ABSTRACT
Without doubt, the microelectronics revolution, digital technologies and the various manifestations of the Internet have had, and continue to have, profound impacts on the structure of urban space. Computer code has become so woven into the fabric of urban space as to be indispensable, profoundly shaping the contours of work, shopping, education, travel and everyday life (Dodge and Kitchin 2005). So central have webpages, email, social media and the like become that simple dichotomies such as online/offline fail to do justice to the ways in which the real and the virtual are interpenetrated. As Graham and Marvin (1996) note, if cities arose to overcome time by using space, information and communications technologies (ICTs) overcome space with time. Hudson-Smith et al. (2009: 271) argue that “computers in cities exist in abundance, of course, but it is cities inside of computers that now define the digital frontier”. Rather than claim that ICTs restructure urban space – a statement that reeks of simplistic technological determinism – it is more accurate to note that ICTs and urban social relations co-evolve, shaping one another in a mutually determinative relationship. As the real and virtual worlds have become shot through with each other, it is more accurate to say that cities and telecommunications are co-evolving.
