OUR SENSE OF COMMUNITY HAS CHANGED T he history of cities is embedded in the ways their elements are juxtaposed. the structures of art and regulation that govern urban amalgamation. Questions both of what goes with what and what yields to what are at the basis of urban form-making. Traditional cities have adjudicated such questions via relations to central places, social order has long been legible in urban form. In the new, recombinant city, however, the legibility of these orders has been dramatically manipulated. often com- pletely obscured. Here, anything seems to go with anything-hierarchies are both reinforced and concealed. at once fixed and despatialized. Value is still a function of location but the invisible hand has learned a new geometry. As phone and modem render the street irrelevant, other dimensions become preeminent. Main Street is now the space between airports. the fiber-optic cables. linking the fax machines of the multinational corporations farflung offices. an invisible worldwide skein of economic relations. Liberated from its centers and its edges by advances in communication and mobility and by a new world order bent on a single citizenship of consumption, the new city threatens an unimagined sameness even as it multiplies the illusory choices of the TV system. Two characteristics mark our new community. The first is the dissi- pation of all stable relations to local physical and cultural geography, the
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