Technocities: The Culture and Political Economy of the Digital Revolution

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 Contents:
Introduction - Jim McGuigan 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 McGuigan 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.

Review :
`I would be even more general than the book jacket and suggest that any reader interested in placing their own use of technology in a wider context will find something of interest in this multi-faceted book′ - Outline 9