One of the main tropes in this study is the comparison of contemporary places to hypertexts. Nodes in a hypertext -- especially in those more literary than this one -- really do find their identity in their links rather than in being independent chunks of information or description. Nodes may also be intimately related yet quite separated in the text or in the process of reading. The idea of this comparison first occured to me when writing a talk, "The Age of the List," for a conference on preservation held in Rome some years back(Kolb 2000c). Some material from that talk appears as part of the description of suburban strips, but the talk goes further in discussing the penetration of older centers by new forces and links. Those ideas now appear scattered throughout this book and hypertext.
There are, however, some serious qualifications* to be made about my parallel between contemporary places and hypertexts. While connections in a hypertext are "made" intentionally, physical space provides a set of contingent and non-intentional connections as well as whatever intentional architectural or place norm connections we may establish.
Still, it is no accident that my study of contemporary places comes after I wrote both a book on postmodernism in architecture and philosophy, and a hypertext on non-linearity in philosophy. The narratives and descriptions I've included show the ways to which my experiences while traveling have inspired these reflections.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001