The city as a 'Central Built Environment': imagining the future of digital cities
Dr Alexia Maddox (2 min read)
I have been working on the Digital CBD Project since late last year. This program of research is funded by the Victorian Higher Education State Investment Fund (VHESIF) and has given me the opportunity to use my imagination to think about what a digital CBD or digital city is.
My personal imagination, however, is augmented by the sociological imagination. This makes my way of thinking about the city informed by other thinkers who talk about global cities and their technologically interlaced digital formations.
This conceptual expansion of city space shifts my thinking to a built environment that encompasses physical place to code.
The digital formation enables the flows of people, information and objects that are the lifeblood of cities. Without these dynamic flows and injections of talent and capital, cities would lose their purpose for being and their vibrancy would drain away.
A city is like a complex adaptive system that never stays in one state, is digitally augmented and is responsive to, and learns from, opportunities and shocks. While cities share some common characteristics, they are all different. What makes them different is their unique urban geography, their people and their ‘reason for being’ in the historical and current local, national and global contexts.
People make the place of cities and shape their nature and function by making constant changes to their built environment. A city feels dynamic largely due to the way it interlaces with the cultural and social diversity that feeds it. Cities take on personalities and, for the active listener, can speak.
In leading the Digital Infrastructures report with a talented team of co-authors, I was driven to document the shifts and implications of working from home, capture and contribute to the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Melbourne, and highlight the playful nature of the city. I thought in terms of work, innovation and play. Because a city thrives when its vibrancy match is struck, these areas help us to see the progressive spine of the city and point to the ways it is adapting to current shocks.
Through the living baseline of Melbourne residents provided by the digital CBD survey, we started to see the changing patterns of engagement with the city and the rise in engagement of people with their suburbs over the city center.
These shifts have significant implications for Melbourne CBD as a place of work and as a center of business. It made me think about the fact that perhaps what we were calling it was restricting the new ways we could think about the future of the city.
I have begun to refer to the city as a central built environment (CBE) rather than as a CBD. I’d like to see where that gets me in imagining the future of Melbourne and how the city can continue to thrive under changing conditions. Seeing it as a CBE means I can focus on the city as a playful, immersive space with tendrils that stretch globally and as a place that Melbourne residents can thrive.
Dr Alexia Maddox is an author of the Digital CBD Project report ‘Are people ready for a Digital CBD? The new infrastructure demands’, which will be launched on Thursday 25 August 2022 - register to attend the online event launch here.