From the City of Bits to E-Topia

Mitchell’s book on the City of Bits, sets out a vision of urban life literally done to bits, left fragmented and in danger of coming unstuck. His next book e-topia, provides the counter-point to this vision of urban life as ungovernable and scenario where the city is no longer left in bits and pieces, but a place where it ‘all comes together’. As Mitchell states in Me++: the Cyborg Self and the Networked City, all this ‘coming together’ is now possible because the trial separation of bits and atoms is over and the dissolution of the boundaries between virtual and physical space makes citizenship worth playing for. The landscape which this chapter uncovers is different for the reason it reveals the middle ground between the ‘high-level’ issues surrounding e-topia and those lying at the ‘grass roots’ level of me ++ the cyborg-self. For it is here with the likes of Graham and Marvin, Laclau and Mouffe and Zizek, that questions about the (radical) liberal democracy underlying the ‘city of bits’ and supporting the global strategy of ‘e-topia’ as the ‘me++ of the cyborg self’, get ‘bottomed out’ as the citizenship, community and governance of the digitally-inclusive regeneration thesis.