" According to Lipset (Seymore Martin Lipset), the United States is the most anti-statist, legalistic and rights-oriented nation in the world. These traits are the outgrowth of the principles of liberty, individualism, egalitarianism, populism and laissez-faire that were embedded in the nation’s founding principles. But this American Creed also had a dark side, promoting not only personal responsibility, independent initiative and voluntarism, but also self-serving behavior, atomism, and disregard for the common good."
"The expression of both faces of the American Creed in the dispersed urbanization of the automobile era is well known. Indeed, successive waves of technological change, mediated through the underlying cultural predispositions of the Creed, have brought successive types of cities to the American scene. In what ways will the new IT technologies, similarly mediated, call forth new settlement types and patterns?"
"The concept of e-Urbanization is introduced to capture the shifts that are unfolding. Just as Louis Wirth argued that the structuring dimensions of the industrial city were size, density and heterogeneity, so the dimensions of e-Scale, e-Density and e-Heterogeneity are introduced as the structuring dimensions of the e-City. e-Scale involves the span of IT networks, e-Density the intensity of networked interdependence and the existence of positive feedback, and e-Heterogeneity the tension between the globalization of tertiary interactions and the persistence of primary ethological needs for self-identity via status identification and territoriality. Together, they define the principal axes along which the e-City will evolve and e-Urbanization will pattern global space. "
- Brian J.L. Berry
The University of Texas at Dallas
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