April 24, 2000 New Thinking:
Suburban, sub-rural, sub-city
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April 24, 2000
Suburban, sub-rural, sub-city
By Gerry McGovern
Everywhere technology goes, so to do people, following sweetly behind like the children followed the Pied Piper of Hamlin.
Technology came to the city in the form of the big factory and the people flocked there, pushed from behind by the machines that were making them redundant on the farm. Technology, in the form of cars, enabled people to move away from the city and the people settled down in the suburbs. Where will technology bring us next?
The city is where it all happens, right? That’s where the power-base is. According to sociologist Saskia Sassen, the modern city is the hub of the modern technological elite who connect into high-speed private telecommunications networks while those living in the country wait and wait for things to download.
Polarization is the name of the game as Sassen calls these global cities "citadels within the city", where the rich go online, the middle class get poorer and the poor increasingly go on the streets.
Sassen notes that incomes of those educated to college level in the US have fallen, in real terms, from 1973 to 1997, with only the income of those with an "advanced degree" going up. Those who serve the digital elite may work in small cafés and exclusive anti-chain chain boutiques, but their wages are not great and they are often employed on a casual basis.
Around them property prices soar, making more and more of the centre of the city the domain of young, ambitious, childless people who are bent on showing how sophisticated they are by drinking expensive cappuccinos and buying apartments no bigger than prison cells for astronomical prices.
So, it’s all a terrible mess? Not really. Dublin, the city I live in, has become a global city in record time. However, I remember the Dublin of the 1980s which reeked of depression and where decayed and rotting buildings littered the city. Dublin at the beginning of the 20th Century was much worse. That Dublin in the “rare auld times” was the slum capital of Europe. Dublin may have its problems today with success but it’s had much worse problems with failure.
In any case, the city is not where most of us will live in the future. According to Michael Pollan in “The Triumph of Burbopolis” (The New York Times, April 9, 2000), “In 1960, one-third of America was city, one-third suburban and one-third rural…. Forty years later more people live in suburban America than rural and urban America combined.”
Contrary to Sassen, Pollan sees modern technology finding its home not in the city, but the suburbs. He writes about how Silicon Valley represents the “apotheosis of suburbia; the first time in history an important economic, technological and cultural revolution has its roots in a suburb.” Pollan also notes that, “America Online, perhaps the first great suburban medium, originates somewhere in suburban Virginia, though like the rest of the Web it might as well be anywhere.”
So, where will the Internet, our new Pied Piper of Technology, lead us? It will be a simple choice, really. For those of us who have families the choice will become increasingly suburban and rural. For the young, cappuccino-drinkers, it’ll be the hot centre of the city, as long as the centre stays in the city!
Gerry McGovern
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Silicon Valley represents the “apotheosis of suburbia; the first time in history an important economic, technological and cultural revolution has its roots in a suburb.”
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