ABSTRACT
Historical context is that there are a range of different theoretical approaches to understanding what the digital city is and how associated urban changes are constituted. This chapter looks at relatively recent perspectives and paradigms as some of the main originators of the digital, and smart, city discourses and practices. It focuses on the convenience, around the beginning of the 1990s, the period when the interne started to be popularised. The complexity of the development of both cities and technologies means that looking at digital urbanism is a much more nuanced matter than simply charting the straightforward 'impacts' of a new piece of software or hardware on the city, and on urban life in general. The chapter presents a case study about wired cities, cyberspace and smart urbanism. The technology designers in these studies coped with developing new community information utilities by viewing the projects as analogous to existing exemplar technologies with which they were familiar.
