President Bush monitors Hurricane Katrina’s path towards New Orleans in 2005. By using teletechnology, Bush was able to supervise the hurricane’s progress from his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Photo courtesy Justin Harter.

This example is particularly apt because Louisiana is the kind of state that is especially well-suited to illustrate telecommunity thinking: it must prepare for disasters while ensuring the distinctiveness of place that is essential to tourism and economic competitiveness—needs that are served well by telecommunity. Louisiana’s socio-political diversity also suits telecommunity principles. Growing evidence suggests that a social advantage of teletechnology is its inclusiveness: it can empower community development players who were previously marginalized. This occurs partly by leveling the playing field with communications tools via which rural or other remotely located participants can take part as equals with those situated at the heart of the political action and partly by placing a value on information itself, from whatever source.

Sixth, because the La Plata project is geared toward the infrastructural development of greater Washington, DC, it has great interest for students of major metropolitan center management. Thomas J. Lockwood, the Department of Homeland Security's Director of National Capital Region Coordination, sees connections between telecommunity and the work of economist Richard Florida ("The Rise of the Creative Class", et al), which views urban growth as fueled by the creation of organic, industry-specific communities of co-workers enjoying access to many lifestyle choices. Aris Melissaratos, Maryland’s Secretary of Business and Economic Development, supports telecommunity not only from the standpoint of his state's economic interests, but also because he regards it is as a valuable development tool for the greater Washington, DC metropolitan area. A key telecommunity premise is that it is good for cities. The internet is global, but its infrastructural support is based in cities, whose competitiveness is increasingly linked to teletechnological capability. A virtual economy requires strongly defined and well-equipped physical locations.

Seventh, telecommunity is shaping the kinds of buildings cities will have in the future. Large companies and government agencies have traditionally maintained urban "people warehouses": head offices with large staffs. But a telecommunity requires only key people in head offices, which now assume a more symbolic role. According to management scholar Charles Handy, the office of the future will resemble a clubhouse, with rooms reserved for activities, not particular people. Also affected are the sites on which teletech-sensitive buildings are built. The National Association of Realtors’ new US$46 million tower on Capitol Hill arose on a site identified by telecommunity research. Skeptics long saw the relatively tiny (8,284 square feet), narrow, and unusually shaped location as commercially undevelopable. Technology-based studies of office building evolution indicated otherwise. Two similar projects have now been proposed to the National Capital Revitalization Corporation.

The Global Urban Net

To understand why teletechnology encourages community dispersal yet continues to coalesce in cities, it is important to realize that internet technology is not an ex nihilo phenomenon. It is a cumulative product of not only technological but also politico-economic history, a fact often overlooked by technology analysts who prefer to focus on hardware innovations. The evolution of global financial infrastructures has provided the scaffolding that makes transnational technology possible. Many people think of teletechnological infrastructure simplistically as a system of computer connections—it is much more.

The internet is a physical system, but the World Wide Web is a community of interlinked units of intellectual property. Both depend on a complex architecture of voluntary contracts and shared protocols subscribed to by exchangers of information traffic (for example, so-called peering agreements). In the early stages of internet development these contracts were informal, trust-driven relationships; they are now mostly formal agreements between participants around the world. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees the allocation of unique internet identifiers like domain names, has an international board. The platform on which global telecommunity capability rests is a socio-political infrastructure based on cooperation between the major cities of the world—an "urban net"—without which the physical infrastructure couldn't operate.

The system of global politico-economic agreements that links the world's major urban communities, making possible orderly global trade, academic, professional, technological, and many other types of cooperation, developed over centuries but made a quantum leap in the 20th century. This is not only of historical interest; it is crucial to how cities function now and how they are evolving. The Bretton Woods conference in 1944 was a watershed for the integration of world financial centers into a global infrastructure, including regulatory treaties like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). This regulatory infrastructure, a cousin of the mesh of agreements and protocols underlying the internet, is an inter-urban construct enabling world financial centers to trade.

A co-drafter of one of the treaties related to GATT, Gordon J. Cloney, heads the international insurance program of Washington, DC's Department of Insurance, Securities, and Banking, where he is responsible for cooperation between the US capital and other global financial centers. Insurance, of course, is a fundamental element of all global financial trade. Cloney points out that although the insurance industry has for years now been liberalizing its global trade, it has simultaneously been building new international structures for regulatory cooperation. As world trade grows freer, contractual infrastructures between global cities become denser. This facilitated the creation of inter-urban teletechnology, which is now in turn enabling information to be exchanged between urban communities at unprecedented and increasing speed across both regional and international borders, reinforcing the urban net anew.

A New Urban Order in the Making

In short, a new global urban order is being shaped by the growth of teletechnology. This process encompasses the development of telecommunities as a leading-edge phenomenon, the technological connection of regional and global urban interests, and the mutual reinforcement of technological and socio-economic infrastructures. Two major points for urban analysts emerge: one immediate and practical, the other theoretical, slower-moving, but far-reaching. On the practical level, teletechnology is part of the evolution of the urban net—a global community of cities distinct from countries—and will rapidly increase the ability of global cities to create inter-urban infrastructures separate from traditional nation-to-nation infrastructures.

Saskia Sassen is credited with coining the term "global city" to denote a city which, because of its power and other characteristics, relates to similar cities in other countries more strongly than to the rest of its own country. A good current example of this is Hong Kong. A British Crown Colony from 1843 until its government was ceded to the People's Republic of China in 1997, Hong Kong continues to conduct a liberal capitalist economy. The People's Republic has agreed to allow the city effective autonomy until 2047 in all matters except defense and foreign relations. Since Hong Kong is one of the world's major centers of capitalist enterprise, however, maintaining its own judicial structure, envoys to important global institutions, customs protocols, and immigration regulations, it is hard not to see it as effectively conducting a vigorous de facto foreign relations apparatus. Now that they are being empowered even further by teletechnology, global cities can be expected to increase their cooperation and their formation of a transnational realm of intercity cooperation. We will see more initiatives like the Cities Alliance, a global coalition of cities jointly organized by the World Bank and the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat). As urban teletechnology use increases, cities will use telecommunity tools increasingly in designing their infrastructures and managing their relationships with regions and outlying communities.