Technocities

Information and communication technologies are said to be transforming urban life dramatically and bringing about rapid economic and cultural globalization. This book explores the many fascinating and urgent issues involved by relating advanced theoretical debates to practical matters of communication with cultural policy. It maps out a range of `optimistic′ and `pessimistic′ scenarios with special regard to various forms of inequality, particularly class, gender and geopolitical. Topics discussed include urban planning, virtual cities and actual cities, economic and political policy, and critical social analysis of current trends that are of momentous consequence. The book concludes that it is necessary to bring together a number of diffe

Information and communication technologies are said to be transforming urban life dramatically and bringing about rapid economic and cultural globalization. This book explores the many fascinating and urgent issues involved by relating advanced theoretical debates to practical matters of communication with cultural policy. It maps out a range of `optimistic′ and `pessimistic′ scenarios with special regard to various forms of inequality, particularly class, gender and geopolitical. Topics discussed include urban planning, virtual cities and actual cities, economic and political policy, and critical social analysis of current trends that are of momentous consequence. The book concludes that it is necessary to bring together a number of differently informing approaches, cultural, economic, political and technological, to make sense of a field of dynamic and contradictory forces.

Introduction - Jim McGuigan
PART ONE: DEBATES
Towards Urban Cyberspace Planning - Stephen Graham
Grounding the Global through Urban Telematics Policy and Planning
Foreclosing on the City? The Bad Idea of Virtual Urbanism - Kevin Robins
Information and Communications Technologies - Frank Webster
Luddism Revisited
PART TWO: TEXTURES
Fishing with False Teeth - Simone Bergman and Liesbet van Zoonen
Women, Gender and the Internet
The Ideal City and the Virtual Hive - Julian Stallabrass
Modernism and Emergent Order in Computer Culture
PART THREE: TERRITORIES
Xs 4 All? `Information Society′ Policy and Practice in the European Union - John Downey
Beyond Infrastructure - Leen d′Haenens
Europe, The USA and Canada on the Information Highway
Technocities and Development - Simon Bell
Images of Inferno and Utopia
PART FOUR: PERSPECTIVES
Designs on the City - John Pickering
Urban Experience in the Age of Electronic Reproduction
New Technologies - Douglas Kellner
Technocities and the Prospects for Democratization