On January 30, 2007 Sweden announced that it would be opening a new embassy and information center to “promote the country’s image abroad” and “answer questions on all aspects of Sweden.”¹ What makes Sweden’s news notable is that the new embassy will be located in the virtual space of Second Life. Equally notable is that the Reuters news service which carried this announcement did so via their newly founded offices in Second Life. One of many emerging virtual worlds, Second Life is an Internet-based, three-dimensional and interactive environment designed to simulate real-world landscapes and social interactions. It is located at the forefront of an ever-evolving set of information and communications technologies (ICT) that push the boundaries of how we live and interact in the real/material-world. In this dissertation I investigate the increasing divergence between material and virtual space through an exploration of the potential applications of Internet-based ICT in the field of urban community development. Drawing on the social imagination of classical utopian writers and theorists, I suggest that contemporary ICT is a valuable resource for organizations, researchers and activists working towards improving the quality of life in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. In particular, I argue that we might revisit utopian literature (a literature that has been largely disregarded as hopelessly idealistic) from within the context of an ICT enabled community development program—and in doing so, that there is tremendous potential to arrive at an innovative set of new approaches to building livable places. Based on an examination of three ICT enabled community development projects in West Philadelphia, I find that the convergence of utopian theory, ICT tools and a classical approach to urban community development has at least three potential outcomes: (1) to reconceive the ways that we understand and discursively construct places—via freely available Internet applications such as Google Maps; (2) to build place-based community capacities and social capital—a process made immensely more efficient through the use of open-source Internet-based social networking tools; and (3) to strengthen local economies by connecting small businesses and entrepreneurs with the global marketplace through eCommerce technology.

¹http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2007/01/30/sweden-to-open-virtual-embassy-in-second-life/