gapingvoid: cities are dead?

gapingvoid: cities are dead?: "Steve Fassman makes an interesting point in the comments of my latest Paris post:

Cities are dead.

With the internet the prime reason for the existence of cities is gone. Cities exist to make it easier to talk to other people to conduct business. The Internet has taken on that mantle and you can have your conversations between basically anyone, anywhere.

I fear that the great cities like Paris will not be able to keep up with the times.

I can relate to this certainly, though I think cities will be with us for a long while yet. Just that now there's a new game in town, and cities will have to get used to competing more with other viable alternatives. Being stuck in the boonies is no longer the life sentence it once was. And perhaps living in the city will no longer offer the obvious economic advantages over staying down on the farm.

Before we see the decline of the cities, though, I think we'll see the decline of the skyscaper, for similar reasons we saw the decline of the battleship in the 1940s, in favor of the aircraft carrier. Limiting firepower, even massive firepower to a single delivery locus is an inefficient way to do it.

So suddenly we see the internet replacing the elevator..."

This is interesting. I grew up in Houston, a city of 4 million confused Texans. Then in high school I moved to Nazareth, PA. (I now live in Denver, CO.) Let's compare those two locations.

Houston:
4,000,000 people
* Hispanic (37.4%)
* White Non-Hispanic (30.8%)
* Black (25.3%)
* Other race (16.5%)
* Two or more races (3.1%)
* Vietnamese (1.7%)
* Chinese (1.2%)
* Asian Indian (1.0%)
* American Indian (0.8%)
* Other Asian (0.6%)

Nazareth:
6,000 people
* White Non-Hispanic (97.8%)
* Hispanic (0.9%)
* Black (0.5%)

Think there was a little culture shock?

But what if it doesn't matter where you live? One of the most attractive things about writing to me is that it's location independent. I can write here in Denver, my writing partner can write in Wichita, Kansas, and I can move to Canada or New Zealand and continue writing just like I did here in the US. I listened to an interesting podcast recently about "digital migrant workers", using as an example the Americans that moved from LA to Wellington for four years to work on Lord of the Rings. Writers differ in that we don't have to follow the work and we don't have to stay put, either. We carry the work with us, literally in the case of writing with mobile technology.