"Container City" is a city in the World Wide Web. This three-dimensional city, which may be entered thanks to VRML, exists only in the WWW, and there it may be inhabited. People can even live there, shop there, educate themselves, enjoy themselves, be medically examined, and soon work there, too.
Every net user with their own WWW site has the possibility of living there - in a container designed and built by themselves whenever possible.
The city's own "arbitrary body" decides who will be accepted. The only condition for being accepted into "Container City" is that the candidate's site must be special and extraordinary in some way. In keeping
with its name, however, the arbitrary body's decisions are varying and arbitrary. In addition, the body may also decide on compulsory acceptance. Life in "Container City" is tax-free, and the city's future is secured by renting small advertising areas within the city.
"Container City" was purposely designed to resemble a conventional, real city, in order to be able to experience the alteration of net-specific use in the near future. It should be possible to observe how a community is formed and if an identity in and with the city can develop. Various activities in "Container City" are planned for the next few months.
"Container City" grows on a square grid, within which the individual containers are placed. All of the containers are developed from pre-defined bodies, so-called nodes, and do not consist of converted CAD drawings, so that the amount of data may be limited and the city can grow.


Links: http://www.mesch.ch/container-city

Markus Schulthess (CH), born 1965, lives and works as a freelance architect in Lucerne. Member of the artists group Artcore. Has studied space and time in the Internet since 1995. He is currently working together with mesch on a 3D Internet model o the city of Lucerne.