interview
INTERVIEW WITH BLAISE GALLAND
Bio : Blaise Galland was born on May 19, 1954 in Montevideo, of Swiss nationality (Geneva).
He graduated in political science and he is a doctor in sociology and anthropology.
He speaks French, Spanish and English fluently, as well as some German and Portuguese.
He taught at the University of Geneva and the EPFL and is currently part-time lecturer at the HES of Lullier.
Website: diwww.epfl.ch/~galland/
Cécile Petit - Before getting into the heart of the matter, I particularly appreciate the definition of the city that you give in your article, De l'urbanisation à la glocalisation (1995). Could you explain it to us here?
Blaise Galland - At the time, I gave a minimalist definition of the city, based on network theory, according to which the city could be defined as "a hub of exchange for goods and information." Goods are exchanged on the market, and information is exchanged in the agora. The concentration of human beings on the territory surrounding these two loci helps reduce the time required for the exchange of these goods and this information. It also allows for some transparency in setting the value of these goods and for the pooling of information of general interest, establishing the "true" representation of the world and the environment at a given historical moment.
C.P. - If cities are formed around the market and the agora, and these two crucial poles are moving into cyberspace, does that mean that the entire urban environment as we know it is called upon to disappear?
B.G. - The city as such won't disappear, since it is already built, and continues to be built through its own inertia, and since people still want to live in the city. But if the city's two essential functions as given in this definition shift into cyberspace, it's the whole meaning of the city that may be called upon to be reinvented, restructured, re-articulated on a new basis, or new bases.
C.P. - I would like to put a question to you now that you raised in La ville virtuelle in 1993: ten years later, has "the urban concept shifted toward a qualitatively different reality"? Has "the purpose of the work of architects, urban planners, and civil engineers" been disrupted? In other words, what of cities today?
B.G. - If I follow Leibnitzian tradition - according to which space is absolutely uniform, and, without the things placed within it, one point in space is absolutely identical to another point in space -, the city hasn't changed fundamentally: from a quantitative point of view, the population of the great majority of cities has grown relentlessly, and the hold this mode of being together has on the ground hasn't suddenly come to a halt with the advent of new technologies. However, space being "pure intuition," the private experience of a growing number of people is being transformed through the use of these technologies. From a phenomenological point of view, I would say today that our relationship to the city tends to become more distant, more ethereal, more dispersed, because a significant portion of our everyday preoccupations lie in the virtual space of the networks. And the development of the "Natel,"1 as we call it at home, has accentuated this existential distantiation.
The term "disrupted" was a little exaggerated then, but ever since the development of the automobile and means of communications, we've seen two successive processes that have had a real impact on the aspect and use of cities, demanding of engineers and architects the creation of new and previously unthinkable objects. Suburbanization has drawn the well-off out of the city to live on the periphery - some of them moving back in twenty years later. Today, however, the networking of city-centres, the process of urbanization, engenders a number of opportunities that would have been considered insane at the time of traditional cities. Building shopping centres, for instance, complete with movie theatres, banks, restaurants, and so on, outside urban centres, half-way between two cities, would have been absurd in traditional urban thinking.
C.P. - In De l'urbanisation à la glocalisation (1995), you go so far as to suggest the gradual disappearance of postal services, universities, libraries, museums, operas, cinemas. The idea worried a lot of people a few years back. But don't you think we've seen these public spaces successfully adapt to the issues of new technologies?
B.G. - It may still be too early to reach a verdict on this; the Web as we know it has only got 12 years' social use. . . But you're right, of course; we know that new means of communication never completely replace the old ones. The old survives by adapting to the new situation. Museums are putting a slew of archival documents on-line (I'm a great fan of the design and production of the Bibliothèque nationale de France's Web site), but that is not bringing about their disappearance or diminishing their turnout. The opposite may well be happening, a bit like "illegal" music downloads that end up prompting surfers to purchase music they wouldn't have known about if it hadn't been for the download activity. But to adapt is also to be transformed. Just as the fax will disappear, entire institutions must re-think themselves differently, like the post office, the universities, the stock exchange, the banks, and so on.
C.P. - You also very rightly point out the limits of new technologies, i.e., the human body. For, as you explain, even if cyberspace abolishes notions of time and space, human beings are not binary, and will never be. That, according to you, is the main reason we see an exponential increase in local, rather than world networks, "glocalization" rather than globalization. First of all, could you define glocalization for our readers. And then, do you agree with the idea that, with the advent of new technologies and the explosion of cyberspace, the world is gradually shrinking as local networks grow? Finally, what are the respective places of physical-man and social-man in virtual space?
B.G. - I defined "glocalization" as the dual process by which the city disinvests itself of the function of producing, processing and exchanging information by shifting it to cyberspace, while consequently developing new forms of socio-spatial organization at the local level. That's what is happening, or can happen, at the local level, though new information technologies are global. New modes of exchange ushered by cyberspace will bring about the reorganization of experiential space, both public or private.
I don't share MacLuhan's notion of the "global village," because it is based on an analysis of television in the 1960s and doesn't take account of the interactivity allowed for by computer networks. And the planet's circumference won't be getting any smaller; in terms of experienced space, it seems to me that the "world" is getting bigger, not smaller, as individuals are increasingly capable of accessing and generating information, and of sharing, in a single cyberspace, the totality of social networks constituted within it. The world seems "larger" because I have access to social networks that would be inaccessible to me without the Internet - to the detriment of the human body, however, for the Internet's power resides in its annihilation of spatial limits, and the human body cannot live without space.
In such a configuration, the place of man's physical and biological being is a lot more complex than it was at the beginning of the twentieth century, when there still existed a certain correlation between an individual's real space and his experiential space. With the experiential space of the Internet, next door neighbours can live light years from each other. Man's place hasn't changed, essentially, because his feet will be firmly planted on the ground for the foreseeable future - one can't digitize life, and one's animal needs will remain intrinsically bound to immediate and local surroundings for a long time to come, to what the city can offer in the way of satisfying those needs. But it is also true that man's place is becoming more complicated by his growing independence in the networks, and his territorial identity is increasingly difficult for being fragmentary. Hence the notion of glocalization, which, applied to the individual, makes her appear to have her feet on the ground and her head in cyberspace.
C.P. - To conclude, I would like to come back to the city metaphor often used to represent cyberspace, and that you also use in "La ville virtuelle." How can you compare virtual space - by definition immaterial, limitless, having no territory - to an urban structure? What do they have in common, and where to they differ?
B.G. - Besides the "plumbing" that transmits information in cyberspace, what constitutes cyberspace in terms of usage are the various sites built within it. Each of these sites is like a building, with its owner, its residents, its users; strung together, all these "places" end up looking like a city. Although it's only a metaphor, it is the first one that came to the minds of its first practitioners - the "internautics" pioneers, to coin a term unapproved by the Académie française. Like all metaphors, this image soon reaches its limits when we take a closer look at the comparison between a city and cyberspace. From the outset, the virtual city can grow endlessly since it is not bound by a particular territory, and therefore knows no geographical, temporal, or spatial limits - decisive factors for any real city. But the density of human activity and the social diversity that characterize our cities are certainly present in cyberspace, which therefore resembles the city as we know it. The metaphor dissolves as soon as we take into account spatial dimension - not the least factor when dealing with a city. In the West, buildings are generally ordered according to their distance from the centre. Yet, in the virtual city of networks, precisely where distance is abolished, there no longer is a centre, nor any limit or periphery, and the only hierarchal order that pertains is the relative popularity of the different sites. Thus, a highly frequented site "resembles" a building, because many people are there at the same time as us, to do the same thing. And all these "buildings," one next to the other, wind up looking like a city, the most populated and the most diverse city imaginable in the world. As opposed to real cities, there are no streets, because, by abolishing the spatial limits, we've left the third dimension behind.
Notes
1 : Mobile phone 
Interview by Cécile Petit
(Translated from French by Ron Ross)
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