With the advent of computerized trading and the effects of September 11th still being felt, this NYTimes article isn’t surprising: Next to Downsize on Wall Street? The Exchange Floor

Behind the marble facade of its neoclassical fortress on Wall Street, the New York Stock Exchange has been the hub of financial activity in Lower Manhattan for more than a century.
But the buzz emanating from its famous trading floor is dying down as computerized trading has rapidly reduced the need for face-to-face transactions. In the next several weeks, the exchange plans to shut two trading rooms that were added decades ago, when its status as the place to buy and sell stocks was unchallenged.

Isn’t this virtualization and distribution what Asymptote’s Virtual NYSE was all about (above)?
The history of the market and marketplace as an urban type is well documented. The exchange of goods and services, which fueled the urbanization of the world, is an fascinating study in itself. See for instance the guilds and markets in medieval Paris where the Hanseatic League’s motto was Stadt Luft macht frei (The air of a city makes people free) and the proliferation of commerce and the market. (Sennett, Flesh and Stone p 155)

Market:

• a meeting together of people for the purpose of trade by private purchase and sale and usually not by auction.
• the course of commercial activity by which the exchange of commodities is effected

It is interesting that the virtualization of the stock exchange hasn’t occurred at a quicker pace. Centralization of services and commerce made sense when face-to-face trades and sales were necessitated by lack of long-range communication and travel options. Goods and services by necessity were bound together at a point in time and space, originally in farmers markets then larger commodities markets, which were aided by technology: horse and buggy, then rail service and through advancements in communications. Now commerce acts like a grid or cloud – omnipresent – due to similar advancement of technology.
Larger market forces have acted on the marketplace which have rendered the marketplace largely irreverent to transactions of a certain size and type. The marketplace, be it Greenmarket or Spitalfields, exists only due the efficiency the marketplace engenders for businesses of a certain size and type, nostalgia and historical inertia. Capitalism’s natural quest for efficiency and profit, has rendered both nostalgia and inertia moot; thus the reduction in need for large centralized trading floors.
Similar centralized assemblages of trade and capital will no doubt face the same fate. However, there are certain assemblages which will weather this storm better than the NYSE; assemblages which market forces of capitalism and efficiency do not wholly dictate their purpose.
Governments and administrative bodies where historical inertia and nostalgia outweigh any concern for global efficiency. Even global bodies such as the United Nations periodically meet, with meetings often featuring multiple heads of state such as this week for the sixty-second General Assembly in New York.
Social functions such as these will continue to dictate centralized face-to-face meetings. Until the next technological advance.