Television is a very complicated game for such an "ordinary" pastime. It's loaded down with technology, the scramble for rights to sought-after programs, fickle and diverse audience tastes, government regulations to follow and, to top it off, new developments in computers and communications that threaten its share of our attention. To survive in the new environment, television will soon add all sorts of bells and whistles to entice you to keep using it.

Television will become available on your home computer so that with just a click of the mouse there's the Simpsons, the news or your favourite movie. In the same way, some of the functions of your computer will be made available on your television allowing you to call up menus and select programs, to change the size and shape of the image and to call up friends on the televideo phone. Television will increasingly reach into every corner of our world, not just the living room, but also the library, the video store, the shopping arcade, the school and yes, finally, the street!

Television's new character will have such a wide range of different services that designers - the new information architects - have begun to think of it as like a "city". This city has "roadways" to get you around, "cinemas" showing movies, electronic "shopping arcades" to buy things in and "meeting places" to exchange messages and information with others. However, this expanded television is getting so complicated there's a danger that, without some kind of "town planning", it will become a cluttered and overcrowded city with few road signs, like Tokyo is today.

Lacking proper planning, the television user won't be comfortable spending much time and money in this television city any more than they would, say, in the Sydney CBD which becomes a virtual wasteland after the shops close. If we're not comfortable then we viewers will stay away. The costs of setting up such a system have also meant designers are building a "transactional" model, where every activity is paid for, rather than a softer sell "interactive" model that allows for both commercial and non-commercial uses of space.

What's missing from most future television plans is the idea of public and open spaces, with parks, playgrounds and quiet places where you can rest and play during a hard day's interacting. With real cities, planning is something that governments, local, state, and federal, and business and the community, all have a hand in. In the television world it's been harder for governments, representing our interests, to have active involvement, particularly in these modern, deregulatory times.

For thousands of years people have dreamt of building the "ideal" city. Planned cities like Canberra and the Gillman, Adelaide, Multi Function Polis (MFP), attest to the dream still being very much alive today. Now Australia has the opportunity to develop a truly livable "television city" or space on the other side of the television screen. Let's hope what we might lose in the glass and steel shopping arcades and business centres, we'll gain on the swings and roundabouts of an open information park, a living and vital part of the new television landscape.