Stephen Graham

Increasing amounts of information processing capacity are embedded in the environment around us. The informational landscape is both a repository of data and also increasingly communicates and processes information. No longer confined to desk tops, computers have become both mobile and also disassembled. Many everyday objects now embed computer processing power, while others are activated by passing sensors, transponders and processors. The distributed processing in the world around us is often claimed to be a pervasive or ubiquitous computing environment: a world of ambient intelligence, happening around us on the periphery of our awareness, where our environment is not a passive backdrop but an active agent in organizing daily lives. The spaces around us are now being continually forged and reforged in informational and communicative processes. It is a world where we not only think of cities but cities think of us, where the environment reflexively monitors our behaviour. This paper suggests that we need to unpack the embedded politics of this process. It outlines the three key emerging dynamics in terms of environments that learn and possess anticipation and memory, the efficacy of technological mythologies and the politics of visibility. To examine the assumptions and implications behind this the paper explores three contrasting forms of ‘sentient’ urban environments. The first addresses market-led visions of customized consumer worlds. The second explores military plans for profiling and targeting. Finally, the third looks at artistic endeavours to re-enchant and contest the urban informational landscape of urban sentience. Each, we suggest, shows a powerful dynamic of the environment tracking, predicting and recalling usage.

Much theoretical commentary over the last decade addressed the likely impacts of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on urban life works by opposing ‘virtual’ spaces and mediated activities to ‘real’ places. Drawing on recent theorising in media studies about ‘remediation’, this paper attempts to move beyond a reliance on such unhelpful real–virtual conceptual binaries. The paper uses such conceptual discussions to consider more fully the multiple, subtle, and interdependent spatiotemporalities which together work to constitute ICT-based urban change. While innovative work has traced the emergence of various online spaces and communities, our interest here is on the intersection of online and offline practices. Through a case study of two contrasting neighbourhoods in Newcastle upon Tyne, the paper explores in detail how social relations and grocery shopping are being affected by ICT use. It suggests that the remediation of everyday urban life through ICTs involves subtle shifts in the spatial, temporal, scalar, and material processes which together help to constitute urban change, and which are all too often overlooked in conventional and binary approaches opposing the ‘virtual’ realm of new technologies to ‘real’ urban places.

This paper proposes a new way of conceptualising urban 'digital divides'. It focuses on the ways in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) unevenly affect the pace of life within the urban environment. Based on a detailed case study of how ICTs are being used in an affluent and a marginalised neighbourhood in Newcastle upon Tyne, the paper suggests that urban digital divides need to be understood as more than uneven patterns of access. They emerge in this work as more than the presence or absence of specific technological artefacts. Rather, it is argued that different styles and speeds of technologically mediated life now work to define urban socio-spatial inequalities. The paper distinguishes between two such key styles and speeds. First, the paper argues that affluent and professional groups now use new media technologies pervasively and continuously as the 'background' infrastructure to sustain privileged and intensely distanciated, but time-stressed, lifestyles. Secondly, more marginalised neighbourhoods tend to be characterised by instrumental and episodic ICT usage patterns which are often collectively organised through strong neighbourhood ties. For the former, mediated networks help to orchestrate neighbourhood ties; for the latter, it is those neighbourhood ties that enable on-line access.

In this follow‐up to a piece originally published in City 8(2), Stephen Graham offers a detailed portrait of the tactics and techniques of contemporary urban warfare. As cities have become more reliant than ever on networks, and as their infrastructures have become more fragile due to the vagaries of neoliberal privatization, urban‐based warfare, which targets the systems—informational, medical, agricultural, and technological—that sustain the civilian populations of cities, has had disastrous consequences. Although terrorists have chosen to target urban infrastructures in an attempt to disrupt modern urban life, Graham suggests that the greater threat to metropolitan existence comes from systematic attempts by traditional powers, such as the United States, to disrupt urban networks, thereby effectively ‘switching cities off’. Policies of what Graham calls ‘deliberate demodernization’ have become the hallmark of US air power. Although such policies are thought to bring about asymmetrical military advantage, they also place civilian populations at risk. Such policies represent thus perpetuation of total war in a different key. Graham concludes by calling for further research into the new geopolitics of infrastructural warfare.

This paper addresses the ways in which urban regions are represented in contemporary urban policies. In doing so, it critically examines how urban trends are reflected in diverse notions of 'cityness' in contemporary policy discourses about spatiality and territoriality. Through a detailed case study of the use and construction of the word 'city' in a range of urban governance contexts in Newcastle upon Tyne, this paper analyses the political work done by diverse representations and invocations of 'cityness' in contemporary urban governance. Such representations matter because the way in which contemporary cities are conceptualised influences policy formulations and policy outcomes. In addition, considerable emphasis is being placed in contemporary urban policy on 'joining-up', 'integrating' and co-ordinating governance efforts. How conceptions of the city are mobilised to do such integrating work provides insight into the challenge such ambitions present. The evidence from the case study suggests that the capacity of local actors to think about the processes of change in metropolitan regions, and to define the ways in which they can respond, is often limited, as they struggle to define what their 'city' actually might be these days. This tends to be to the detriment of collective attempts to maximise conditions for citizens and for investment.