Cyborg Agonistes: Disaster and Reconstruction in the Digital Electronic Era

Palma Nova near Venice, with its famous star-shaped fortifications, is a city of two tales. You can read complementary narratives from the plan. One tale is of enclosure. The walls, as in other ancient, medieval, and Renaissance cities, protected the concentrations of assets and settled populations within from nomadic bandits and mobile armies without. In addition, as Lewis Mumford cogently put it, “[T]he power of massed numbers in itself gave the city a superiority over the thinly populated widely scattered villages, and served as an incentive to further growth.” Density and defended walls provided safety, economic vitality, and long-term resilience. At the extreme, under siege, the gates were closed, soldiers manned the battlements, and the city became selfcontained for the duration. To attack it, one needed some technology to breach the defensive perimeter—Joshua’s trumpet, Achilles’ wooden horse, Francesco di Giorgio’s tunnel beneath the walls of Castel Nuovo, a battering ram, or a siege engine. The second tale is of connection. The central piazza, surrounded by public buildings, is both the focus of the internal street network and the local hub of a road network that extends through the gates and out into the countryside, linking the city to others. The piazza is—like the server of a local Internet service provider (ISP)—a node at which nearby and larger communities are connected. When the gates are open, the city functions as a crossroads rather than as a sealed enclosure, a place of interaction rather than one of exclusion. Urban history is, from one perspective, a struggle of these narratives for dominance. Eventually, the network won. Mumford associated this victory with the rise of capitalism—a new constellation of economic forces that “favored expansion and dispersal in every direction, from overseas colonization to the building up of new industries, whose technological improvements simply canceled out all medieval restrictions.” For cities, “[T]he demolition of their urban walls was both practical and symbolic.” Superficially, modern Manhattan resembles a scaled-up version of Palma Nova; it is a regularized street grid, surrounded by water, and accessed by a limited number of bridges and tunnels.