The Urban Beach project opened an artificial beach in the middle of Bristol. The idea behind this and other initiatives of the Cities Programme at Demos is that people need new, different places to socialise.
The cafe-culture, they believe, is required. Informal, preferably outdoor places are necessary to infuse citizens with the willingness to relax and interact with each other.

I think the idea is great and I can see why it is required. But, it made me think.

Some time ago (not that long ago!), we were keen to create on the Internet informal places for people to talk to each other as they used to do face-to-face. We witnessed the launching of many chat rooms, online-cafes, etc.. It was all about creating online mirrors of the "places" and environments people would traditionally chose to socialise.

More recently, social tools have not only made those interactions even richer but they opened the door to many different experiences. So, it seems that now people need to worry about how to create in the "real world" environments for people to chat, meet and interact as they do online. One of these days we will have people attempting to create in one of our cities the type of places that attract most participation on Second Life.

One thing hard to achieve is easily gathering in one physical space the amount and diversity of people one can when online. It's just that, online, physical distance and geography is not an issue. "Beam me up, Scotty!"? I wonder...