The environment, as modified and created by people, is largely about the use of information, its generation and exchange. How do recent innovations in the technologies of information management and communication affect our use of space and place, and the way we perceive and think about our surroundings?
This volume provides an international, exploratory forum for the complex phenomenon of new information and communication technology as it permeates and transforms our physical world, and our relation to it: the architectural definition of our surrounding, geographical space, urban form and immediate habitats. This book is a reader, an attempt at registering disciplinary changes in context, at tracing subtexts for which most mainstream disciplines have no established language. The project is to give voice to an emerging meta-discipline that has its logic across the specializations.
A wide range of professionals and academics report findings, views and ideas. Together, they describe the architecture of a postmodern paradigm: how swiftly mutating the proliferating technology applications have begun to interact with the construction and reading of physical space in architecture, economics, geography, history, planning, social sciences, transport, visual art - but also in the newer domains that have joined this spectrum through the very nature of their impacts: information technology and telecommunications.
The space navigated in this volume is vast, both in physical terms and in its virtual and analogous form. It ranges from the space that immediately encompasses, or is simulated to encompass, the human body - as in buildings and virtual tectonics - to that of towns and regions. We stay clear of molecular-scale space, and of dimensions that are larger than earth.
Professor Droege directs the Liechtenstein Institute for Strategic Development, and is President, Eurosolar and General Chairman, World Council for Renewable Energy. He initiated the Chair for Sustainable Spatial Development at the University of Liechtenstein while holding a Conjoint Professorship at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Newcastle, Australia. An inaugural member of the Zayed Future Energy Prize jury and Expert Commissioner at the World Future Council he served on the Steering Committee of the Urban Climate Change Research Network at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and CUNY. He taught and researched at MIT, held an Endowed Chair in Urban Engineering at at Tokyo University’s Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, and Chair of Urban Design at Sydney University. He has authored/edited eight books.
