THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL The modern networked city in crisis

From the late 1960s a series of powerful critiques of the assumptions underlying the modern urban infrastructural ideal, and its results in practice, emerged. Most of the central tenets of the ideal – the need for public or private infrastructure monopolies, for singular and standardised technological grids across territories, for the ‘binding’ of cities into supposedly ‘coherent’ entities – became deeply problematic and difficult to defend. Twenty years later, as privatisation, liberalisation, globalisation and the application of new technologies weave across the planet, fewer and fewer networks, in fewer and fewer cities, regions and countries, continue to develop in isolation from these critiques, along the ‘pure’ lines of the modern integrated ideal.