ABSTRACT
A strong anti-urban emphasis on the environmentally and socially destructive nature of twentieth-century cities permeates this approach to city-telecommunications analysis. As John Gold argues, underpinning many futuristic visions of the 1960s and 1970s was ‘a prevailing hostility towards the metropolitan city and a social philosophy that aims to break up the mass society and recreate smaller communities’ (Gold, 1990; 22). Following the long-standing utopianism of people like Ebenezer Howard and Frank Lloyd Wright, industrial cities are seen to be ‘sick’ (Mason and Jennings, 1982) or ‘unnatural’—extreme concentrations that were aberrations created by the industrial revolution. Advances in telematics, as the cause of urban decentralisation or even dissolution, are therefore heralded as solutions to many of the ills of contemporary urban society. These sorts of ideas have a long history. Peter Goldmark, for example, predicted that telecommuting to work would liberate people from the ‘conditions of extreme density within the confines of cities and their suburbs’ that they were forced to endure as a result of the growth of the great industrial metropolis (Goldmark, 1972). People, he argued, were ‘physiologically and psychologically unprepared for’ this ‘unnatural’ life; cities were the areas where ‘problems of crime, pollution, poverty, traffic, education etc. are the greatest’.
