1992) is best remembered for its anticipation of Second Life with the MetaVerse, but in several extended sequences the book’s hero-protagonist Hiro Protagonist consults a palm-sized tool called, well, “Earth”: “It looks exactly like the earth would look from a point in geosynchronous orbit directly above L.A., complete with weather systems—vast spinning galaxies of clouds, hovering just above the surface of the globe, casting gray shadows on the oceans—and polar ice caps, fading and fragmenting into the sea” (109). The abstraction of information into a visual, spatial, and above all urban representation is, of course, the signature cyberpunk trope, back to the granddaddy of them all, William Gibson’s lines of light, “like city lights receding.” But what Gelernter and Stephenson both have in common is an emphasis on the geographical and the miniature. Both of them, of course, are anticipating the massive contemporary industry of GIS, which has culminated in Google Earth and its rivals, competitor products such as Microsoft’s Bing and NASA’s World Wind, putting something very much like Stephenson’s spectral spinning sphere a mere 10 or 15 MB download away from any desktop.

We can continue to multiply origin stories. There’s Buckminster Fuller, for example, and his 1960s Geospace concept, a gigantic globe wired up to receive input from databanks all over the world. But virtual earths and giant electro-mechanical orbs are at best a partial genealogy for Todd Presner and his team’s remarkable work on HyperCities, which, as Presner notes, owes as much to the traditions of cultural mapping that emerge from Benjamin’s Arcades as the panoptical fantasies of Fuller, Stephenson, and Gelernter. In his paper, Presner succinctly catalogs what sets HyperCities apart from more general tools like Google Earth: that it foregrounds temporal browsing as a fundamental aspect of the user experience; that the content privileges the interests of humanities scholars, exposing the cultural and historical transformation of space (as opposed to, say, the location of the nearest In-and-Out Burger); and finally, that the entire project is explicitly conceived as a platform for experiments in new forms of scholarly publishing. This last is what I take to be the key feature for purposes of discussion at this meeting.