ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the debates and difficulties associated with imagining cities in a world shifting towards increasingly pervasive and 'real-time' electronic flows. It investigates the problems that have beset attempts to treat telecommunications as a central focus of research within urban studies and urban planning and policy making. The chapter focuses on two sets of influential analyses: one utopian and optimistic, based on predicting a telecommunications-based 'end' of the city; and another critical, dystopian, approach highlighting the emergence of an ensnared, polarised and corporatized urban world based on telecommunications. The chaos of American urban sprawl belongs not just to the city of steel and glass, but also to the other city – the phantom city of media and information. The 'paradigm challenge' of telecommunications to urban studies has three aspects: the challenge of invisibility; the challenge of conceptualising space and time; and the challenge to urban planning.
