These great urbanist games: New Babylon and Second Life

Abstract

Michel de Certeau, the French social theorist perhaps most attuned to the fraught nature of the relationship between designed spaces and everyday practices, took a moment in his landmark L'invention du quotidien. Vol. 1, Arts de faire (1980, translated by Steven Randall in 1984 as The Practice of Everyday Life) to muse about the rise of technology and its possible saturation of everyday experience, and what that would mean for the future of the city. He imagined that the proliferation of technology in an unbounded sense would dissolve what had been a distinction between "proper" institutional spaces and the unbounded spaces of the quotidian. He continued:. © 2012 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.