1
INTRODUCTION
Telecommunications and the city: parallel transformations
TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND URBAN TRANSFORMATIONS
A rapid transformation is currently overtaking advanced industrial cities. As we approach the verge of a new millennium, old ideas and assumptions about the development, planning and management of the modern, industrial city seem less and less useful. Accepted notions about the nature of space, time, distance and the processes of urban life are similarly under question. The boundaries separating what is private and what is public within cities are shifting fast. Urban life seems more volatile and speeded up, more uncertain, more fragmented and more bewildering than at any time since the end of the last century.
Apparently central to this transformation, according to nearly all commentators, are remarkable leaps in the capability and significance of telecommunications. Much of contemporary urban change seems to involve, at least in part, the application of new telecommunications infrastructures and services to transcend spatial barriers instantaneously. Telecommunicationsâliterally communications from afarâ fundamentally adjust space and time barriersâthe basic dimensions of human life (Abler, 1977). They connect widely separated points and places together with very little delayâthat is, in ways that approach âreal timeâ.
As telecommunications themselves become digital and based on microelectronics, they are merging with digital computer and media technologies. These are diffusing into a growing proportion of homes, institutions, workplaces, machines and infrastructures. The result of this merging is a process of technological convergence and a wide and fast-growing range of so-called âtelematicsâ networks and services. Following the French word tĂ©lĂ©matique, coined in 1978 by Nora and Minc (1978), âtelematicsâ refers to services and infrastructures which link computer and digital media equipment over telecommunications links. Telematics are providing the technological foundations for rapid innovation in computer networking and voice, data, image and video communications. It is increasingly obvious that telematics are being applied across all the social and economic sectors and functions that combine to make up contemporary cities. It is also clear that telematics operate at all geographical scalesâfrom within single buildings to transglobal networks. As William Melody argues, âinformation gathering, processing, storage and transmission over efficient telecommunications networks is the foundation on which developed economies will close the twentieth centuryâ (Melody, 1986).
As part of this transformation, cities are being filled with what Judy Hillman calls âgigantic invisible cobwebsâ of optic fibre, copper cable, wireless, microwave and satellite communications networks (Hillman, 1991; 1). The corridors between cities, whether they be made up of land, ocean or space, are in turn developing to house giant lattices of advanced telecommunications links. These connect the urban hubs together into global electronic grids. Such grids now encircle the planet and provide the technological basis for the burgeoning flows of global telecommunications traffic: voice flows, faxes, data flows, image flows, TV and video signals. Instantaneous electronic flows now explode into the physical spaces of cities and buildings and seem to underpin and cross-cut all elements of urban life.
Clearly, then, contemporary cities are not just dense physical agglomerations of buildings, the crossroads of transportation networks, or the main centres of economic, social and cultural life. The roles of cities as electronic hubs for telecommunications and telematics networks also needs to be considered. Urban areas are the dominant centres of demand for telecommunications and the nerve centres of the electronic grids that radiate from them. In fact, there tends to be a strong and synergistic connection between cities and these new infrastructure networks. Citiesâthe great physical artefacts built up by industrial civilisationâare now the powerhouses of communications whose traffic floods across global telecommunications networksâthe largest technological systems ever devised by humans.
Many have argued that these shifts are part of a wider technological and economic revolution which seems to be underway within advanced industrial societies and within which both the development of telecommunications and urban change hold central significance (see Miles and Robins, 1992). A wide and sometimes confusing range of analytical perspectives have developed that try to chart this transformation from an industrial, manufacturing dominated society to one dominated by information, communications, symbols and services.1 Because western societies are fundamentally urban societiesâwith between 60 and 90 per cent of their populations living in towns and citiesâcities are at the front line of this revolution. Cities are the dominant population, communication, transaction and business concentrations of our society. This makes them the central arenas within which we would expect the effects of current telecommunications innovations to be felt. As we move towards an urban society based more and more on the rapid circulation of messages, signs and information via global electronic networks, it would therefore be hard to pinpoint a more important set of technologyâsociety relations than those which link cities to telecommunications.
THE URBAN âIMPACTSâ OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS
But what are the implications of these shifts? What becomes of cities in an era dominated by electronic flows and networks? What fate lies in store for our urban areas in the world where âvirtual corporationsâ, âvirtual communitiesâ and the abstract âelectronic territoryâ of âcyberspaceâ are developing, based fundamentally on the use of telematics as space and time transcending technologies?
The growing use and significance of telecommunications throws up many profound and fundamental questions which go to the heart of current debates about cities and urban life both today and in the future. For example, how do cities and urban life interrelate with the proliferation of electronic networks in all walks of life and at all geographical scales? What happens to cities in the shift away from an economy based on the production and the circulation of material goods to one based more and more on the circulation and consumption of symbolic and âinformationalâ goods? (Lash and Urry, 1994). How are cities to sustain themselves economically given that more and more of their traditional economic advantages seem to be accessible, âon-lineâ, from virtually any location? Are cities being affected physically by advances in telecommunications as many claim they were in previous eras by the railway and the automobile? How does the movement from physical, local neighbourhoods to specialised social communities sustained over electronic networksâsuch as those on the Internetâaffect the social life of cities? How are social power relations and the traditional social struggles within cities reflected in the new era of telecommunications? What is the relevance of telecommunications for burgeoning current debates about the âenvironmental sustainabilityâ of industrial cities? And what do all these changes imply for the ways in which cities are planned, managed and governed?
Such questions have recently stimulated much speculation and debate about the future of cities and the role of advances in telecommunications in urban change. Many commentators excitedly predict very radical changes in the nature of the city and urban life as advanced telecommunications, telematics and computers weave into every corner of urban life and so âimpactâ on cities. Arguments that this will mean the dissolution of the cities and the emergence of decentralised networks of small-scale communities or âelectronic cottagesâ are widespread. In fact they are so common that visions of the end of cities seem almost to have reached the status of accepted orthodoxy within some elements of the popular media. Here, speculations abound surrounding the apparently revolutionary importance of the âcommunications revolutionâ, the âinformation ageâ, the âinformation superhighwayâ, âcyberspaceâ or the âvirtual communityâ for the future of cities.
Unfortunately, however, these debates tend to be heavily clouded by hype and half-truth. They have generated much more heat than light. Such debates often tend also to be extremely simplistic, relying on assumed and unjustified assumptions about how telecommunications impact on cities. Many accounts of cityâ telecommunications relations amount to little more than poorly informed technological forecasts. Often, these are aimed at attracting media attention or generating sales and glamour for technological equipment. As a result, remarkably little real progress has been made in debates about telecommunications and cities. Amidst all the general hype about telecommunications and cities, remarkably little real empirical analysis of cityâtelecommunications relations exists.
This leaves the terrain open to extremes of optimism and pessimism. On the one hand, utopianists and futurologists herald telecommunications as the quick-fix solution to the social, environmental or political ills of the industrial city and industrial society more widely. On the other, dystopians or anti-utopians paint portraits of an increasingly polarised and depressing urban era dominated by global corporations who shape telematics and the new urban forces in their own image. Meanwhile, the increasing importance of telecommunications in cities has stimulated urban policy-makers, managers and planners to begin to get involved in the development of telecommunications within their cities. But they, too, often remain confused about how their cities are really affected by developments in telecommunications. This, and the need to be seen to be successful means that they themselves can become prone to hyping up their urban telecommunications policies in the language of the quick technical fix.
The immaturity and neglect of urban telecommunications studies means that there has been a tendency to approach the whole subject without trying to justify the theory or methodologies adopted. In the excitement to address these neglected and important areas, Warren (1989) notes what he calls a âcandy store effectâ:
The topic [of telematics and urban development] creates a âcandy storeâ effect by providing license to deal with a range of phenomena. The result is an effort to cover far too much with no logic or theory offered to explain why some consequences are discussed and others are not and why some evidence is presented and other findings are notâŠ. We are left with an analysis which lacks any theoretical base and an explicit methodology, gives more attention to marginal than primary effects of telematics, and, in many instances, is in conflict with a significant body of research.
THE NEGLECT OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS IN URBAN STUDIES
This âcandy storeâ effect is one symptom of the wider immaturity and neglect of telecommunications issues in both urban studies and urban planning and policy-making. In many ways, cities can be thought of as giant engines of communicationâphysical, social and electronic (Meier, 1962; Pool, 1977). We might therefore expect technologies that allow communication over distancesâthat is tele communicationsâto be a central focus of disciplines which aim to understand the city and professions involved in urban planning and management. This is especially so given that telecommunications are absolutely central to current innovation and restructuring all of the activities that combine to make cities: in manufacturing, transportation, consumer and producer services; in leisure, media and entertainment industries; in education, urban government, public services and urban utilities; and in social and cultural life.
But, despite these two points, telecommunications remain far from being a central focus in urban studies or urban policy-making. The subject of telecommunications and cities is a curiously neglected and extremely immature field of policy and research. Urban telecommunications studies remains perhaps the most underdeveloped field of urban studies. Telecommunications is also one of the least developed areas of urban policy (Mandlebaum, 1986). Recently Michael Batty argued that âinterest and insights into the impact of communications patterns on the city with respect to information flow haveâŠbeen virtually non-existentâ (Batty, 1990a; 248) and that current âunderstanding of the impacts of information technology on cities is still woefully inadequateâ (ibid.; 250).
Urban studies and policy remain remarkably blind to telecommunications issues. Compared to the enormous effort expended by urban analysts and policy-makers on, say, urban transportation, urban telecommunications have received only a tiny amount of attention. Vast libraries and many professional bodies and dedicated journals now exist in the field of urban transport issues; only a handful of books have directly looked at telecommunications and the city.2 Things have not greatly changed since Bertram Gross argued in 1973 that âurban planners seem most comfortable when dealing with urban problems in terms of transportation. Indeed, the most advanced techniques and the most âscientificâ body of knowledge readily available to such decision makers are those of transportâŠ. Urban plannersâŠmust become aware of the problems and possibilities of telecommunicationsâ (Gross, 1973; 29). âUrban analystâ or âcommentatorâ could easily replace âplannerâ here. At most only about a dozen urban commentators in the Anglo-Saxon world have directly researched the relationships between telecommunications and urban development since Gross made that statement. Only rarely have these had much impact of the urban disciplines.
This relative neglect means that the field has been left open to other non-urban specialists who have developed very influential speculations on how cities might relate to telecommunications. Importantly, though, these speculations have not been based on any particular under...