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New shapes of discontinuity
Zones of networked interdependence are now growing in rapid, unbounded fashion. As they inexorably fuse into a single global system, they confront us with the challenge of imagining and forming extended social aggregates that are sustained not by force and fear, bur by the ancient principle of reciprocity applied in new spatial patterns and on unprecedented scales-networks of ethical interconnectivity that allow scattered, disparate strangers, in vast numbers, to get along peacefully and productively. These new civic formations will be embedded in particular physical structures -- as surely as the walled city of Athens, the concrete and steel cities of New York or London, or nation-states and empires held together by their transportation and utility infrastructures. They will have geographic shape, and will result from investments in specific places. But they will be spatially discontinuous, overlapping and intersecting, and messily asynchronous in their patterns of daily activity. Mitchell 2003, 210-11