From William Mitchell's Book City of Bits

Cyberspace is opening up, and the rush to claim and settle it is on. We are entering an era of electronically extended bodies living at the intersection points of the physical and virtual worlds, of occupation and interaction through telepresence as well as through physical presence, of mutant architectural forms that merge from the telecommunications-induced fragmentation and recombination of traditional architectural types, and of new, soft cities that parallel, complement, and sometimes compete with our existing urban concentrations of brick, concrete, and steel.

For designers and planners, the task of the twenty-first century will be to build the bitsphere--a worldwide, electronically mediated environment in which networks are everywhere, and most of the artifacts that function within it (at every scale, from nano to global) have intelligence and telecommunications capabilities. It will overlay and eventually succeed the agricultural and industrial landscapes that humankind has inhabited for so long.

This unprecedented, hyperextended habitat will transcend national boundaries; the increasingly dense and widespread connectivity that it supplies will quickly create opportunities--the first in the history of humankind--for planning and designing truly world-wide communities. Just as the ancient polis provided an agora, markets, and theaters for those living within its walls, the twenty-first-century bitsphere will require a growing numer of virtual gathering places, exchanges, and entertainment spots for its plugged-in populace. Juast as architects have traditionally designed schools, hospitals, and other service facilities to meet the needs of surrounding local areas, bitsphere planners and designers will structure the channels, resources, and interfaces of educational and medical service delivery systems for much more extended constituencies. Commercial, entertainment, educational, and health care organizations wil use these new dlivery systems and virtual places to operate, cooperate, and compete on a global scale.