ABSTRACT
A key argument of this book that the current burgeoning importance of telecommunications fundamentally challenges the paradigms underpinning urban studies and policy-making. Even the recent growth of research on urban telecommunications has largely failed to reach beyond the specialist audience to help shift telecommunications from the margins to the centre of contemporary understanding of cities. As a result, the conceptual and policy-making frameworks built up since the nineteenth century to deal with the physical, geographical, social and environmental aspects of the industrial city still tend to underpin-at least implicitly-a large proportion of urban analysis and policy-making. These approaches to understanding cities seem less and less able to cope with current urban change, as it becomes more and more mediated at the most fundamental level by telecommunications. The remarkable neglect of telecommunications in urban studies means that current very rapid telecommunications-based changes in cities demand a corresponding shift in the analysis and understanding of cities and the processes of urban development. But because these have yet to emerge fully, we argue, many urban analysts and policy-makers still see cities through analytical lenses which actually have less and less to do with the real dynamics of telecommunications-based urban development. There is, in short, a threatening ‘paradigm crisis’.
