Imagining Cyber-Communities

Some see a sort of competition between residential areas and countryside when it comes to the "best land". The glorious reality of my cyber-communities is that they could be built on landfill and they would still work. All a cyber community needs is a square mile. Depending on the political state of affairs, it will either be built with serious security in mind or with a degree of openness to the surrounding countryside - or more likely the surrounding sprawl or sprawl residue.

The setting of a cyber community should defer to the availability of lovely land to surround it. It can occupy a declivity, a valley, anything that suggests a degree of protection, since we would wish a cyber-community to withstand most extreme weather without a whimper. That said, we do not build cyber communities next to water or in tornado alleys or anywhere else that extreme weather is predictable. And if and when we build them our suggestive existing model for such a community is a stadium-like structure which may even have a retractable roof or some equivalent both to protect one from deluge and to capture the precious falling drops and process them for human use.




The image above is not my idea of anything but the general
size and heft of a cyber-community. It suggests a matrix
which holds and supports the modular elements which
enclose spaces within the community. It suggests the height,
the walkability within its precincts, And one can readily
infer that 5000-10,000 could live in such spaces and have
plenty of room for other spaces and areas which would
provide any community anywhere with all the institutions
and amenities we associate with urbanity, with the city. 
Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes