Exploring Fact City: Trust and Acceptance

An intriguing paper in the nytime “Wikipedia: Exploring Fact City” builds an analogy between Wikipedia and a city. Like a city, Wikipedia is a tale of spontaneous organization and achievement because it mimics the basic civility, trust, acceptance of a city. The author Noam Cohen elaborates in trust with references to Jane Jacobs observations of sidewalks and rules that govern them:

It is this sidewalk-like transparency and collective responsibility that makes Wikipedia as accurate as it is. The greater the foot traffic, the safer the neighborhood.

The concept of acceptance is developed with reference to Lewis Mumford’s “The City in History,”

Even before the city is a place of fixed residence, it begins as a meeting place to which people periodically return: the magnet comes before the container, and this ability to attract nonresidents to it for intercourse and spiritual stimulus no less than trade remains one of the essential criteria of the city, a witness to its essential dynamism, as opposed to the more fixed and indrawn form of the village, hostile to the outsider.”

Why do I blog this?: Working on a project that propose the treatment of a city digital infrastructure with the same approach of its physical infrastructure (i.e. enable rather than structure urban life). Some thoughts in this article can support my argumentation. Digital infrastructure could relay on these approaches of trust and acceptance to enable rather than authoritatively structure/frame/contain the intercourse and spiritual stimulus that make living in a city possible.