Impacts of Information Technologies on Urban Economies and Politics*

Economic globalization and telecommunications have contributed to produce a spatiality for the urban which pivots on de-territorialized cross-border networks and territorial locations with massive concentrations of resources. This is not a completely new feature. Over the centuries cities have been at the intersection of processes with supra-urban and even intercontinental scalings. What is different today is the intensity, complexity and global span of these networks, and the extent to which significant portions of economies are now dematerialized and digitalized and hence can travel at great speeds through these networks. Also new is the growing use of digital networks by often poor neighborhood organizations to pursue a variety of both intra-urban and interurban political initiatives. All of this has raised the number of cities that are part of cross-border networks operating at often vast geographic scales. Under these conditions, much of what we experience and represent as the local turns out to be a micro-environment with global span. The new urban spatiality thus produced is partial in a double sense: it accounts for only part of what happens in cities and what cities are about, and it inhabits only part of what we might think of as the space of the city, whether this be understood in terms as diverse as those of a city’s administrative boundaries or in the sense of the multiple public imaginaries that may be present in different sectors of a city’s people. Below I unpack some of the elements that condition this complex pivoting on crossborder networks and territorial localizations, focusing particularly on the urban economy and on the new types of place-centered politics of the global that we see emerging.