The Tale of Two Global Cities

Since the mid-1980s, telecommunications and information technologies (IT) have become more intensely bound up than ever before in the social, economic, political and cultural processes and transformations which are increasingly concentrated in and between key strategic urban places across the globe. By analysing telecommunications developments in Paris and London, this book offers an explicit comparative and cross-national approach to the development of urban telecommunications infrastructures and to the development of global cities through a focus on these crucial infrastructures. The case studies are founded solidly on a critical discussion of and engagement with the most relevant and recent debates and theories in urban studies, geography and planning. By examining differing, but parallel influences of national, urban and local contexts, processes and practices bound up in telecommunications developments, the book firmly underlines the inherently territorial basis of these developments and their multi-scalar elements and implications, all of which are being reinforced by the current stringent strategic retrenching of telecommunications operations around the globe.