ABSTRACT
Within a career remarkable for its breadth, depth and impact, Peter Hall has contributed significantly to topics seemingly only tangentially related to urban planning: the information age and technological change. The emergence of what is sometimes called the information age is an outcome of technological change. Although we are presently inundated with data and information, thanks to telecommunications and internet infrastructures, including ever-present mobile devices and networks, this did not seem so in the pre-internet days of the 1980s and early 1990s. Hall's work on the information age and technological innovation is perhaps less known and less cited than his work on world cities, planning, and the history of cities. In many ways, however, this work on the impact of new technologies is at the heart of his understanding of the role of cities.
