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Picking up where his best-selling City of Bits left off, Mitchell argues that we must extend the definitions of architecture and urban design to encompass virtual places as well as physical ones, and interconnection by means of telecommunication links as well as by pedestrian circulation and mechanized transportation systems. He proposes strategies for the creation of cities that not only will be sustainable but will make economic, social, and cultural sense in an electronically interconnected world. The new settlement patterns of the twenty-first century, he argues, will be characterized by live/work dwellings, twenty-four-hour pedestrian-scale neighborhoods rich in social relationships and vigorous local community life, complemented by far-flung configurations of electronic meeting places and decentralized production, marketing, and distributing systems. Neither digiphile nor digiphobe, Mitchell advocates the creation of e-topias-cities that work smarter, not harder.

William J. Mitchell is Dean of the Department of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is the author of City of Bits, The Reconfigured Eye, and The Logic of Architecture and the coauthor of The Poetics of Gardens.