TheFeature :: Cities, Swarms, Cell Phones: The Birth of Urban Informatics
By Howard Rheingold [& Anthony Townsend, urban informatician and wireless activist, professor of urban planning at NYU]
...Townsend believes the pace of urban life is quickening. "As every person completes more tasks, communicates with more people, coordinates activities among more social networks in the same amount of time, the aggregate effect is an acceleration of the urban metabolism."...
At the same time that the urban core is heating up and attracting the young, fast-moving, youth thumb-tribes and unwired mobile knowledge workers, it becomes possible to extend sprawl even further. People will be doing email via speech-to-text/text-to-speech intermediaries while crawling through traffic from their suburban homes...
K-Collector