A city revised: representing or recreating the urban space as a polygon experience - a discussion of the case of virtual Turku

The Internet has provided a new means to represent urban space. The development of modelling languages,like VRML, has given us the tools to recreate urban locations on the net. In this paper, the virtual image ofTurku, a city located in Southwest Finland is discussed. My approach is twofold. Firstly, I focus on the “official” city web-page and its two dimensional textual appearance. This constitutes the essence of virtualcity as “public” project. Secondly, there is a challenging new field that combines aspects from computersciences, urban studies and Internet research. This refers to three-dimensional city models that are used torepresent an exact copy of the material space of cities. The analysis is based on interpretation of interviewsand contents of the two site structures. The following conclusions are proposed. The mission of a virtualpublic city is twofold: it is a local project, purposed to build a new and efficient medium to connect theadministration and citizens, and it is also a global/national project, a medium of advertising and givingknowledge of the tourist possibilities and attractions. On the other hand, the private virtual city project isbased on potential future incomes. It is a means of gaining profit via expanding possibilities provided by ecommerce