ABSTRACT
However, it is equally clear that care needs to be taken to avoid overdramatising the telecommunications-based changes underway in cities. A historical perspective, the experience of many failed Utopian forecasts, and the danger of falling into the language of hype teach us to avoid sensationalism when approaching telematics and cities (Thrift, 1993). When current trends towards increased speed and mobility are placed in a historical perspective, they actually appear to be an intensification of processes that have a history as long as the modern, industrial city itself. The current analytical challenges to urban studies echo the ones which existed at the beginning of the twentieth century. As Stephen Kern has so ably demonstrated (1983), at that time, the seemingly fantastical technologies of the bicycle, telegraph, telephone, electric light and power networks and railway totally challenged and remade prevailing paradigms of understanding cities, space, distance and time that were rooted in the pre-industrial past. From the slow, linear experience of a single space and time came a brave new world dominated by a bewildering simultaneity. Many spaces and times became superimposed within the strictures of a single experience or economic event. In many ways, then, the current changes that come with the application of computerised communications in urban society reflect merely the latest intensification of a movement towards a speeded-up ‘information society’ that has roots in the initial industrialisation process (Beniger, 1986). Anthony Giddens has argued powerfully that these trends are fundamental features of modern, industrial societies. They represent what he calls ‘a dislocation of space from place’, because transport and telecommunications networks allow modern social systems to ‘disembed’ from their local, physical contexts to operate at much wider scales of space and time than were previously possible (Giddens, 1990; 24).
