Set along national Highway #5, near Hanford California, high up along the national park of Avenal overlooking the hilly seaside near Silicon Valley you will find the town of Archadia. A First glance you might mistake the city for a copy of an 19th century Mediterranean garden village because of its white houses and the abundant presence of Bougainvillea, the municipal flower. However, Archadia is something completely different.

The city was designed in de 2020’s to be the first new digital city. In the first 20 years of the third millennium computing had become such a ubiquitous presence that slowly the realms of the virtual and the physical had begun to merge. The 2010’s saw a massive rise in applications around the notion of Augmented Reality but the term has become obsolete after the state of immersion in the mixed virtual/physical world had become a permanent urban reality. Cities became like a 3-dimensional canvas on which every user could paint his or her version of it.

In the old cities of Europe this led to a wild growth of digital objects competing over the decreasing amount of free physical space. Local and national governments struggled to regain control over public space but miserably failed because their regulatory means were hopelessly outdated. In some areas this resulted in a complete ban on use of Augmented Reality. 2018 saw wild agitations in Paris, led by students, artists and squatters. The movement, demanding an open data structure, gained momentum because of their unique capacity to enable people to participate, both globally and locally. Again, governments failed to gain control of the situation because of their lack of understanding of the new digital communication media and were brought to their knees. Some describe the events as the Open Revolution, or the second French May. It is certain that European democratic systems lost part of their authority to a newly created class within European society, called the digital nomads. This splintered group of personas were born out of the Neo-Hippie movement which was linked to the revolutionaries in Paris, situated all over the world and the Net. Some of them existed solely as digital entities, others could were actual persons, all of them were untraceable.

In the United States of America, most notably in California governments utilizing less repressive strategies were rewarded. The bay-area was already known for its experimental(although not always successful) urbanism and used local excess of space to their advantage. Urban planners in Silicon Valley came up with regulatory means to enrich reality with it’s virtual dimension. Architects came up with ways to incorporate the new medium and constitute a new paradigm in design. Slowly parts of cities began to change. Now that the built environment had real-time characteristics some elements of the buildings, the roads, the furniture, the signs etcetera began having different functions and were designed differently. Because some functions of these objects could move to the virtual dimension they could be made personal and contextual: People could now determine the color of a building. Also, streetsign and advertisement meant for someone driving their car is not necessarily meaningful to pedestrians and vice versa. Cities were designed “cleaner”: All signs (streetsigns and ligning, facade advertisement, etc.) were moved from the physical city to the virtual domain, white materials were favored over darker ones because it was easier to project on them. “Cleaning cities” became a goal in itself: Removing as much noise from the city to make way for people, green and buildings.

Archadia was to become the epitome of the clean city. Everything that could be resovled in the virtual dimension would effectively be done so: The buildings and the streets remained white and sleak, much like the drawings in which they were conceived. For the users this idea of the city as a colouring picture was enhanced. The government had a dedicated layer for contextual signing; for the rest every user was free to determine what the city might look like to him. The teenage girl that passes you by might see the entire city as a place where she can put up the posters of some boy band, music coming floudly rom each corner. The distinguished gentleman crossing the street might see the city clean as it is, because he is adjusated to the slight nausea first-time visitors feel when they see the emptyness of the clean city.

The idea of a clean city somewhat reminds of the vision of modernist architects, the beautiful yet highly unsuccesfull experiment of the 20th century. But where the modernist slogan “light, space and hygiene”, the designers of Archadia had a more human touch. Creating space for people and green in the city is their adagium. So they did not find their inspiration in the modernist cities, clean though they were, but found inspiration in the ancient archaic architecture, hebce the name of the city.