Welcome to the premiere issue of Urbania Magazine. After a year of anticipation, we are excited to introduce you to our new on-line space.

To be urbane entails a sense of savoir faire requiring a certain knowledge of one's surroundings and how we interact with them. For most of us, these surroundings are distinctly urban. Urbania Magazine is here to record and analyze the coming of age of a new generation with new attitudes and ideas. We will be exploring our interactions with the built environment, cyberspace and the general culture with a goal of understanding our emerging value system.

As Urbania Magazine evolves, we will be experimenting with different formats, media and organizational schemes. We are a volunteer community interacting both in real time and over the net. As such, we invite you to join a work in progress as a reader or for some of you, as contributors. Your input is gladly received at editorial@urbaniamagazine.com.

We are very pleased to announce two new partnerships with outside sites: Powell's Bookstore and CDNOW. These partnerships will enable us to display a virtual bibliography of materials that readers may find useful for further exploration beyond the scope allowed by specific articles. Let us know how well this works for you.

Our premiere issue examines mass transit in the San Francisco Bay Area through a multimedia photo essay, the appropriation of public space and the support of public arts events such as Saint Paul's Peanuts on Parade. Dan Whittaker has contributed photographs of his artwork challenging the way we view and understand architecture. In the realm of idea space, we explore concepts of the analog/digital divide and begin a journey of coming to terms with the postmodern attitude.

Have fun with this, digest it and let us know what you think.

Carl Durrenberger
Steven Wall