Use the word "landscape" in the English language and it probably conjures up green fields or hills or a certain kind of pastoral art; use the word "urbanised" and it usually conjures up streets, crowds, cars. It’s as if, in the English language, the yoking together of "urban" and "landscape" into the phrase urbanised landscape is an attempt to heal the profound historical dichotomy between the country and the city, the subject of a famous book with that title by Raymond Williams which traced the opposition between country and the city in European thought since Roman times.

But of course the tension and complex relationship between country and the city is hardly something that is distinctively western. Just take an example from contemporary Chinese popular culture – Cell Phone, the recent fine and popular Chinese film by Feng Xiaogang. Here is a film that sets up a tension between the country and the city in the life of a metropolitan husband who returns to the country to visit his mother. It is a film with a complex and humorous understanding of the country/city dichotomy. But what makes the film resonate in the context of this festival devoted to digital arts is that the country and city relationship in the film is articulated partly through technology and, above all, through the cell phone. The countryside is imagined as the place of community, the city as the place of secrecy and isolation – the film begins humorously with villagers listening to a communal message through a large trumpet and moves on to contrast this with the role of cell phones in the private lives of city dwellers.

Of course, the terms the "country" and the "city" are conceptual, ideological and historical terms. But at another level they are geographical or spatial terms. But what the new digital technology allows us to do is reconfigure our ideas of space and geography and to find new ways of imagining cities. In the same way that the invention of the printing press, which allowed people to read privately rather than be read to communally, helped to invent the idea of a private life - irrespective of what particular books were read - so digital technology has helped to bring into being new and distinctively urban ideas of community and of the urban landscape.

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Stand in a city street and notice how many people are talking on a cell phone – it is such a common sight in cities from Shanghai to London that is now unremarkable. Yet in historical terms this is something wholly unprecedented – someone is walking though a street in one city and is at the same time connected or networked with someone in the same city, another part of the country or even another continent. This has quite profound implications, if insufficiently examined, for our understanding of community.

Once upon a time a community was something geographically sited. The people who lived next to one another, near to one another, constituted the community. Now cell phone technology, in particular, but digital technologies in general, have enabled us to reimagine the idea of community. Take the online game World of Warcraft, which is played from China to France, from the US to Britain. Ten million people worldwide belong to the World of Warcraft community, share interests, play together, talk with one another – yet never meet other than online. Or notice the way that cell phone technology has allowed the anti-globalisation community to communicate with one another or the way that mobile technology has allowed flash mobs to come into being, bringing people together in public spaces for communal events.

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This new way of relating to one another, virtually rather than physically or virtually as well as physically, has profound implications for our understanding of the urbanised landscape – not least for urban planners and policy makers. When urban policy makers plan city development – whether they are in Shanghai or New York – they tend to think in terms of hardware: buildings and transport, for example. Of course these are important but it is equally important to think of the urban "software" – the human capacity and the technology, and especially the mobile technology, that human beings use to reinvent themselves and the city.

A good example of the tussle between the relative importance of human software and physical hardware can be found in the dilemma that confronts urban planners. Urban planners all over the world are trying to build creative quarters (hardware) for a variety of reasons. It is believed that these creative quarters can help to develop the creative economy which will be an increasingly important sector in all developed nations or regions; that they can help a city brand itself in ways that allow it to attract new investment and talent. All this may be true but the question is: should urban planners begin by building the hardware (the real estate) or should they help develop and strengthen the hardware around existing talent (or software)? The history and example of 798 in Beijing suggests that they should be led by the software: after all, the hardware – the derelict factories were found – by a group of artists and designers who initially rescued the complex and turned it into one of Beijing’s showcases. One of the strengths of the software-driven approach is that there is no need for new buildings, no need to keep mastering the environment – something important for a sustainable future. With Shanghai eArt’s building complex to be opened this year, it is also the case that, rather than construct a new building, the festival has taken over an old building and is renovating it.

A good example of the tussle between hardware and software in technology lies in the domain of the cell phone. Urban planners are trained to think that buildings can kickstart creativity. But what about cell phones? Take China as the example, where there are around 500 million cell phones. In my view cell phones are to the twenty-first century what the cinema screen was to the last century – the source of cheap urban entertainment. In the early twentieth century in the US, there was a large urban population without sufficient urban entertainment available. Hollywood arose to meet that demand. In China at present there are large and increasing urban populations with an appetite for entertainment - especially on the cell phone. Text messaging, music videos, dating agencies, online games – all these are just some of the forms of digital entertainment available on the cell phone – a kind of technology that is in effect only twenty years old.

What everyone says about cell phones, of course, is that they are interactive, and this is true. But it is equally true that the phones offer a mobile experience – not fixed, not complete, provisional, not permanent – an experience that can take place anywhere and everywhere. Go to a cinema or a theatre or a museum and you have to arrive and watch something already complete, in which you cannot intervene. The cell phone experience is not like this. Nor, and this is very important, does the cell phone leave the kind of marks on the earth left by traditional manufacturing industry - cell

phones can even be recycled.

Cell phones are a sign, then, of the move globally, and especially in China, from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge-based economy. To phrase it in terms of headlines from "Made in China" to "Created in China"; from "China Cheap" to "China Chic".

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The modern cities of the earth largely owe their present shape and form to the consequences of the industrial revolution. Manufacturing came into being with the industrial revolution and its way of working was to master the earth and make it do our bidding. Nature, in the sense of the physical world beyond the control of human beings, was relegated to the countryside in an industrialised society. China, too, has lived through this industrial mindset. But there is another and more traditional Chinese understanding of nature - that we should collaborate with rather than control nature. When I talk to a Chinese environmental friend of mine, she tells me, in order to illustrate the Chinese understanding of nature, that there is a village in northern China where a tree is planted when a person is born, and when that person dies the tree is cut down and the person is buried in the wood of the tree and another tree is planted. This is both a traditional way of life but it also feels like it offers an image of a sustainable future.

The new technology – or digital technology – offers a modern version of this collaboration with nature rather than mastery of it. Unlike heavy manufacturing industry it does not consume the earth's resources but makes its goods through the development of IP. That is why some people are beginning to call digital technology "green media". It does even not consume resources of the earth in the same way that earlier media did (even though there are of course still environmental issues with digital technology).

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Digital technology offers us not only a vision of the post industrial city but also how it might be realised in daily life. This is not the industrial city of isolated and alienated individuals but a city or urbanised landscape of connected and networked individuals, networked not only locally but also globally. This is not the industrial city of heavy industry and of the human world’s attempt to master nature, but an urbanised landscape where we are always interacting with each other, respectful of the need to collaborate with nature. It is a world which has moved from a manufacturing to a creative economy. This is why digital or green technology is important. It is the responsibility of all of us to help digital technology to realise its and our own potential.