Planning the unplannable: How local authorities integrate urban and ICT policy making

THE idea that Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been dramatically changing many aspects of contemporary society is no longer new. The influence of such technologies on our daily activities, as well as the ways we perceive and use space, has attracted the interest of a wide variety of researchers from different backgrounds, and this also has increased the interand multi-disciplinarity of studies concerning space. Particularly within urban studies, concepts, ideas, predictions, models, and metaphors have been mushrooming as researchers have tried to re-conceptualize the city with regards to the information revolution. The “networked city,” the “galactic metropolis,” the “informational city,” the “post-Fordist city,” the “aterritorial city,” and the so-called “post-industrial city” and “post-modern city,” are just a few names that have been given to this urban phenomenon. Recent references to the city relate the constant and rapid development of ICTs to the re-definition of notions of space, time, distance, territory, landscape, mediation, presence, and immersion—virtual, physical, and real. According to Moss and Townsend, “information systems are permitting new combinations of people, equipment, and places; as a result, there is a dramatic change in the spatial organization of activities within cities and large metropolitan regions.” Lojkine Batten Drewe Townsend Lewis Castells Lipietz Painter