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Cities in the Telecommunications Age: The Fracturing of Geographies. James Wheeler, Yuko Aoyama, and Barney Warf, editors

An interesting thing about technology is that, under various guises, it keeps everything mixed up. Of course, in no realm is this truer than telecommunications technologies. We are inundated regularly with reports of the revolutionary effects of wired and wireless technologies, the wonders of global positioning systems, Internet appliances, and the adjective smart applied to everything from cars to toasters to ceiling fans. As a result, every few years, a new book on urban telecommunications issues is needed to sort out the terrain and figure out the latest effects of this rapidly changing set of technologies on a much more slowly evolving entity: the city. In the 1990s, as the digitalization of information moved to inevitability, the leading treatises on urban telecommunications included William Mitchell's (1996) City of Bits, and Steve Graham and Simon Marvin's (1996) Telecommunications and the City. One of the first candidates up in the new millennium is Cities in the Telecommunications Age: The Fracturing of Geographies, a reader edited by James Wheeler, Yuko Aoyama, and Barney Warf. It includes 19 chapters divided into an introduction and four substantive sections: (1) cyberspace, (2) telecommunications infrastructure and urban planning, (3) the impacts of telecommunications, and (4) case studies of the impact of telecommunications technologies on urban space. The essays were prepared for a March 1998 conference on telecommunications and the city held at the University of Georgia, so the book is, in effect, a compilation of the best conference papers. The editors structure their book around three analytical objectives: (1) determining the role of telecommunications in creating new geographies of space, (2) how changes in telecommunications technology are bringing changes in innovative activity and economic systems, and (3) a look at case studies of how these technologies are restructuring cities. The book is strongest in its theoretical and critical chapters, particularly those by Manuel Castells, Mitchell Moss and Anthony Townsend, and Barney Warf. Despite having written reams on "the informational city," Castells has always been a bit murky about his concept of "the space of flows." However, his chapter here offers a lucid anatomy of the space of flows, which includes the technological infrastructure, networks of interactions, nodes and hubs, habitats, and electronic spaces. His comments predict increasing conflict between the forces of neoliberal marketization of the Internet and the users of the World Wide Wet)—that is, "grassrooting the space of flows." Moss and Townsend offer a compelling argument about how the deployment of new telecommunications systems alters the place where things occur. In their view, for example, residential space now serves as a workplace, school, and prison through the creative use of technology. Planning tools like zoning are increasingly outmoded by such transitions. Warf offers a reprise of McLuhan's ideas that telecommunications allows "bodies" to be in multiple places at the same time, thus reinventing notions about the body's interaction in urban space. He provides some insights into the way cyberspace and bodies are "shot through with each other" using some nuanced discussion of digital prosthetics, biometrics, cyberpornography, and virtual reality. Unfortunately, the book is noticeably weaker and much more uneven in its empirical chapters, so there are both high points and low points. One of the high points is a chapter by Martin Dodge and Narushige Shiode that measures the spatial distribution of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses on individual computers in the United Kingdom. They provide some graphically interesting maps that depict the concentration of IP addresses in the southeastern United Kingdom. While their findings are not a major news bulletin to telecommunications geographers (i.e., that IP addresses are concen-