The 'information city' as management apparatus

During the 1980s, Tokyo saw a change in its pattern of development, from the wholesale rebuilding of actual neighborhoods to the manipulation of the visual environment and of the information provided thereby. Understanding cities as an apparatus or control system designed to manage the production and consumption of individuals, this article explores the significance of this shift towards the design of cities as a medium for information. Typified by the development of Shibuya, in the south-west of Tokyo, dominated in large part by the Parco department store, the city not only provided information, but itself became information and thereby a commodity to be consumed, evident in the emergence of magazines that constituted it as such. Cities thereby changed into an apparatus that sought to manage the totality of an individual's desires, also prompting a turn to semiotics as a way of comprehending the information city.