The Electronic Architecture Of Community

Much has been made about how the Internet can be an isolating experience. Robert Kraut in his landmark "Homenet" study of Internet users found that Internet use can detach us from our neighbors, leaving us content to connect with virtual neighbors from around the world. According to this line of thinking, there may be nice new urbanism porches out front, but we are all ensconced in our dens emailing away to our far-flung comrades.

Understated in this and related "geography of nowhere" analyses is that the range of Internet use in communities is at least in part a planning and design choice. To be sure, the default design, delivered by your local telephone or cable provider, is one that has little or no community connection. Such connections are not a central part of the prevailing business model for connectivity. As one provider recently noted to me, "it's amazing how much time and energy we spend trying to push premium entertainment channels down those pipes."

But there is another business model, one that I would term the "ubiquity" model. Rather than looking to sign up some market share for HBO, it would instead look to achieve widespread use. There are early examples of this model in greenfield developments (e.g. DC Ranch in Arizona), where everyone has access to a high speed network and community intranet at a very competitive price. Preliminary research on community intranets, such as has been done by Barry Wellman and Keith Hampton of the University of Toronto, provides positive evidence that such networks increase social connections, and related research that my colleague Anita Blanchard and I have done also document how cultural community networks can also reinforce place-based communities.

The challenge for most communities is how to intervene in these circumstances to create a digital architecture that more closely accommodates their community goals. While several towns, particularly university towns (e.g. Boulder, Davis), have community networks, for many communities it is the local school system that has quietly become the big-pipe civic provider. Fueled by a $2 billion per year federal e-rate program, school districts around the country have been upgrading their infrastructure. I would argue that schools now represent not only an important cornerstone of our civic architecture in a physical sense, but in an electronic sense as well. This presence is especially central in small communities, such as in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, where the school district has played an important role in developing a community-wide high-speed network.

While the fragmented nature of local telecommunications planning allows different entities to proceed at each's own pace (schools can march ahead wiring their buildings while City Hall wrangles with the cable franchise provisions), what is lost is the economies of scale for a ubiquitous high-speed network and an architecture of connectivity that integrates local civic functions such as education. Similar to other "silo" planning omissions, the time is now right to form new community-based partnerships with school districts and other civic entities to create more wired learning communities that connect communities and avoid the cyber-isolation that researchers decry.

Dr. Horan is Associate Professor at the School of Information Science, and Executive Director, Claremont Information and Technology Institute, Claremont Graduate University. His recent book, Digital Places: Building Our City of Bits (Urban Land Institute, 2000) analyzes the impact of digital technology on community and urban design. Additional information on his research can be found at ULI's Digital Places and Dr. Horan's website.