ABSTRACT
This leads us to the future of urban places and electronic spaces. Debates about the future of cities and urban society, while gaining ground, are currently somewhat stifled. Futurism is often discredited; the fall-out from the failures of many futuristic and modernist urban plans of the 1960s and 1970s continues. Faith in science and technology as redeeming forces has long since withered with the collapse of modernist assumptions about progress, knowledge and technical rationality. The rate and complexity of change in contemporary cities makes even more daunting the task of the extrapolation of these processes and the prediction of urban futures (Healey et al., 1995). Given the crisis of urban social polarisation, the many questions over the future of urban economies, the continuing environmental crisis in cities, and the radical shifts underway in urban policy and planning, it is not surprising that looking into the future often seems something of a luxury from current standpoints. The ‘paradigm challenge’ brought by the proliferation of electronic spaces further compounds these problems. The inertia and dominance of anachronistic ideas about cities are deeply rooted; the barriers facing sophisticated analysis and intervention in urban telecommunications are daunting. And these problems make it even more difficult to be normative and suggest what kinds of cities and electronic spaces we want and how these urban ideals may be brought to fruition. Of course the answers to such questions presume that there is such a group which can be easily identified from the many disparate and conflicting bodies that make up cities. Perhaps debate should start here by exploring how this ‘we’ might first be identified.
