Introduction

A revolution is occurring amidst the humdrum activities and commonplace concerns of everyday life in the city. It is a virtually unseen revolutionary transformation whose signs only subliminally reach our consciousness when we enter our homes, travel in our automobiles or step into our workplaces. That quiet transformation is the dawning of the ethereal city, the signposts of which include the miles of cables and fiber-optic wires or cellular towers tucked inconspicuously (or not so inconspicuously) just above or below the skin of the city (Graham and Marvin, 1996). It is a gilt-edged revolution in that it is unleashing progressive and productive possibilities for enhancing community social relations, as well as regressive and destructive possibilities tending toward degrading further the foundations of communitarian relations and alienating inhabitants of the city from others, the physical environment and urban fabric.

Sweeping as it is, this telecommunications revolution is a part of a more farreaching and thoroughgoing revolution operating at the global scale. Manuel Castells (1989: 7–33) has drawn out the implications of the role of knowledge, data and information for the international political economy and cities, positing the emergence and increasing hegemony of an “information mode of development” and the dawning of an increasingly bifurcated “information city.” That is, at the global level, he sees a process of “informationalization” where knowledge and data become the growing basis for capital accumulation by major corporate and transnational corporate players in the global economy.