Urbanism is one of those buzz words that architects and urban designers love to use.  While its definition is up for debate, typically it implies a living condition where density is such that anonymous citizens share responsibility for a particular area.  This transforms citizens into residents, and areas into neighborhoods.  Jane Jacobs’ book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” perhaps did more for this definition of urbanism than anyone else.  Jacobs describes urban communities that are bottom-up, informal, and highly temporal in nature.  They organize and disband according to shared interests in the future of their physical location (eg, in the security of the neighborhood, or its real estate development), without requiring any more formal social network than shared physical location.  However, the protocols that structure the relationship between the social network and physical location are highly particular, especially when translated into a network vocabulary:  “nodes” must be spaced evenly to produce consistent eyes on the street, the environment that supports nodal reorganization must be of an adequate scale/density to ensure contact, mixed-use of the same space, etc. 

As technology has allowed social networks to become forged through digital communication as well as physical communication, the protocols that produce urbanism have changed dramatically.  Less dependent on physical location to produce density, terms like “digital urbanism” and “web urbanism” have entered the urban design lexicon.  These new protocols that produce hybrid digital/physical urbanism are only beginning to be unpacked and researched.  However, as evidenced by these two articles, front-runners in these fields are quick to legitimize their work by citing the same principles of urbanism that were central to Jacobs’ research.  Fundamental to both physical and digital urbanism is place (either physical public space or the website as a space) acting as a glue that juxtaposes seemingly unrelated information.  When this connection is made, the protocols that structure digital urbanism can be unpacked through the same network vocabulary that applied to social networking in physical space:  “nodes” must share a common home space, the environment that supports nodal reorganization must ensure contact among nodes, a diversity of nodes with access to different information should share the same space, etc.

http://lessig.org/blog/2006/05/tribute_to_jane_jacobs.html

http://archrecord.construction.com/archrecord2/design/june03/liftin.asp