ABSTRACT
These economic and social shifts have led to a growing concern amongst urban planners and policy-makers to address the environmental dimensions of their cities. Planners are trying to address the legacies of pollution and dereliction from the industrial era as well as the side-effects of burgeoning traffic congestion. The need to compete as an attractive business environment is joining with wider social awareness to force environmental issues to the top of the urban agenda. Concern now centres on the need for environmentally sustainable urban futures. Once again much attention here has turned to the potential role of telecommunications and telematics for contributing towards the development of more sustainable cities (Gillespie, 1992). Most often, however, this analysis has been hampered by the assumption that telematics-based flows of electronic information can be used directly to substitute for the environmentally damaging flows of physical transportation. More critical scrutiny of such ideas casts doubt on such claims, however, because they rely on oversimplified conceptions of the relationships between urban environments and telecommunications.
