The attraction of cities has been based primarily on two powerful draws: superior services and jobs. In ancient Rome, you received better military protection and better spectacles than in the provinces; in Manhattan today, you receive better medical care, restaurants, and haircuts than in a cow town. Further, the ample supply of jobs, often high-paying ones, has pulled people into urban settings ever since the Industrial Revolution began moving work out of the home.

The Digital Age, though, has weakened the urban magnet. People no longer have to live amid service providers to have access to their services; many services can be effectively summoned electronically. Telecommunications, moreover, is bringing work back into the home. People now may work in a wired spare bedroom or in a home office in an executive ghetto such as Aspen, Colo.

Does this mean the diaspora of urban professionals now will push beyond suburbs and exurbs to remote hideaways, mountaintops, or places such as Venice, selected merely for their beauty? The answer is yes, but it is a qualified yes. Just as an army cannot outrun its supply lines, workers always will need a recognizable base, so they can collaborate and fend off isolation.

Let’s look in detail at how the future may play out:

New patterns of service distribution undoubtedly are superimposing themselves on society. But whatever the successes of new systems of electronically delivered services, some services—including many of the most humble—still will depend on the local presence of the providers. Just like everyone else, teleworkers need to get their dry cleaning done, and don’t want to go too far for it. Electronic traders may operate globally, but the janitors who empty their wastebaskets and vacuum their floors have to be right there on the spot. Chefs have to get the food to the table while it is hot. Telehairdressing and teledentistry seem very far off.

Even electronic hot spots—such as Manhattan’s financial district, the City of London, or Aspen’s millionaire enclave—will lure low-wage service workers who do the sorts of things that computers cannot. It is a dirty little semisecret that these high-flying places have low-rent counterparts nearby. (Ironically, as networks spread, as smart places proliferate, and as software becomes ever more capable, the prices of information-related services will be driven down as the supply becomes more abundant. At the same time, the value of manually performed services will rise. Cooks, gardeners, nannies, and plumbers will do increasingly well.)

Now, improved telecommunications will present us with new choices—frequently very attractive ones—about where and how we live. Do we continue to commute to the office or do we telecommute from home? Do we support our local bookstores or order from online catalogs? Do we go out to the theater or download videos for private viewing? Do we give our attention and loyalty to our immediate neighbors or to our distant, electronically connected friends and colleagues—with whom we may actually have more in common?

Despite all the new choices, long-established settlement patterns and social arrangements will continue to be remarkably resistant to change; when they change, they do so slowly, messily, and incompletely. Human nature hardly alters at all. There is a powerful glue that holds together concentrations of population and economic activity. So, while digital delivery of educational, entertainment, medical, retail, financial, and other services can be expected to produce new patterns among these concentrations, the new services certainly will not dissolve them.

The outcome of changes we’re going through won’t be some eye-popping Tomorrowland. Ubiquitous electronic connections won’t turn us into rootless, laptop-toting, cellphoning nomads. Most of us still want more or less permanent places of our own, there to live with people we particularly cherish.

We will, however, see an increasing amount of electronically enabled homework, and correspondingly burgeoning demand for space in the home to accommodate it. This doesn’t mean downtown offices will disappear. Instead, we will see increasingly flexible work schedules and spatial patterns; many people will divide their time among traditional types of workplaces, ad hoc work settings that serve while they are on the road, and electronically equipped home workplaces.

As to the place we call home, eventually we will have to invent new housing types—in many ways the modern equivalents of the barbershop in Little Italy, behind which the barber’s family lived. In current urban centers, artists’ lofts demonstrate the advantages of living and working in the same place.

Traditional land-use notions will be stood on their heads. Some residential colleges and universities will recognize that their ancient patterns of living/work spaces clustered around communal functions such as laboratories and classrooms are appealing templates for the future. The new work spaces, the silicon-based towers that replace the old ivory towers, will be both more concentrated and more connected than past campuses.

Though cities aren’t going away, the electronically enabled shift of activities back to the home and the resulting 24-hour, pedestrian-scale neighborhoods may actually re-create what was best about the old-style small towns and urban neighborhoods. Ideally, the change will produce a vigorous local social and cultural life.

The real danger is that the reconfiguration of urban patterns may further cluster the affluent. Today, Silicon Valley professionals commute in air-conditioned cars from gated residential communities to campus workplaces with guards at the entrances, scarcely noticing they are passing through much less affluent areas such as East Palo Alto.

For planners and politicians, the dawning Digital Age creates an urgent need to find policies that will create an acceptable level of social equity. For architects and urban designers, the complementary task is to develop an urban fabric that provides opportunities for social groups to intersect and overlap—perhaps using a laptop at the piazza café instead of a personal computer inside the gated condo.

Mitchell is professor of architecture and media arts and sciences, and dean of the school of architecture and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of the recent books City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn and e-topia, both from MIT Press. He can be reached at wjm@mit.edu.