E-TOPIA

This little book begins with a big claim: the city is dead, and cyberspace killed it. But Mitchell, it turns out, is too intelligent an observer to really mean anything quite so drastic. Despite his weakness for bold, catchy statements (and it is a weakness), this MIT architecture professor has both feet planted in the long and much-studied history of urban spaces, and he draws from it a pragmatic optimism that keeps his argument both hopeful and nuanced. His real thesis: Under cyberspace's influence, the city is changing, no more or less radically than it did under the influence of postal systems, electricity, and cars. And if we ride the new changes carefully, he insists, the places we live and work in can become "e-topias--lean, green cities that work smarter, not harder."