ABSTRACT
In this chapter we have argued that the neglect of telecommunications in the mainstream of urban studies and policy-making is becoming so serious that it threatens to undermine the prevailing paradigms which underpin them. The different elements of this threatening paradigm challenge have been analysed in detail: the challenge of invisibility, the conceptual challenge and the challenge to urban planning. As a route away from this paradigm challenge, we have explored some of the insights provided by recent cultural commentary on urban change that has emerged from debates about post-modernism. This allowed us to highlight a range of new approaches to the conceptualisation of space, time and cities and to review recent approaches which place a more central emphasis on the increasingly telemediated nature of contemporary urban life. Improved understanding of citytelecommunications relations, it seems, can best be achieved through exploring the interactions between cities as fixed places where networks intersect and telecommunications as supports for a myriad of electronic spaces which operate free of time and space constraints.
