From Face - Block to Facebook or the Other Way around ?

Can network technology stimulate communities of propinquity and sustainability? We explore in this study the relation between communication technology, the production of space for public life, and community building in the contemporary city. For that we propose the collaboration of urban planning and computer science, for the design of virtual communities that are deferent to physical space (hybrid). We aim to stimulate creativity, generate common interest and promote physical interactions in the neighborhood with the existing tools used to design web-based online communities. The critical piece that should be in place for the success of such an effort is the participation of community members. In this paper we focus on one of the possible ways to address this challenging problem: creativity within collective action. We explore a new type of collective action enabled through the steadily advancing wireless technology. That is the ability of a community to create a cost-effective user-owned wireless network to support their internal communication needs and offer free access to the Internet. We propose a new type of hybrid community -wireless neighborhood community (WNC) -that exploits this technological potential and provides an institutional framework for the community at the neighborhood level. For this we analyze examples of neighborhood collective action that are successful in the physical space, which could guide the design of wireless neighborhood communities.