First Call: 4th International Symposium "Global Village" - 1999
"The Global City and the
Global Village -
The function of telematics
in local empowerment"
The first three international Global Village Symposia in Vienna 1993 - 97 have opened a space of discussion between the aspects of the physical and the aspects of the virtual in the development of our future living spaces. "Global Village" has been used as a synonym for the enrichment and augmentation that might occur if we consider large and small cities and villages part of a network rather than isolated entities. Clearly centered around sustainable city building principles (pedestrian orientation, high diversity, short distances, optimum size), the visions and models presented in the Global Village process contained a wealth of diversity; there were highly "urban" and higly "rural" schemes, and Global Village always sought to demonstrate that only through diversity and creativity the evolution alongside the mentioned principles can succeed.
The visual image, the composition of realistic phantasies, plays a decisive role in promoting the larger agenda of sustainable development; only if authentic dreams can fuel the imagination and the expectation, we will be able to succeed to change the urban environment in sufficient speed.
But as important as the wholistic vision is the discussion of the functional elements of the telematically enhanced living spaces. Global Village goes beyond the details of telework, telemedicine, distance education - it builds on these new tools and tries to rather ask about the details of a "social operating system" of such a connectedness between "front ends" composed under local power on one side and global networks on the other side.
We see just the beginning of entirely new areas of conflict when cities begin suddenly to become aware of the importance of their own telematic infrastructure, in opposition or in harmony with the plans of global corporate players to so-to-say network every household. We see enourmous potentials which can become synergetic and empowering, they also can become redundant and disempowering. Only if the city considers itself as an enterprise and global corporate players support these entrepreneurial function of an urban service cluster, real synergies will be found.
The fourth international
symposium Global Village suggests a perspective, where Global Cities
are considered such clusters of know-how and services whose delivery enables
others to succeed in a productive localisation, a dramatical decrease in
living costs and a much better use of local resources. This opens
the possibility to a new cooperation between urban and rural areas, not
only between the cities themselves. The market for these types of knowledge
and tools might be bigger than anything that helped building the market
economy, ironically because fewer and fewer players are needed and absorbed
in the global marketplace - delivering enourmous productivity to new types
of self-sustaining local economies.
archology in the forests by Richard Register, Berkeley