ABSTRACT
A critical focus on networked infrastructure – transport, telecommunications, energy, water and streets – offers up a powerful and dynamic way of seeing contemporary cities and urban regions (see Dupuy, 1991). When our analytical focus centres on how the wires, ducts, tunnels, conduits, streets, highways and technical networks that interlace and infuse cities are constructed and used, modern urbanism emerges as an extraordinarily complex and dynamic sociotechnical process. Contemporary urban life is revealed as a ceaseless and mobile interplay between many different scales, from the body to the globe. Such mobile interactions across distances and between scales, mediated by telecommunications, transport, energy and water networks, are the driving connective forces of much-debated processes of ‘globalisation’.
