Archinect - News

Bjarke Ingels talks Bhutan smart city development with CBS' '60 Minutes'

2024-11-18T14:09:00-05:00

"If we succeed, we can show that you can create a city that does not displace nature, that is anchored and rooted in the local heritage and culture, and that still allows for prosperity and growth to happen."

The ever-popular Ingels sat down with Lesley Stahl to go over his team's vision for the project they first unveiled with Arup almost a year ago. The 386-square-mile master plan's design features many public buildings and other important infrastructure that double as bridges, unfolding in the shape of a Mandala flower, which hosts 11 neighborhood-scale developments rendered with increased density as they cascade in ribbons down to a low-lying southern terminus.

Bhutan, a nation of under 800,000 people, is struggling to retain skilled young professionals. A public bond campaign worth $100 million USD has just been launched for the project. According to the South China Morning Post and other outlets, the new 'Gelephu Mindfulness City' will be developed in phases over 21 years.

Zaha Hadid Architects previews Discovery City master plan for southern Malaysia

2024-08-26T12:22:00-04:00

The first project from Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) in Malaysia will be a master-planned Discovery City located within the Ibrahim Technolopolis (or IBTEC), a new 7,290-acre smart city in the southern state of Johor. While design details of the firm’s 582-acre contribution won’t be put forth in full until 2025, its initial announcement includes particulars such as a centerpiece cultural center (valued at appx. $62 million) and plans for strategies for renewable energy and water infrastructure. The project's total value is equal to about $6.2 billion USD.

Image courtesy Zaha Hadid Architects

Foster + Partners, Sasaki, and actor Idris Elba float plans for a 'smart city' island development in Sierra Leone

2024-03-19T13:34:00-04:00

Foster + Partners is working on a new smart city design with actor Idris Elba for a coastal island off the shores of Sierra Leone. The news was reported by the BBC on Sunday, when the plan was revealed for the first time after five years of planning.

Sasaki Associates will collaborate with the firm, Elba, and his business partners at the Sherbro Alliance Partners (or SAP). Their plan is to preserve nature areas on the 230-square-mile Sherbro Island (which has roughly ten times the land area as Manhattan) while enacting a new "eco-city" capable of supporting up to one million residents.

The outlet reports the project is to be financed through a public-private partnership and that the island will "be designated a special economic zone with a separate legal and economic system from the rest of Sierra Leone." Some online commentators have compared it to Disney World, the crypto-funded Akon City in Senegal, or the new planned community in Northern California that’s backed by a group of...

University of Miami's School of Architecture to design smart 'Silica City' concept for booming Guyana

2023-12-12T11:53:00-05:00

The University of Miami School of Architecture has announced its participation in a master planning project that will help develop a smart city in the capital region of Guyana, South America.

Both students and faculty from the school will join with others in UM’s Advanced Study of the Americas program, Herbert Business School, School of Nursing and Health Studies, and Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science to realize the project, which leverages their expertise in the fields of resilient design, sustainable architecture, climate science, nature systems, technology, and more.

'Silica City' is an 11,000-acre planned community of 60,000 people near the Guyana International Airport with residential plots, a city center, an 'Innovation Village' area, and AI-bolstered infrastructure. Preliminary design work has already begun via a new 12-student studio that was taught in the fall by former School of Architecture dean Jose A. Gelabert-Navia, who said: “You cannot devel...

SOM reveals plans for 100,000-person Sultan Haitham smart city in Oman

2023-08-23T14:53:00-04:00

A new plan for a proposed smart city in Oman has been released by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) in advance of the project’s anticipated construction start next year.

The 14.8 million-square-meter Sultan Haitham City is located west of the country’s capital, Muscat, and will accommodate 100,000 people with a total of 20,000 units of housing and climate-resilient naturalistic elements developed around twelve core aims of creating an experience that is "affordable, safe, compact, accessible, comfortable, robust, efficient, circular, healthy, smart, and lovable."

The project is part of the larger Vision 2040 initiative, which has, to date, seen the construction of the world’s largest 3D printed building made with real concrete. The development will begin with the construction of six neighborhoods around a 1.9-square-mile central core and later spread out along a 4.6-mile stretch until completion in 2045. SOM’s Managing Director Thomas Behr says it "provides a new model for sustainabl...

NEOM announces plans for new man-made island development called Oxagon

2022-12-22T16:42:00-05:00

Plans for a new floating city design that’s part of the NEOM project in Saudi Arabia have been revealed recently, offering a glimpse at the Gulf state’s full vision for a megadevelopment program that includes Trojena ski resort, an artificial island called Sindalah, and centerpiece 110-mile-long smart city dubbed The Line.

The ‘Oxagon’ as it is so-named, is formed by a series of floating squares connected by a network of canals and will contain factories and logistics centers along with housing accommodations for up to 90,000 residents by the time it is completed in 2030. It is strategically located in proximity to the Suez Canal in order to give the country an enhanced position within the global supply chain

Image courtesy NEOM

According to a press release: “At Oxagon’s core will be the adoption of the most advanced technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), human-machine fusion, artificial and predictive intelligence, and robotics, all of which are coupled to a network of f...

Abu Dhabi unveils emirate-wide digital twin project

2022-10-19T09:00:00-04:00

Abu Dhabi’s Department of Municipalities and Transport (DMT) has announced the launch of a digital twin project, a first-of-its-kind initiative for the emirate capital.

The undertaking was unveiled during GITEX Technology Week, a tech and startup event held in the Dubai World Trade Center, which ended last week. The project will integrate a range of advanced technology, including aerial photography, LiDAR scanning, and game engines to create an accurate digital copy of Abu Dhabi, supporting the work of planners, engineers, and specialists from the public and private sectors. The aim is to simulate changes to the city’s built environment in 3D and evaluate vast amounts of data. For example, spatial analysis tools will assist in analyzing the impacts of various urban planning scenarios.

The emirate’s buildings, infrastructure, and even interior spaces will be made virtual to improve planning a...

XZero City is Kuwait's contribution to the smart city movement

2022-09-02T12:46:00-04:00

A Dubai-based developer named URB has entered the fray of futuristic community planning in the region after publishing plans for XZero City, a pedestrian-friendly, net-zero carbon community it says will eventually grow to accommodate up to 100,000 people.

Billed as a “new paradigm in green urban living,” the car-free city will spread out over a 16-square-kilometer (6-square-mile) swath in the southern Kuwaiti desert connected by a resilient landscape which serves as the “social glue” to self-sustaining homesteaders occupying one of its initial 30,000 modular residences.

Image courtesy URB

By separating the development into different Commercial, Medical, and Educational hubs, URB says it hopes to provide a high quality of life powered by advanced renewable energy technologies, fed by biosaline agricultural produce and vertical farms, and enhanced by an equestrian track, a nature conservation center, and other attractions marketed vaguely as “edutainment.”

Image courtesy URB

An ecotour...

The Line, the largest part of Saudi Arabia’s ambitious NEOM project, looks like a total fantasy

2022-07-29T08:30:00-04:00

A clearer picture of Saudi Arabia’s mind-blowing NEOM megaproject is coming together after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s office unveiled plans for an elevated 170-kilometer (105 miles) long linear city called The Line that he says will eventually house more than 9 million people.

According to the Saudi government, The Line will “embody how urban communities will be in the future in an environment free from roads, cars, and emissions.” It is designed to run 100% on renewables and prioritize individual health and well-being while helping the state preserve some 95% of NEOM’s total existing land. The development will be confined to a 34-square-kilometer (13.1-square-mile) footprint to reduce infrastructure encroachment into nature.

Image courtesy of NEOM

The Line comes complete with a high-speed rail system capable of transporting riders from end to end in the development within 20 minutes. The rest of the habitation’s layout will be based on the principles of a concept called "Zer...

Considering the Quayside failure as proof futuristic Smart Cities may be a thing of the past

2022-06-30T18:16:00-04:00

Smart city technology should do things like shorten commute times, speed the construction of affordable housing, improve the efficiency of public transit, and reduce carbon emissions by making building technology more efficient and providing less polluting transportation alternatives to the car. But often its proponents focus on what it can do rather than what it should. If Sidewalk’s Quayside failure taught us anything, it’s that these technologies need to respond better to human needs.

The MIT Technology Review took a dive into the abandoned pre-pandemic conversion of Toronto’s 12-acre Quayside waterfront plot into an elaborate “Smart City” development by the hands of Sidewalk Labs. The revitalization was recently repackaged as a mixed-use green corridor concept to be overseen by Adjaye Associates, Henning Larsen, and Alison Brooks Architects. Sidewalk Labs has said it was planning to redevelop the vacant brownfield site “from the internet up.”

Previously on Archinect: Sidewalk Labs' Quayside project in Toronto is cancelled

Author Karrie Jacobs considers the history of urban planning concepts such as the 15-Minute City and Ville Radieuse in relation to the rebuked concept, which has dominated the past two decades of planning, and will be felled, she predicts, by an “emphasis on the optimization of everything” and the contradictory desire to “eradicate the very thing that makes cities wonderful.”

Bechtel to lay groundwork for Saudi smart mega-city Neom

2020-08-12T15:51:00-04:00

American engineering firm Bechtel has inked a contract with Neom, a forthcoming $500 billion "smart city-region" that is slated for what is currently mostly open mountain and desert landscape along Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coast.

According to a press release issued by Bechtel, the firm was selected to "oversee and create resource-efficient utilities and a highly advanced transport system to connect NEOM's cognitive cities," among other projects. The scope of work for the contract will involve "integrating sustainable land use, intelligent urban design and multi-modal mobility" as well "simultaneous construction in multiple locations requiring extraordinary engineering solutions in challenging terrain."

Bechtel Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Brendan Bechtel said via a statement, "NEOM is one of the most complex projects in living memory and we are proud to be part of it. The vision for a futuristic, innovative and sustainable ecosystem is unique and bold, and we believe NEOM will...

BIG and Toyota unveil 175-acre “Woven City” in Japan that tests out the future of urban mobility

2020-01-07T16:39:00-05:00

BIG has drawn up the masterplan for the “Toyota Woven City”, which will transform a 175-acre former factory site in the city of Susono in Shizuoka into a new smart city that will be fully “dedicated to the advancement of all aspects of mobility”. Bjarke Ingels and Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda presented the prototype town at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas yesterday.

Currently scheduled to break ground in early 2021, the multi-phase project features a flexible network of streets dedicated to various speeds of mobility, which allows for safer, pedestrian-friendly connections, BIG says. It will also incorporate solar energy, geothermal energy, and hydrogen fuel cell technology. Plus, the city's hidden infrastructure will include a goods delivery network called the “matternet”.

Woven City splits the typical road into three street types. The first is a street optimized for faster automated vehicles, with logistical traffic underneath.

Credit: BIG | Bjarke Ingels Group.

Credit: BIG |...

"Digital Infrastructure City" in Las Vegas to be built with construction drones and a robot-augmented "super workforce"

2019-08-16T12:45:00-04:00

Bleutech Park Properties, a real-estate investment trust (REIT), and KME Architects have unveiled plans for a new "Digital Infrastructure City" in Las Vegas.

The digitally-focused, smart city-style development is set to feature "automated multi-functional designs," "supertrees," and self-healing concrete structures, according to a press release. The development, which will include offices and market-rate and affordable housing, will draw all of its energy from renewable sources. The buildings in the development are set to be wrapped with photovoltaic glass panels that will turn "entire building exteriors into single solar panels," according to a statement.

The project is also set to be constructed using union labor; Those workers will be aided by a bevy of automated and digital technologies, including aerial construction drones that will work on hard-to-reach and dangerous portions of the project and "wearable technologies" that will aid workers in heavy lifting and repetitive task...

What happens in Neom, stays in Neom

2019-07-27T12:18:00-04:00

“This should be an automated city where we can watch everything,” Neom’s Mohammed bin Salman-led founding board said, according to the documents—a city “where a computer can notify crimes without having to report them or where all citizens can be tracked.”

The Wall Street Journal digs into some of the documentation underpinning Saudi Arabia's forthcoming desert tech city, Neom. The Massachusetts-sized city-state, a pet project of the country's omnipresent crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is being planned as part of an effort to turn the country into a producer of information technologies and other technological and industrial innovations.

Plans obtained by The Wall Street Journal envision a $500 billion technological wonderland populated by robotic maids, a Jurassic Park-style robot dinosaur theme park, and an artificial "moon" projection screen that live-streams images from outer space.

“Neom is all about things that are necessarily future-oriented and visionary,” Neom's chief executive officer, Nadhmi al Nasr, told The Wall Street Journal, adding, “So we are talking about technology that is cutting edge and beyond—and in some cases still in development and maybe theoretical.”

Sidewalk Labs' Toronto waterfront smart city raises dystopian concerns

2018-08-10T14:40:00-04:00

Sidewalk’s vision for Quayside — as a place populated by self-driving vehicles and robotic garbage collectors, where the urban fabric is embedded with cameras and sensors capable of gleaning information from the phone in your pocket — certainly sounds Orwellian. Yet the company contends that the data gathered from fully wired urban infrastructure is needed to refine inefficient urban systems and achieve ambitious innovations like zero-emission energy grids.

Last fall Sidewalk Labs, a Google-affiliated company, announced plans to build a new smart city model on 12 acres of the Toronto waterfront named Quayside. The design would include infrastructure with sensors and data analytics with the claim of building an overall more streamlined, economical, and green urban space. Sidewalk Labs' partnership with Canada is the beginning of an urban model they hope to expand globally.

While the goal may look utopian, many see an ominous future where governance is under threat rather than the projected promise of urban innovation. Concerns center around tech monopolies, the collection and commodification of city data, and a democratic process of decision making for our environments.

An army of underground robots will collect waste and deliver parcels

2018-05-28T22:36:00-04:00

Initially Sidewalk's deal with the organisation will cover a 12-acre site but it is believed it wishes to expand this to the whole area - which at 325 acres will represent a huge land-grab....As part of the planning process of bidding to develop the waterside location, the firm looked at 150 examples of smart cities, including those built from the ground up such as Masdar, in Abu Dhabi and Songdo in South Korea.

Jane Wakefield chatted with both critics and proponents of a, Sidewalk Labs, proposed project on Toronto's Eastern waterfront.

Will cities themselves become Silicon Valley's Biggest Start-Up?

2018-02-26T14:18:00-05:00

In the maddening gap between how this place functions and how inventors and engineers here think it should, many have become enamored with the same idea: What if the people who build circuits and social networks could build cities, too? Wholly new places, designed from scratch and freed from broken policies.

In Emily Badger's latest piece for the Upshot, she investigates the Tech Industry's newest sector of disruption, the City. From Alphabet company's proposal for Sidewalk Labs in Toronto to a proposed smart city in Arizona, Silicon Valley is looking to build urban utopias of their own. While the idea has received strong negative feedback, particularly from urban planners and architects who believe the tech industry should stay within its lanes, Badger wonders if approaching the problems modern cities are facing through a tabula rasa mindset might be beneficial.

Bill Gates buys 25,000 acres in Arizona to build a smart city

2017-11-13T13:53:00-05:00

Belmont Partners, an investment firm run by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, has bought 25,000 acres in Arizona to create a planned community reports KPNX. The large plot of land was bought for $80 million and is 45 minutes from Phoenix, within Maricopa County, in an area called the West Valley.

Plans for the new city, which will be appropriately named Belmont, include 80,000 residential units, 3,800 acres for office, commercial and retail space and 470 acres for public schools. According to a press release put out by the firm, they plan to build "a forward-thinking community with a communication and infrastructure spine that embraces cutting-edge technology, designed around high-speed digital networks, data centers, new manufacturing technologies and distribution models, autonomous vehicles and autonomous logistics hubs."

400 of the smartest acres in the country

2017-01-31T19:06:00-05:00

The Japanese technology giant wanted a place to experiment with solar power and renewable energy, autonomous vehicles and other technologies. And it needed a public partner and community support. It found that in Denver, DIA, Xcel Energy, developer LC Fulenwider and many others.

Tamara Chuang highlights some of the technology (ranging from consumer electronics, to "smart" public infrastructure) Panasonic was hawking at CES 2017. Some of which will be employed at Peña Station Next, a new TOD, smart city lab on the edge of Denver International Airport. Last month, she reported on the installation of some of the first bits, brains for 53 street lights.

All that data Uber has been collecting might just come in handy

2017-01-12T12:27:00-05:00

Uber has A rocky history with city governments—to put it mildly... Now, Uber is making something of a peace offering. The company is launching a new service that could help cities master their traffic. It’s called Uber Movement, and it uses information on the billions of rides Uber has completed.

Uber Movement is free for the select planning agencies and researchers granted access to it. With it, you can gauge travel times between any two locations. Since, as Uber's chief of transportation policy notes, Uber doesn't actually do any urban planning, they figure they might as well give all this information to the people who do. And, hey, maybe it'll help the ride-sharing company cozy up to previously hostile city governments.

University of Miami School of Architecture helps to create a new Smart City in the Yucatan Peninsula

2016-09-02T16:07:00-04:00

The project, which is being designed by UM SoA’s Responsive Architecture and Design Lab (RAD-UM Lab), will be built next to the Yucatán Science and Technology Park (YSTP), established by the National Autonomous University of Mexico. RAD-UM Lab specializes in technology-based designing and the “internet of things,” everyday objects that can collect data and connect to modern tech.

The University of Miami School of Architecture continues to experiment in the realm of responsive architecture, this time at an urban scale. Zenciti is a proposed "smart city" to be located in the Yucatan Peninsula where the gathering of data will play a prominent role. Information technology will be embedded into the inner workings and infrastructure of the project allowing for potential opportunities to monitor urban issues such as traffic patterns, transportation, pollution levels, and energy consumption. Smart City models are curently in use in Europe with examples such as Amsterdam and Barcelona. Zenciti has the potential to be one the first examples in Latin America.

This initative is a collaboration between the University of Miami's School of Architecture, Center for Computational Science, and College of Engineering, as well as the Yucatan State Government’s Information Technologies Innovation Cente. The UMSoA has aggressively been expanding research into responsive arch...

Chicago installs "urban Fitbits" to track air quality, noise levels, and traffic

2016-08-29T13:39:00-04:00

The Windy City has begun installing what sounds and looks a whole lot like a Fitbit that can measure the vitals of a bustling metropolis. Chicago, which partnered on the project with researchers at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory and several corporations, last week installed the first two of 500 modular sensor boxes. The devices will eventually allow the city and public to instantly get block-by-block data on air quality, noise levels, as well as [...] traffic.

The project, the first such initiative in the country, is called 'the Array of Things'. Affixed to light poles, the devices are equipped with sensors that monitor air and surface temperature, carbon monoxide levels, ambient sound intensity, and barometric pressure, as well as other input. A total of 50 devices will be installed this year, with 450 more coming by 2018.

The data will be used to improve public health, traffic conditions, and guide infrastructure decisions. It will also be publicly available starting in mid-October. Like with most "smart" initiatives, privacy concerns have arose, particularly over the devices' capacity to take photos. Officials have stated that any photos taken will be deleted within "tens of minutes".

Check out the video below for more info:

In related news:

What's the newest project for Silicon Valley investors? Building cities

2016-06-28T17:39:00-04:00

Y Combinator, the startup accelerator and investment firm that helped produce Airbnb, Dropbox, and Instacart, is embarking on a creation project arguably more ambitious than any company. "We want to build cities," wrote Y Combinator partner Adora Cheung and President Sam Altman...the project aims to develop ways to reduce housing expenses by 90 percent and to develop a city code of laws simple enough to fit on 100 pages of text. Eventually the plan is to actually produce a prototype city.

"We’re not trying to build a utopia for techies," says Cheung, the project’s director and the former CEO of failed housecleaning startup Homejoy. "This is a city for humans."

For more news from Silicon Valley, check out these links:

Copenhagen is the first city to try to monetize its data

2016-06-09T13:29:00-04:00

Copenhagen has become the first city in the world to attempt to monetize its, and others’, data through a city data market. Traffic snarl-ups, home break-ins, whether it rained or snowed, and how much electricity the city dwellers use each day is among the data to be traded for cash, city officials announced. Interestingly, the city, which is partnering with Hitachi on the project, also wants to incorporate others’ data.

"Not all data will have a price tag—some of it will be free, but it will be anonymized anyway."

Relatedly, in a recent conversation with Joseph Grima, co-founder of Space Caviar, the architect suggested, "...the home is becoming a factory of data to the point that one could pay one's rent through the process of producing data simply through a set of domestic activities."

For other relevant content, check out these links:

This month, Archinect's coverage includes a special thematic focus, Privacy. Have projects that grapple with how city data and other new modes of urbanism have changed our notion of privacy? Submit to our open call by Sunday, June 19.

Welcome to the Hudson Yards, c. 2019: the world's most ambitious "smart city" experiment

2016-04-26T20:55:00-04:00

The observation deck won’t be finished for a few years yet. If you want to see the future of New York, walk north along the High Line, round the curve at the rail yards, and turn your back to the river. Amid the highway ramps and industrial hash of far-west Manhattan, a herd of cranes hoists I-beams into the sky. This is Hudson Yards, the largest private real-estate development in United States history and the test ground for the world’s most ambitious experiment in “smart city” urbanism.

Last year, I reviewed Mattern's book Deep Mapping the Media City, in which she delves into some of the issues surrounding so-called "smart cities." Check out the review here.

For more on the implementation of surveillance and other technologies in the city, check out these links:

Losing yourself in the smart city

2015-12-03T18:35:00-05:00

Thanks to Big Data, it is now next to impossible to reside anonymously in a modern city. Why? Because data anonymization itself is almost impossible without using advanced cryptography. Our every transaction leaves a digital marker that can be mined by anyone with the right tools or enough determination.

A city for the future but devoid of people

2015-10-06T18:07:00-04:00

In the arid plains of the southern New Mexico desert, between the site of the first atomic bomb test and the U.S.-Mexico border, a new city is rising from the sand. Planned for a population of 35,000, the city will showcase a modern business district downtown, and neat rows of terraced housing in the suburbs. It will be supplied with pristine streets, parks, malls and a church. But no one will ever call it home.

Planned by the telecommunications and tech firm Pegasus Global Holdings, the CITE (Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation) is a $1 billion plan to build a model city to test out and develop new technologies.

With specialized zones for agriculture, energy, and water treatment, the city would also play host to tests for new tech like self-driving cars, responsive roads, and "smart homes" of all kinds.

CITE would have built-in sensors throughout, as well as a central control room to oversee operations.

CITE does not plan to have humans inhabiting the city to allow for faster testing and fewer potential mishaps. But that presents its own issues: after all, these technologies are ultimately intended for social use, and even "smart cities" have to be populated by humans.

"The inhabitants of cities are not just interchangeable individuals that can be dropped into experimental settings," Professor Steve Rayner, co-director of the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities, tells CNN. "Th...

Waze and its new uneasy bedfellows

2015-06-08T14:44:00-04:00

The L.A.-Waze partnership is, at least in theory, an initial step toward allowing the city’s planners and engineers to regain a healthier role in mediating the kinds of longstanding cross-town conflicts that Waze has renewed and amplified. Whether the deal will help to resolve fundamental long-term issues related to the city’s growth and inadequate infrastructure is another matter.

Amazon's new Dash button and the value of running out of toilet paper

2015-04-03T18:35:00-04:00

Dash fits squarely into the current age of smart-home technology... It is not simply a matter of practical efficiency but of a proactive, preëmptive way of living, in which inefficiency is the worst kind of waste. The way we manage our chores is a measure of our worthiness. No one wants to live in a stupid home... And only a chump would ever run out of toilet paper. But what if there is actual value in running out of things?

Amazon released their new Dash devices yesterday and many people thought it was an April Fool's joke, partly " the idea seemed to poke fun at Amazon’s omnipresence, making it visibly manifest with little plastic one-click shopping buttons adhered to surfaces all over your home." But the device, which would enable you to re-stock a certain product with the push of a little button, is real and coming. The video is below –– it's a bit unsettling.

In his New Yorker piece, Ian Crouch notes the imminent arrival of products that will be able to reorder supplies, ie. a washing machine that will sense when the detergent is low and order more. Crouch darkly imagines "a washing machine, haywire and alone in a basement somewhere, constantly reordering supplies for itself long after we’ve all been wiped off the Earth." He suggests that being bothered to have to stop may actually be important, in part in making us feel bad about the way we consume and the amount we waste.

Crouch's article seems to ...

The Internet and the Future of Loneliness

2015-04-02T15:37:00-04:00

...the promise of the internet is contact. It seems to offer an antidote to loneliness, trumping even the most utopian urban environment by enabling strangers to develop relationships along shared lines of interest, no matter how shy or isolated they might be in their own physical lives. But proximity, as city dwellers know, does not necessarily mean intimacy. Access to other people is not by itself enough to dispel the gloom of internal isolation. Loneliness can be most acute in a crowd. -Laing