Designing Digital Communities that Transform Urban Life: Introduction to the Special Section on Digital Cities

The pervasive integration of digital technology into cities provides new opportunities for information systems scholars to participate in the efforts in transforming urban life. It requires (a) the creation of a large-scale digital infrastructure, (b) the design of new services and applications, and (c) the re-examination of the meaning of social interactions in public and private spaces. In order to create an initial forum for multi-disciplinary dialogue to explore these issues, a research workshop was organized by the Irwin L. Gross Institute for Business and Information Technology, Temple University on November 1–3, 2007. This special section includes three papers from the workshop. These three articles point out that the future socio-technical reality of digital urban environments must be deliberately designed in order to magnifies the strengths of the most daring human design endeavor ever—cities.