ABSTRACT
Urban studies, policy and planning have long neglected telecommunications (Mandlebaum 1986), while communications-studies disciplines have virtually ignored the city as a focus of research (Jowett 1993). It is not therefore surprising that, while popular speculation about what ‘cyberspace’, the ‘information superhighway’ and ‘National Information Infrastructures’ mean for the future of cities grows quickly, these debates tend to be lost in a cloud of hyperbole and hype. So far, most debates tend to generate much more heat than light (Burstein and Kline 1995). Often, they are extremely simplistic, relying on assumed and unjustified assumptions about how current advances in telecommunications will ‘impact’ on cities.
