The virtualization of urban functions

Info-telematic technology is producing a new urban dimension : the digital city. Information represents by now the new good for urban economy : the city produces, elaborates and transfers information. Many of the functional Urban processes are progressively organizing themselves on such model. This means that in a few time, a lot of urban functions (finance, commerce, health, administration, etc.) mil be transferred by the real dimension to the digital one. Many of face-to-face relationships, once essential forgetting service, will be transformed in the meeting of telematic flows that will replace large part of the urban mobility. If the city can be thought as a complex system, formed by a physical and a functional sub-system the change in action is firstly acting on this last sub-system by priming a process of modifying the urban activities (trading, financing administration, etc.) into virtual activities (virtualization of urban Junctions). The new order of the city needs the definition of new interpretative models and new procedures to measure this change. The physical and functional city will need at all managerial and town planning actions totally different from those currently carried out. It is necessary to think about new ‘rules” for the city in changing. Urban planners bave a natural difficulty to manage with this type of matters and to envisage a system to manage the virtual dimension of the city. If we don't adopt such different optics it will not be succeeded in checking the new phenomena of urban modernization. Furthermore, it will be lost a possibility to orient the urban system toward new more qualitative levels. Starting from such considerations the paper tries to put focus on the following topics : 1. an updating of the urban interpretative models that allows to effectively explain the actual evolutionary phase of the city ; 2. the definition of methods that allows to measure the «virtualization » level of the different parts of the city to be able to manage urban transformations ; 3. the envisage of a new process of town planning considering interaction among the component subsystems of the city (physical, functional, perceptive and communicative).Fistola Romano, La Rocca Rosa Anna. The virtualization of urban functions. In: NETCOM : Réseaux, communication et territoires / Networks and Communication Studies, vol. 15 n°1-2, september 2001. Geocyberspace: building territories on the geographical space of the 21th century (I) pp. 39-48