Let's take a walk. From my apartment to rny studio is about half an hour, fifty minutes if I stop for a cappuccino and the New York Times. The trip begins with a descent downstairs from my fifth floor apartment, the top of the building. In a city that priveleges human locomotion as its principal means of movement, five stories becomes a kind of natural limit_gravitation's own human skyline. Stairs are also urban architecture's initial invocation of the orders of social life, first steps in the passage of private to public, the extension of the street by other means, high tide of the public realm. I descend past the plastic bags of garbage left by neighbors for the porter. I know them by this evanescent archeo1ogy: Jeff, secret sharer, disordered and unsociable with his aggressive heaps of unbound newspapers and ripping sacks of God-knows-what; Margo, whose clean landing repeatedly confirms her residence elsewhere, and whose ernpty rent-controlled apartment tips my blood pressure over the red line at the systems of inequality and unfairness that New York's distorted market-based mode of housing production yields. I work hard - why should I pay six times the rent for an identical apartment in the same building? I have thoughts of the landlord, that parasite, instrument of this unfairness, repository of my most primitive fantasies of economic determinism. He doesn't clean the hall because his grasping ethics are pure products of the system. I rehearse the lecture about the idea of the civic I've been planning to give him, but will have to save it until I'm more timely with the rent. We're in an historic district, I want to tell him, and our building plays a role this beautiful community of built memories: don't you have any feeling for this? He will reply that the Landmarks Commission prevents him from fixing things up. Gotcha!, I think, I know people down there, I'll see that the drawings are approved. But there's no money, he'll plead, all those tenants on rent-control! (Why don't you help me get them out, he suggests in a lowered tone, tempting my solidarity and arousing my rage, the bastard). On the front landing I meet Jane, frail and beautiful, asthmatic, and looking very old today. Jane is the landlord's opposite, the moral center of the building and the captain of the block. She's sorting through the recycling bin, taking seriously this pusillanimous retrofit of sustainability into a city dedicated to waste. This culture doesn't produce enough Janes. From her vantage point on a folding chair atop the front stoop, Jane keeps tabs on the comings and goings of the block, sensitive both to the social and the physical environment. Jane knows everybody's secrets and recognizes people, children, dogs. Jane spots criminals, can a recite the history of virtually every apartment between MacDougal Street and Sheridan Square. She knows the secrets of the flowers and the trees. Jane tends the petunias in the concrete urn that's chained to the railing out front,waters the street trees, trowels the soil around them for aeration. On weekends she works in the community garden around the corner. Great cities offer abundant choices. It isn't overstretching to suggest that this is precisely one of the links between the urban body and the body politic that democracy thrives on, especially in an environment which is rich in possibilities. One measure of the physical success of urban design lies in the variety of means and routes of circulation, the way in which choice, body, pleasure, and convenience join to form the circulatory nets of urban movement. Here, complexity is an insufficient test: confusion is not enough, but the possibility of getting lost is one of the vital practices of urban enjoyrnent. My choices on 1eaving my bui1ding are initially two, though eventually dozens. Let us assume a left turn. This brings us to Washinghton Square, the main park in the neighborhood, dog run, drug market, perfomance space, beach, quadrangle, edge condition, monument. Today I choose to follow a kind of green line to work. It isn't altogether easy_downtown Manhattan is staggeringly ill-equipped with green areas and retrofitting, greening it is a great challenge. Nevertheless , a longish strolll under greenery is possible for at least a portion of the walk. A diagonal cut across the park brings us into the sphere of influence of New York University. Two almost universally reviled buildings from the sixties_faculty and staff housing_frame a green space of civic dimension. Although the kind of modernist urban practice these buildings represent is justly repudiated .as a general model, this project and this setting are fine. Radiating the canonical virtues_light, air , space, greenery, relatively free ground plane, a bit of a dance of roof structures_these buildings, and the three later I.M. Pei towers in the next block, offer a humane and decent vision of urbanity. I don't remember the blocks obliterated for these structures, nor know anyone displaced for their construction, and so I simply deal with their presentness. I like these buildings, and although I would not want to live in a neighborhood comprised of them, I'm happy to live in a neighborhood which includes them. Looking south through this mini-radiant city, the view is down Wooster Street, one of the best , most intact streets in SoHo. The vista is terminated by one of the buildings of the telephone company, a great work of New York Art Deco. A few blocks further brings us to a somewhat more contemporary inscription. We're in SoHo now, the omega of gentrification, New York's most "Euro" neighborhood: what could be more appropriate than this hole-in-the-wall European currency exchange? There's something almost quaint about it, the perfect image of the way in which global capital vamps locality by offering the palpability of money, those soiled depreciating greenbacks, in lieu of the usual electronic transaction that's converted instantaneouly into Francs or Deutschmarks. We know it's picturesque here because tourists need to change money to participate in the kind of cash economy we would expect in an "historic" district like SoHo. In fact, the necessity for such transactions is severely limited, required only at street vendors and the few surviving business of the fading ethnic population that preceeded the artists and Yuppies, and which appear increasing1y alien amidst the g1itz, but which ironically embody the small scale sense of "old Europe" which the new establishments strive with such desperate calculation to recreate. EuroCard or Amex is certainly more convenient at Agnes B. or the Odeon. No finer example of this multinational relayering of Europeanness can be found than the corner of West Broadway and Grand Street_the Eurotrash Triangle_ which has recently agglomerated half a dozen French restaurants and cafes. On the down side, it certainly is another sign of globalized Yuppie culture. On the other hand, though, it's wonderful. The tenacious embrace of the street_despite excessive traffic and the almost complete abdication of the public realm in providing such urban amenities as street trees and furniture, or even a well maintained roadway and sidewalk_marks a circumstance at once hopeful and desperate. Arriving at Canal Street, the border between SoHo and Tribeca, another truth becomes clear: there are no partial solutions to the problem of traffic. C1ogged and toxic virtually round the clock, Canal Street is used as an artery by cross Manhattan traffic and is a perpetual disaster area. Crossing it, as I do twice a day, I've tried to invent strategies of amelioration. Such fantasies have a 1ong history. One of Robert Moses' last great initiatives was an attempt to build an expressway across (and destroying) SoHo, to link the bridge and tunnel on opposite sides of the island currently joined by Canal. The only real solution to the problem of Canal Street is the elimination of the traffic. The fix is not technical: the disgorging tunnel must simply be closed. There is no politician in the world with nerve for this fact, alas. Once we've made it to the other side of Canal, we're on the home stretch. Two summers ago, this little parking lot was swarming with carpenters who were busily erecting two historic buildings. The smaller of thern was a little house which appeared to be of early 19th-century vintage. Next door, across the party wall, was a lot building of cast iron and brick, seemingly about 75 years more recent. On the ground floor of the little house was a desperately authentic-1ooking snack bar/luncheonette. The entire ensemble took about two weeks to build. Who, of course, but Hollywood could have been responsible? For weeks, the neighborhood had been papered with announcements describing the upcoming production, apologizing for any potential inconvenience and generally trying to engage the community with the thrill of having a film set in its midst. And it was thrilling: the swarms of scenographers distressing plywood into rhapsodic verisimilitude; the evening the rainmaking gantries arrived and inundated Franklin Street; the morning we saw Bridget Fonda drinking cappuccino in Bubby's cafe with Harvey Keitel. A flyer dissemenated by the production company explained just why they were doing it. The main setting for the film was the snack bar, scene of an encounter between a policeman and a waitress that set the whole narrative into motion. According to the flyer, location scouts had scoured all of New York looking for just the right site in which all of this might take place. But after looking at thousands of locations, they were unable to come up with a single one that satisfied their requirements for authenticity, and so arose the decision to make the simulacrum, a fiction more real that any of the available realities. The simulation is one of the central questions for architecture and cities, and an index both of our power and the loss of it. As you can see, the ersatz construction is remarkably persuasive, a hyper-reality. I miss that film set, and not just because it was a goof. Its volumes were apt to its corner, its fake patina was rich. In a neighborhood of expensive restaurants (Robert De Niro owns there) a "real" snack bar would have been great. Even I become nostalgic for something that never was. I scarcely need to tell you that we are awash in this creek and that no city is immune. The Disneyfication of material culture proceeds at a breathtaking pace.We are creating cities which simply lie to us, cities which have forgotten how to tell the truth, which are delinquent in the connectedness of their meaning to the real experiences of their citizens. The authentic city is becoming a mendacity, a city where meaning is slipped in like a Gap ad at the bus shelter, where time is simply painted into the yielding surface of space: the city has become virtual beyond ourr_or anyone's_grasp. Walter Hudson is this nightmare made flesh. At the tirne of his death, on Christmas Eve 1991, he weighed 1,125 pounds, down from the1400 pounds that had established his Guinness-certified record as the world's fattest human. He was so large that when he died a wall of his house had to be demolished to permit the removal of his body by a forklift. Towed behind a hearse to the cemetary, his piano-case coffin was buried in a double plot. Walter Hudson is for me the paradigmatic citizen of the simulated city of post-electronic paranoia, a city in which we are all increasingly citizens What makes him exemplary is not exactly his bulk, it's his immobility: except for a tragically brief period of slimming, Hudson never left his house, unable for years to rise from his specially-constructed bed. He was sustained in this stasis by a high-tech personal existenzminimum of computer and television, toilet and refrigerator. With a Big Mac in one hand and the TV remote control in the other, Hudson led his contracted life. His size, however, is central to his status as post-electronic proletarian. His huge heft was, after all, both the medium of his imrnobiliiy his home-bound invisibility_and, ironically, the reason for his celebrity, for his public visibility. Like our cities, Hudson is clearly transitional, evoking both old and new strategies of visuality, of ways of being and of being seen in space. On the one hand, his baroque corpulence_his achievement_speaks of historic routines, of spatiality. Hudson's distinction was, after all, precisely to have occupied more space than anyone in history. But if this excess celebrates an antique volumetric spatiality, Walter Hudson's celebrity is entirely post-spatial: pure mediation, framed (if barely) in televisual space. There is something deeply poignant_even bracing_in this spectacle: Hudson's unsettling intermediacy was not simply nostalgia, but a kind of resistance. In spite of culture's continuous incitements to take up less space, Hudson took up more and more, and thereby sited the real risk: in a disembodying system, being huge becomes almost revolutionary. Indeed, if the virtual city offers a threat, after all, it is not simply to the hoary historicity of 4000 years of city-building. Such virtuality puts the character of other subjectivity at risk by its radical resituation of the body. If the city becomes completely neuralized, if both the ritual and accidental pleasures of literal propinquity are obliterated, hard-won notions of democracy are cast into doubt. Any mediation, whether by apparatus, regulation, or mere extent, holds the possibility of compromising free association. One of the most striking and ironic features of this fundamentally paranoid condition is that the most nominally enfranchised members of the electronic public are those willing to submit to the most draconian froms of surveillance. To participate fully in the electronic city requires a remarkable surrender of privacy, to have virtually all of ones activities recorded, correlated, and made available to an enormous invisible government of shadowy credit agencies, back-office computer banks, market research establishments, private security companies, advertisers, data-base gatherers, and endless media connections. Whip out your Amex card, and we know where you are. Turn on your home security system, and we know you've left. Order a special meal, and we know there's a non-smoking Muslim in seat 3K. The ultimate consequence of all of this is that the body no longer simply exists in public space, but actually becomes it. In the virtual city, Walter Hudson is the Piazza Navona. Electronic space is a great collapser of difference, producing a maelstrom of bits, the Cartesian space of TV, an infinite and recombinant juxtaposition engine. In this system, no two images are incompatible. Mass graves in Bosnia are brought to you by Beasty-Feast Gourmet Cat Food. Nothing wrong with juxtaposing things, it's just that the system is only interested in numbers. The urban model this produces is, of course, the theme park, television made concrete. Walt Disney, our last true visionary of physical space, was a kind of surrealist Tito, combining cartoon nationality into viable creative geographical aggregation. And it's hard to know whether to resist the fun. Watching the former Yugoslavia degenerate into a dark Disneyland of dumb differences, sensitive souls must be drawn to the sweet repressions of the consumer drug, anything to distract these barbarians from their blood, to chill them out with an immobilizing, numbing sameness that would, at least, keep them in front of their sets. This condition reflects a crisis both for the city, and for democracy itself. As we move to the inevitability of a pluralist world in which patterns of mobility and simultaneity become ever freer, and a new condition of mutability must characterize urban life, the monadic Modernist model, the formula of the endless grid whichsignifies simply the democratic right of all citizens to surrender everything which distinguishes them, to melt together in the pot of sameness of the universal subject, new models of democratic relations, models of deep complexity and new tractability, must emerge. Electronic space has the power either to aid this proces, or to frustrate it. We are, I believe, potentially the last generation that will enjoy real non-virtual subjectivity, the kinds of familiar body measures which enable the city as we've known it. I, for one, am unwilling to cash in the power and pleasure of such spaces until it's clear that the alternative is more fun, safe, and stimulating. Or that it will be simply a supplement, an enlargement of possibilities. The Internet also has the power to bring people together, to thwart stuctures of control, to make unimagined connections. Cities are also juxtaposition engines, instruments for both producing and adjudicating adjacencies. The character of cities emerges from the characteristic ways in which they solve the problems of keeping things together or apart, whether socially or formally. Racial or class segregation; use zoning that locates work far from living; height restrictions and solar access guarantees; mandated materiality; the siting of highways; a preference for gardens_all of these taken together yield the particularity of cities. On the other hand, this is also a point of incredible promise. As old constraints on adjacency are loosened, as time and space become graspable in new ways, as any place can truly be any place, our position as designers is liberated. If juxtaposition can really be free, then we are also free to reimagine the basic structures of urbanism according to tests which respond to our best attempts at reason: democracy, sustainabiliy, and pleasure.We are in a position to reconsider cities fundamentally. Caroline stares at the piece of mahogany spinning on her lathe. The order is for a thousand legs and the deadline is tomorrow. Because Margalit_who has designed the tables and is making the tops_is obsessed with variation, each leg must be different, and Caroline is making the variations by hand, even though the lathe is sufficiently programmable to produce its own variation algorithims. Caroline wants her impress on each piece, and Margalit herself is adamant about the unmistakability of a "Caroline Curve," as she calls them. Knowing that Abbott and Ramon will be arriving in a couple of hours with the drey-horse, Fred, and the wagon to take the legs the mile to Margalit in Nimbus Nabe, she puts her mask back on and redoubles her efforts. The Mahogany for the legs has come from Weed's forests and has been genetically altered to grow in the c1imate and soil of the desert. Over the past years, the area given over to mahogany cultivation has greatly increased, as demand for unendangered hardwoods has risen, and as Weed's reputation as a source of fine wooden products has grown. Still, supplies are limited_although the genetic engineers have succeeded in making the trees grow nearby, they have not managed to make them grow any faster. Most of the tab1es have already been sold, Margalit's reputation being what it is, and their distribution will be global. Because Margalit's workshop is relatively small, the tables will have to be rippled out. Every morning, a large "C" container (or a mix of smaller "A"s and "B"s) will arrive via the Goodsnet at the workshop, ready to be loaded up with tables. The pliant, corrugated, celluplastic box, with its bright holographic encoding patch, will rise slowly from Subterranea and its sides will roll back for loading. Twenty or thirty tab1es, wrapped in straw mats, will be loaded in, the routing patch programmed, and the container will slip back down for the quick trip to the goods Interrmode. With the exception of the stowaway checkers, the G.I. is fully automated. The checkers insure not only that the occasional cat or dog which has fallen asleep in the container is removed, but that children and bargain-seeking travellers are detected. When the system was first up and running, this problem had not been anticipated. Although computers had detected unexplained weight anomalies in certain loaded containers, this was thought to be a software glitch, until a teenage boy was found almost frozen to death after a transpacific flight in a container full of pottery. Years later... Long after we'd moved, we met the architect who had designed the building where we'd lived during childhood. She was quite elederly but altogether 1ucid, and recalled the great technical difficulties she'd had working out the complex solar access requirements on a site that was, even then, hemmed in by neighboring structures. And she told us about searching for just the right greenish stone to respond to the marble Montessori school across the street. We learned that the idea of carving the names of the tenants into the walls of the vestibule had been hers, and she was, in turn, delighted to find out that, having run out of space, the roster was now continued up the front stairway...

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