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.

• Cover 2
• Contents 7
• List of Contributors 9
• Acknowledgements 11
• Introduction 13
• 1 Towards Urban Cyberspace Planning: Grounding the Global through Urban Telematics Policy and Planning 21
• PART 1 - DEBATES 21
• 2 Foreclosing on the City? The Bad Idea of Virtual Urbanism 46
• 3 Information and Communications Technologies: Luddism Revisited 72
• PART 2 - TEXTURES 102
• 4 Fishing with False Teeth: Women, Gender and the Internet 102
• 5 The Ideal City and the Virtual Hive: Modernism and Emergent Order in Computer Culture 120
• PART 3 - TERRITORIES 133
• 6 XS 4 All? ‘Information Society’ Policy and Practice in the European Union 133
• 7 Beyond Infrastructure: Europe, the USA, and Canada on the Information Highway 151