Information and communication technologies are said to be transforming urban life dramatically and bringing about rapid economic and cultural globalization. This book explores the many fascinating and urgent issues involved by relating advanced theoretical debates to practical matters of communication with cultural policy. It maps out a range of `optimistic′ and `pessimistic′ scenarios with special regard to various forms of inequality, particularly class, gender and geopolitical. Topics discussed include urban planning, virtual cities and actual cities, economic and political policy, and critical social analysis of current trends that are of momentous consequence. The book concludes that it is necessary to bring together a number of differently informing approaches, cultural, economic, political and technological, to make sense of a field of dynamic and contradictory forces.
Table of Content
Introduction – Jim Mc Guigan
PART ONE: DEBATES
Towards Urban Cyberspace Planning – Stephen Graham
Grounding the Global through Urban Telematics Policy and Planning
Foreclosing on the City? The Bad Idea of Virtual Urbanism – Kevin Robins
Information and Communications Technologies – Frank Webster
Luddism Revisited
PART TWO: TEXTURES
Fishing with False Teeth – Simone Bergman and Liesbet van Zoonen
Women, Gender and the Internet
The Ideal City and the Virtual Hive – Julian Stallabrass
Modernism and Emergent Order in Computer Culture
PART THREE: TERRITORIES
Xs 4 All? `Information Society′ Policy and Practice in the European Union – John Downey
Beyond Infrastructure – Leen d′Haenens
Europe, The USA and Canada on the Information Highway
Technocities and Development – Simon Bell
Images of Inferno and Utopia
PART FOUR: PERSPECTIVES
Designs on the City – John Pickering
Urban Experience in the Age of Electronic Reproduction
New Technologies – Douglas Kellner
Technocities and the Prospects for Democratization
About the author
Jim Mc Guigan is a freelance researcher, writer and artist. He is also Emeritus Professor of Cultural Analysis at Loughborough University UK. Previously, he taught at Coventry, Leeds, Leeds Trinity, Open and Wolverhampton Universities. He was a research officer at the Arts Council of GB and a script editor in the BBC TV Drama (Plays) Department. He has been a visiting scholar at, amongst others, the Universities of Bergen, Canberra, Canterbury (Christchurch NZ), Catalonia, Copenhagen, Eastern Finland, Izmir, Jyvaskyla, Rostock and at IFK Vienna. He has delivered keynote addresses at conferences and guest lectures in Australia, Austria, Canada, Croatia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Norway as well as at various universities in Britain and elsewhere. He has, for instance, served on the Art and Humanities Research Council and the European Commission. Jim’s main academic interests are in social theory, cultural studies and policy. He has published in many book collections and journals, including Cultural Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies, International Journal of Cultural Policy, Keywords, New Left Review, New Statesman, Social Semiotics, Sociological Review and Sociology. His books include Cultural Populism (1992), Culture and the Public Sphere (1996), Cultural Methodologies (1997), Modernity and Postmodern Culture (1999, 2006), Rethinking Cultural Policy (2004), Cool Capitalism (2009), Cultural Analysis (2010), Raymond Williams on Culture and Society (2014), A Short Counter-Revolution – Raymond Williams’s Towards 2000 Revisited (2015) and Neoliberal Culture (2016). He is currently working on a book about Raymond Williams.
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