In his talk “Smart Growth for a Smart City: A New Economic Vision for Halifax”, delivered in Halifax, NS on April 24, 2002 as part of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s Noon Hour Lecture Series “Shaping Downtown: 5 Points of View”, AIMS President Brian Lee Crowley explains why the one thing that most dominates the regional urban landscape now is technology, and how this has tremendous effects on the future shape of cities.
Technology is doing more than anything else to upend traditional notions of urban geography because it is releasing people from the traditional constraints on location. With the Internet and Worldwide Web, teleconferencing, video communications devices, cell phones, etc., people (and companies) have more freedom to choose how they want to be organized, where they want to be located, and who they want to be close too.
