graham, stephen. "bridging urban digital divides? urban polarisation and information and...

Urban Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1, 33–56, 2002

Bridging Urban Digital Divides? Urban

Polarisation and Information and Communications

Technologies (ICTs)

Stephen Graham

[Paper �rst received, November 2000; in �nal form, June 2001]

Summary. The societal diffusion of information and communications technologies (ICTs)

remains starkly uneven at all scales. It is in the contemporary city that this unevenness becomes

most visible. In cities, clusters and enclaves of ‘superconnected’ people, �rms and institutions

often rest cheek-by-jowel with large numbers of people with non-existent or rudimentary access

to communications technologies. In such a context, this paper has two objectives, re�ected in its

two parts. The �rst part of the paper seeks to demonstrate that dominant trends in ICT develop-

ment are currently helping to support new extremes of social and geographical unevenness within

and between human settlements and cities, in both the North and the South. The paper’s second

part aims to explore the prospect that such stark ‘urban digital divides’ might be ameliorated

through progressive and innovative policy initiatives which treat cities and electronic technologies

in parallel. It does this using a range of illustrative exemplars from a variety of contexts.

1. Introduction

Two dominant trends help to de�ne our age:the most momentous process of urbanisationin human history and an extraordinarily rapid(but highly uneven) application of digitalinformation and communications technolo-gies (ICTs). Close inspection reveals thatthese two trends are actually closely inter-related. Against the widespread assumptionin the 1970s and 1980s that electronic commu-nications will necessarily work to underminethe large metropolitan region, all evidencesuggests that the two are in fact mutuallysupporting each other. Both are constitutiveelements of contemporary processes of mod-ernisation, internationalisation, globalisationand industrialisation. In the global North andthe global South, as well as in newly indus-

trialising and post-communist states, the ap-plication of ICTs within and between cities,whilst an intensely uneven process, thus con-stitutes a critical nexus underpinning the de-velopment of our societies, humansettlements and, indeed, our civilisation.

Why, then, are ICTs helping to facilitateprocesses of intensifying global urbanisa-tion? Three main reasons can be highlighted

(1) ICTs allow specialist urban centres, withtheir high-value-added services and man-ufacturing, to extend their powers, mar-kets and control over ever-more distantregional, national, international and evenglobal hinterlands. ICTs support the ac-celerating and spiralling contacts, trans-

Stephen Graham is in the Centre for Urban Technology , School of Architecture , Planning and Landscape, University of Newcastle,

Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK. Fax: 0191 222 8811. E-mail: [email protected] . The author is grateful to the United

Nations Center for Human Settlements, and particularl y to Willem Vanvliet , for providing the support that made this research possible.

0042-0980 Print/1360-063X On-line/02/010033-24 Ó 2002 The Editors of Urban StudiesDOI: 10.1080/0042098022009905 0

STEPHEN GRAHAM34

actions, communications �ows and inter-actions that help to bind, integrate andadd economic dynamism to the vast, ex-tended and multicentred urban settle-ments, corridors and regions of our age(Wheeler et al., 2000).

(2) In an intensely volatile global economy,the growing speed, complexity and riski-ness of innovation in all sectors—eventhose that can theoretically be pushedentirely on-line—seem to demand a par-allel concentration in those cities withthe assets and ‘innovative milieux’ tosustain on-going competitiveness. Thisexplains why the greatest planning prob-lems in many emerging ‘multimediaclusters’ and digital growth centres incities of the North and South are trans-port and car parking. Workers still needto move their physical bodies to be ‘inthe thick of’ the digital innovation pro-cess, even though their products are theninstantaneously sent on-line to distantmarkets and users (Castells, 1999a).

(3) Demand for ICTs—mobile and land linephones, satellite TVs, computer net-works, electronic commerce, Internetservices—is overwhelmingly driven bythe growth of metropolitan markets.Large ‘global’ cities, especially, are ofdisproportionate importance in drivingall aspects of ICT investment and inno-vation (Graham and Marvin, 1996). Thisis because of the speed, complexity, dy-namism, mobility—and, in the case ofmobile phones, sometimes immobil-ity!—of cities and urban settlements. Itis also because of cities’ cultures ofmodernisation, their concentrations ofcapital, their relatively high disposableincomes and their high concentrations ofinternationally oriented �rms and institu-tions. As much of the economic product-base of cities becomes mediated by �owsof electronic information and symbols,with the progressive digitisation ofmoney, services, media, information,education and logistics, this criticalnexus between cities and ICTs can onlystrengthen.

The complex intersection of human settle-ments and ICTs, which Castells captures asthe complex dialectic between the ‘space of�ows’ and the ‘space of places’, is helping toforge new landscapes of innovation, econ-omic development, cultural interactions, pol-itical dynamics and social inequalities withincities and urban regions (Castells, 1996,1998, 1999a, 1999b) The fabric of manycities and human settlements is becoming sointimately mediated with ICTs and othertechnological systems that some now charac-terise them as ‘cyborg cities’ (Picon, 1998).Others talk of the ‘in�nite city’, made up oftransnational urban corridors. In this, tra-ditional monocentric cities give way to an‘all-pervasive and ever-present urbanisation’and urban culture, strung together by vastcomplexes of technological and communica-tions systems (Skeates, 1997).

The societal diffusion of ICTs remainsstarkly uneven at all scales. It is in the con-temporary city that this unevenness becomesmost visible. In cities, clusters and enclavesof ‘superconnected’ people, �rms and institu-tions, with their increasingly broadband con-nections elsewhere (Internet, mobile phones,satellite TVs) and their intense access toinformation services, often rest cheek-by-jowel with large numbers of people withnon-existent or rudimentary communicationstechnologies and very poor access to elec-tronic information. The social and economiccores and peripheries of the global infor-mation ‘age’, rather then being continentsapart, now often lie geographically adjacentto each other within individual cities. Often,they are literally a few feet apart, separatedby gates, walls and highly uneven accesspatterns to the crucial portals that supportparticipation in electronic domains. Thus,whilst dominant domains of the economic,social and cultural fabric of the planet arenow being mediated with ICTs at an aston-ishing pace, between 60 per cent and 70 percent of the world has never made a phonecall (UNDP, 1999). And, whilst it is growingvery rapidly, the Internet remains the pre-serve of a small global elite of between 2 percent and 5 per cent of the global population.

BRIDGING URBAN DIGITAL DIVIDES? 35

The complex interconnections betweencities and ICTs are evolving within a broadercontext set by political and economic liberal-isation, volatile technological change, thechanging nature of nation-states and an inter-nationalising political economy. Together,these processes of change throw up enor-mous challenges to traditional ways ofunderstanding cities. They particularly chal-lenge those oriented towards land use, physi-cal form, urban design and transport—waysof thinking about industrial-age cities thathave long neglected the importance of elec-tronic communications and technologies inurban life (see Graham and Marvin, 1996,ch. 2).

Many questions emerge at the intersectionof ICTs and human settlements which stillremain largely unaddressed by urban re-searchers. How, for example, do digitallymediated economic �ows articulate with cityeconomies and urban systems in differentplaces and sectors within developed, devel-oping, newly industrialising and post-communist economies? What are therelationships between the application of ICTsand broader processes of social and geo-graphical polarisation that have recently beenobserved within and between cities? Howcan urban analysis and policy-making grap-ple meaningfully with invisible and intan-gible domains of electronic �ow andreal-time international exchanges at multiplegeographical scales? And how can the policyworlds of the city be brought together withthose of cyberspace and ICTs to foster cre-ative policy initiatives that harness the powerof new technologies for positive urban socialand economic development?

In such a context, this paper has two ob-jectives, re�ected in its two main parts. The�rst part of the paper seeks to demonstratethat dominant trends in ICT development arecurrently helping to support new extremes ofsocial and geographical unevenness withinand between human settlements and cities, inboth the North and the South. The paper’ssecond part aims to explore the prospects thatsuch stark ‘urban digital divides’ might beameliorated through progressive and innova-

tive policy initiatives which treat human set-tlements and electronic technologies inparallel. It does this using a range of illustra-tive exemplars from a variety of contexts toback up the argument.

2. Not the ‘Death of Distance’! Not the

‘End of Geography’! ICTs and Urban

Polarisation

Why might the application of ICTs be sup-porting social and geographical polarisationwithin and between the world’s cities? Thisseems an especially apposite question as, at�rst sight, it might appear that new comput-ing and communications technologies offertantalising possibilities for transcending tra-ditional social and geographical barriers?

Advertisements and magazine articles, cer-tainly, endlessly suggest this, with their por-trayals of ICTs, and especially the Internet,as some value-free technological panacea of-fering instant, limitless access to some en-tirely separate and disembodied on-lineworld. In this ‘death of distance’ or ‘end ofgeography’ scenario, an intrinsically equi-table, decentralised and democratic world isseen to be emerging. Within this, everythingwithin the global economic, cultural and so-cial space becomes equally accessible or‘one click away’ (Graham, 1998). ‘Cy-berspace’ is cast as a single, unitary andintrinsically unifying electronic space. It is aspace, moreover, which has somehow over-come the familiar social, economic, culturaland geographical segmentations and inequal-ities of the ‘off-line’, urbanising world.

The reality, however, is both very differentand a good deal more worrying, for there isnow a great deal of evidence that the domi-nant trends surrounding the application ofICTs are serving to underpin and supportprocesses and practices of intensifying urbanpolarisation. This is occurring at every scaleacross the globe. Dominant logics of ICT-based change seem to be underpinning urbanpolarisation, the ‘disembedding’ of dominanteconomic, social and cultural activities, andthe social and technological distancing of thepowerful from the less powerful. There are

STEPHEN GRAHAM36

four reasons why this is so. In what follows,we shall highlight the ways in which ICTs, ascurrently applied by dominant users, tend to

—Extend the power of the powerful;—underpin intensi�ed unevenness through

tying together international divisions oflabour;

—allow socioeconomically af�uent groupsselectively to bypass the local scale; and

—be culturally and economically biased, es-pecially in terms of the wider developmentof what we might term the emerging ‘in-ternational information marketplace’.

2.1 The Uneven Geography of ICTs: How

New Technologies Tend to Extend the Reach

of the Economically and Culturally Powerful

The �rst key point to stress is that, at leastcurrently, the explosion in the use of ICTsoverwhelmingly represents an extraordinaryextension in the social, economic, culturaland geographical powers of those groups andorganisations who are best connected, mosthighly skilled and most able to organise andcon�gure the shift on-line to their own ad-vantage. It is those particular groups, organi-sations and places that are orchestrating theinstantaneous and often international media-tion of money, work, service distribution,transport, leisure and media access, as thesesectors are recon�gured as �ows of elec-tronic signs. So far, they are thus the keybene�ciaries of the ‘information revolution’.As Erik Swyngedouw puts it, far from beinga universally liberating stampede on-line,“the changed mobility, and hence, powerpatterns” associated with new informationtechnologies “may negatively affect the con-trol over place of some while extending thecontrol and power of others” (Swyngedouw,1992, p. 322). It is worth exploring someexamples of this process.

Urban polarisation and the Internet. Our �rstexample is the relationship between theextraordinary growth of the Internet and glo-bal urban polarisation. Whilst it is the fastestdiffusing medium in history, the UNDP still

characterises the Internet as a “global ghetto”encompassing only 2 per cent, or 250 mil-lion, of the most privileged and powerful ofthe global population—over 80 per cent ofwhom live in OECD nations (UNDP, 1999,p. 63). This global 2 per cent—expected torise to 700 million by 2002—tends to beoverwhelmingly relatively wealthy. (In LatinAmerica, 90 per cent of users came fromupper-income brackets; in the UK, 30 percent had salaries over $60 000.) They werehighly educated (globally, 30 per cent had atleast one university degree; in China, theequivalent �gure was 60 per cent, in Mexico,67 per cent, in Ireland, almost 70 per cent).Male users dominated (62 per cent in the US,75 per cent in Brazil, 84 per cent in Russia,93 per cent in China and 94 per cent in theArab states). Internet users tended to beyoung (under 30 years as an average age inthe UK and China; 36 years in the US).Finally, dominant ethnic groups tended todominate Internet use, as did English-speakers. (In 1999, 80 per cent of all globalwebsites were in English, whilst only 10 percent of the world’s population spoke thelanguage (UNDP, 1999, p. 62).

The key concern is how the global me-dium of the Internet relates to the cultures,civil societies and landscapes of local spaces,cities and regions. This relationship tends tobe one of extending the power of the power-ful whilst further marginalising the lesspowerful within the same geographicalspaces—a logic of intense polarisation. Asthe UNDP suggests

the Internet is creating parallel com-munications systems: one for those withincome, education and—literally—con-nections, giving plentiful information atlow costs and high speed; the other forthose without connections, blocked byhigh barriers of time, cost and uncertaintyand dependent on out-dated information.With people in these two systems livingand competing side-by-side, the advan-tages of connection are overpowering. Thevoices and concerns of people already liv-ing in human poverty—lacking incomes,


education and access to public institu-tions—are being increasingly marginalized(UNDP, 1999, p. 62).

People without access to the Internet aredisadvantaged by not having access to theservices and applications that run on it. Thisis especially so as electronic means of organ-ising access to services grow progressivelymore dominant, leading to the downgradingor curtailment of traditional, face-to-face, pa-per-based ways of delivering them. Peoplewithout Internet access can therefore faceextra costs, hurdles and barriers when at-tempting to improve their social and econ-omic positions. This is because they tend tolack the skills, knowledge, equipment, infra-structure access, capital, money, electricityand telephone access necessary to enter, ac-cess and fully exploit the exploding on-lineuniverse, and the working, service and com-municational �ows available within it.

Thus the uneven growth of the Internet,and other ICT-mediated systems, representsa subtle, often invisible, but immenselypowerful process of dualisation within andbetween human settlements. Urban societiesbecome separated into the ‘on-line’ and the‘off-line’ in complex tapestries of inclusionand exclusion which work simultaneously atmultiple geographical scales. Such trends aremultiple, superimposed and complex—butthey are clearly starting to affect layers of thephysical, technological, social and economicarchitecture of cities and systems of humansettlements in very important ways. Con-sider, for example

—The position of people who remainstranded in the worlds of physical cash orthe informal economy, whilst dominantservice providers and consumers in manycities migrate into an electronic cash orformal economy (often withdrawing or re-structuring their networks of physicalof�ces and service-points in the process).

—The ways in which highways and roads incities like Toronto, Melbourne and Singa-pore are starting to be commodi�ed, ren-dering them accessible only to those who

have bank accounts and electronictransponders in their cars.

—The landscapes of booming high-tech cit-ies in the South, like Bangalore (India) andBintan Island (Indonesia). In such cities,huge efforts are being made to con�gureindustrial and technology parks and elitehousing areas with the best possible in-frastructural connections to distant places.At the same time, many informal settle-ments struggle to access a pay-phone,metalled roads, sewerage or electricity.

The Internet and the restructuring of US

cities. In the cities of the North, it tends to below-income and ethnic minority communi-ties that are most excluded from the Internet(Goslee, 1998). In the US, for example, in1997, 24 per cent of whites had on-lineaccess in major cities, whilst only 7 per centof blacks did. Fifty per cent of city residentsearning over $75 000 a year had Internetaccess, but only 6 per cent of those earningless than $10 000 did so (NTIA, 1999). Itshould be remembered that telephone access,too, remains highly uneven, even in theUSA. Only 50 per cent of female-headedhouseholds living at or below the povertyline, and 43.5 per cent of families who de-pend totally on public assistance, have accessto even this basic technology (NTIA, 1999).

Thus, even in advanced industrial nationswith rapidly maturing Internet markets,whole sections of the urban population fail tobene�t from the skills, education, equipment,infrastructure, capital, �nance and supportnecessary to go and remain ‘on-line’. This isso at precisely the time when being on-line isbecoming ever-more critical to access keyresources, information, public services andemployment opportunities. Goslee estimatedthat, by the year 2000 in the US,

60 percent of jobs will require skills withtechnology. Moreover, 75 percent of alltransactions between individuals and thegovernment—including such services asdelivery of food stamps, Social Securitybene�ts, and Medicaid information—willtake place electronically. People without

STEPHEN GRAHAM38

technology skills or access to electroniccommunications will be at a considerabledisadvantage (Goslee, 1998, p. 3).

As James Katz, a community activist in theUS, argues, it is certain that

the rich are going to be getting richer interms of information … the informationpoor will become more impoverished be-cause government bodies, community or-ganisations, and corporations aredisplacing resources from their ordinarychannels of communication onto elec-tronic ones (Katz; quoted in Goslee, 1998,p. 6).

Inner-city communities, especially, face asituation that the now defunct US Of�ce ofTechnology Assessment (OTA) describedthe effect as “the concentration of povertyand the deconcentration of opportunity”—that is, the ghettoisation of non-connectedgroups within central cities at the same timeas ICTs help to support the decentralisationof growing information industries to (periph-eral) ‘edge cities’ (OTA; quoted in Goslee,1998, p. 7).

The Internet is therefore much more thanan unevenly diffused and polarised mediumof communication and expression. It is di-rectly involved in the restructuring of thosecities that drive its development. Certain ur-ban spaces, especially in ‘global’ cites of theNorth, are emerging as dominant power-houses of global Internet production. A newtype of emerging economic enclave isemerging in such cities: the gentrifying ‘cy-ber’ district. Such spaces are now driving theproduction of Internet services, websites andthe whole digitisation of design, architecture,gaming, CD-ROMs and music. The citiesthat are developing such enclaves tend to bethose with very great strengths in the arts,cultural industries, fashion, publishing andcomputing: New York, San Francisco andLondon, to name but three (see Braczyk et

al., 1999).San Francisco’s ‘Multimedia Gulch’ dis-

trict is a classic example. This district is afast-growing media and Internet cluster in

the city’s ‘SOMA’ area. Here, downtownurban neighbourhoods have been refurbishedand gentri�ed to sustain the clusteringdemands of interlocking micro, small andmedium-sized �rms in digital design, adver-tising, gaming, publishing, fashion, music,multimedia, computing and communications.Over 2200 �rms now provide over 56 000jobs in these sectors, up 105 per cent createdbetween 1996 and 1998, as massive capitalmoved north from Silicon Valley (Rothstein,1998). Such processes, however, have set offspirals of gentri�cation, attracting consider-able investment from restaurants, retailers,property �rms, ‘loft’ developers and infra-structure companies and leading to the ex-clusion of lower-income groups from thenewly ‘high-end’ space. Rents have explodedand, somewhat ironically for an industrywhose products can be sent on-line anywhereon earth, parking shortages have becomecritical. Major urban social and politicalcon�icts have emerged as ‘dot.commers’,with their extraordinary wealth, have—alongwith real estate speculators—colonised se-lected districts.

This in�ux, not surprisingly, has dramati-cally driven up rents, leading to the evictionor exclusion of many poorer residents. Underthe banner “the Internet killed San Fran-cisco”, Paul Borshook (1999) outlines thesymptoms of what he calls the ‘Internetting’of San Francisco: commercial real estaterates went up by 42 per cent between 1997and 1999; the median-priced apartment cost$410 000 in August 1999; median rental foran apartment was $2000 per month; andhomelessness rates were rising fast. Land-lords, backed by the relaxation of rent con-trols and tenant protection laws by the CityCouncil in the 1990s, have instigated a hugerise in evictions. The result is a severe hous-ing crisis, the expulsion of poorer peoplefrom the downtown core of the city (as manysimply cannot afford to remain) and the ac-centuation of landscapes of social and geo-graphical polarisation, as pockets of the cityare repackaged as places of work, leisure orliving for Internet-based businesses and en-trepreneurs.


2.2 ICTs as Supports to the Restructuring of

Human Settlements: Integrating Inter-

national Divisions of Labour

Digital capitalism is now free to physicallytranscend territorial boundaries and, moreimportantly, to take economic advantageof the sudden absence of geopoliticalconstraints on its development. Not un-coincidentally, the corporate politicaleconomy is also diffusing more generallyacross the social �eld (Schiller, 1999,p. 205).

The second key point that we need to stresshere is that there is a close connection be-tween ICTs, global urban polarisation andthe extending power of transnational corpo-rations to shape urban development. Againstthe rhetoric that ‘cyberspace’ is a purelyvirtual and disembodied world, the radicalgrowth of ICTs is closely related to the re-structuring of real geographical places at allgeographical scales.

ICT networks and the exploitation of geo-

graphical differences. ICTs offer unparal-lelled choice and �exibility to mobile �rmsand socioeconomic groups to exploit differ-ences between places and people. This isdone through the construction of highly elab-orate divisions of labour which can then beintimately integrated in ‘real time’ throughICTs. Currently, international telecoms tar-iffs are collapsing, capabilities are growingexponentially and mergers, alliances and ac-quisitions in telecom and media industriesare beginning to offer global ‘one-stopshops’ for international corporate ICT sys-tems (Sussman and Lent, 1998). Such capa-bilities enhance the ability of corporations toseparate out or ‘unbundle’ elements withintheir operations to geographically dispersedcities and settlements, whilst maintaining in-timate control and co-ordination.

Thus, transnational companies and theiraf�liates can bene�t from the seamless andinstant integration of plants located in globalnetworks of specialist and very different ur-ban places, with very different labour condi-tions and costs. Broadly, ICTs are being used

to tie together the following ranges of pro-duction sites (see Graham and Marvin, 2001,ch. 7)

—research and development centres in sub-urban technopoles of the North and, to alesser extent, the South (Castells and Hall,1994);

—corporate headquarters and �nancial ser-vice houses in select ‘global’ cities (Gra-ham, 1999);

—cultural, media and multimedia sectors inthe emerging ‘digital clusters’ of someNorthern and a few Southern cities;

—cheap, mobile manufacturing plants in theperipheries of the North and the newlyindustrialising cities of the South;

—decentralising call-centres, data-processing and e-commerce managementcentres in newly emerging e-commerceenclaves across the world (the Caribbean,the Phillipines, Ireland, India, northern andwestern UK) (Wilson, 1998);

—electronically integrated resource extrac-tion activities in minerals, forests, oil�eldsand �sheries; and

—the logistics, seaport and airport hubs thatserve as the transshipment and export pro-cessing zones that lubricate internationali-sation.

As Jean-Marc Offner (1996, p. 26) puts it,rather than somehow causing ‘territory todisappear’, as in the cyberspace dreams of somany IT utopianists, “it is precisely the fact

that a multitude of places exist that createsthe need for exchange” based on ICT net-works (emphasis added). The construction ofICT systems to support intensifying divisionsof labour is further supported by the growthof local efforts to ‘package’ spaces and zoneswith the subsidies, labour forces, infrastruc-ture, services and security to tempt in mobileinvestment. As urban development agenciesstruggle entrepreneurially to con�gure theirspaces with the right local–global (or ‘glo-cal’) infrastructural connections to allowthem to emerge (hopefully) as a valued nodeon international corporate networks, a closenexus emerges between the local productionof infrastructure and urban space and global-

STEPHEN GRAHAM40

ising networks of electronic (and physical)�ow.

The global liberalisation of telecommunica-

tions and the ‘cherry picking’ of urban mar-

kets. In liberalised telecommunicationsregimes such as the US and UK, it has beenshown recently that city regions are nowmarked by mosaics of intensifying uneven-ness, as providers seek to cherry pick onlythe most lucrative business and professionalcustomers from across the urban landscape(Woodbury and Thompson, 1999). Upper-income spaces and buildings with highcomputer ownership and communicationsexpenditure are targets of vast, competitiveinvestment in broadband infrastructure andservices. These allow ‘always on’ Internetwith full streaming multimedia, dedicated‘T-1’ Internet trunk backbones, cable Inter-net, digital subscriber lines and the rapidlydecreasing costs of international communica-tions. In mid 1999, about 86 per cent of allbroadband Internet delivery capacity in theUS was concentrated in the prosperous sub-urbs and business areas of the 20 largestcities (Lieberman, 1999). It is becomingclear that, under conditions of infrastructuralliberalisation

The private sector builds where the highvolume and the money is. In most com-munities the �ber-optic rings circle thebusiness district. If you’re in a poor subur-ban neighborhood or the inner city, you’reat risk. What’s more, providers that havespent years building their infrastructuresdon’t come back and �ll in the under-served neighborhoods . That may be ashrewd �nancial strategy. But the socialimpact could be devastating (Lieberman,1999, p. 1).

Such dualisation is underpinned by the wide-spread shift from standardised marketing byemerging telecom and media conglomerates(within regulated monopolies), to marketingtargeted precisely at socioeconomicallyaf�uent groups and areas (within competitiveoligopolies). AT & T, for example, has nowrecognised that it makes 80 per cent of its $6

billion annual pro�ts from 20 per cent of itscustomers (Schiller, 1999, p. 54). The target-ing of innovation and investment towardsricher groups and spaces is also supported bythe attempts of cross-media alliances to takeadvantage of technological ‘synergies’ in of-fering high-value customers whole baskets ofservices on a single-contract basis across in-ternational spaces (land line and mobilephones, cable TV, broadband Internet andcorporate networks). In the US, for example,the CEO of MCI (now part of the WorldComgroup), John Donaghue, recently stated that

We’re going to change our focus frombeing omnipresent to the entire market totalking to the top third of the consumermarket that represents opportunities incellular, Internet and entertainment(quoted in Schiller, 1999, p. 54).

Dan Schiller calls these consumers the“power users”. These he de�nes as

high value residential customers whospend lavishly on a basket of telecommu-nications and information services, typi-cally including (on an annualised basis)$650 on cellular; $500 on local wirelinephone service; $400 on long distance tele-phony; $375 on cable, pay-per-view andvideo-on-demand; $250 on paging; as wellas hundreds of additional dollars on on-line access, newspapers, magazines, and�ction (Schiller, 1999, p. 54).

As pro�t-driven mergers between telecom-munications and media transnationals start tode�ne and direct the global roll-out of ICTinfrastructure, investment tends to concen-trate on ‘cherry picking’ the market ‘hotspots’: the downtown business districts,high-tech spaces, media clusters and upper-income residential districts of prosperous, in-ternationally oriented and ‘global’ cities. Theconcentration of all information, communica-tions and knowledge infrastructures and in-dustries creates an astonishing pool ofdemand in the business cores of such cities:in 1999, both New York and Tokyo hadmore telephones than the whole of Africa (14million) (Smith, 1999). This concentrated de-


mand drives a frenzy of competitive activityand investment by communication and mediasuppliers of all types. The centres of globalcities like New York and London now havesix or more separate optic-�bre grids, offer-ing the most capable, reliable, competitiveand cost-effective electronic connections onthe planet.

Driven by new start-ups who do not wantto serve whole cities, regions or nations,many of these new city-level �bre networksare precisely limited to demand-rich parts ofthe main business cities. Such networks areconnected seamlessly to each other via newtransoceanic and transcontinental �bre andsatellite networks, creating a global– locallogic which conveniently bypasses bothpoorer parts of global cities and the interven-ing and often peripheral spaces betweenthem.

Re�ecting and reinforcing the ‘globalarchipeligo’ of glocal city cores, small high-capacity networks can start to mediate largeportions of global economic �ows. By 1998,the metropolitan �bre network of World-Com/MCI built recently in London, for ex-ample, had only 180 km of �bre, but it hadalready secured fully 20 per cent of thewhole of the UK’s international telecommu-nications traf�c (Finnie, 1998). As they buildsimilar networks in the major cities of theUS, Europe, Asia and Latin America, alongwith the dedicated transoceanic �bres to con-nect them, WorldCom/MCI and other �rmslike them, are able to bypass incumbent car-riers. As Schiller states

on both sides of the Atlantic, newly estab-lished transatlantic submarine cable facili-ties and urban business networks willallow it to link directly some 4,000 busi-ness buildings in Europe with 27,000 suchbuildings in the United States (Schiller,1999, p. 63).

However, developing cities like Mexico City,Beijing and Sao Paulo, often now face a lackof competitiveness in global telecommunica-tions links. They tend still to face monopolis-tic, state-owned providers who are moreexpensive, less innovative and offer a more

limited bundle of services. Global liberalisa-tion, however, is rapidly changing this situ-ation and cities like Mexico City are rapidly,but unevenly, being wired by Westerntelecommunications �rms (Finnie, 1998;Graham, 1999).

Meanwhile, poorer parts of cities of theNorth—for example, low-income, African–

American and blue-collar neighbourhoods inUS cities—are increasingly prone to underin-vestment and deteriorating service quality asthe universal service regulations that appliedto telephony fail to be translated to regulatebroadband investment. Such spaces are alsobeing disproportionately affected by the ris-ing relative costs of local communications(Schiller, 1999, p. 55). Within liberalisedmarkets, in the context of entrepreneurialplanning, and with the withdrawal of localmonopolies, infrastructure providers are un-likely to target new investment, marketingand innovation in poor communities andmarginalised neighbourhoods—places whichalso tend to face stark exclusion from formal�nancial services, insurance, retailing invest-ment and other services (Speak and Graham,1999). As Hallgren, a US community ac-tivist, has found,

many communities and areas are not per-ceived as having a large enough customerbase to attract a [telecommunications orInternet] company to offer a service, letalone multiple companies (M. Hallgren,personal communication, 17 March 1999).

As marketing and infrastructure developmentstrategies tend to re�ect ever-more the patch-work geographies of fragmented cities, thesituation of Bell Atlantic in New Jersey,reported in the Cybertimes in 1997, is typi-cal. By then, the company, the report argued,had rolled out high-capacity optic-�bre linksand broadband Internet services to “suburbanbusiness parks and large corporations” aswell as “setting a schedule for suburbanneighbourhoods”. But it had “not yet madespeci�c plans for the thousands of poor peo-ple who live in the state’s largest cities”. Norhad it wired the Enterprise Zones that NewJersey City council were developing in the

STEPHEN GRAHAM42

hope of attracting in new corporate invest-ment. Worse still, it had “let its networkdeteriorate in parts of Brooklyn and theBronx, where corroded wires led to scratchylines and service outages” (Schiller, 1999,p. 56). Physical of�ces, used by many poorpeople without bank accounts to pay bills,have also been routinely closed by UStelecommunications �rms, whilst rates fordirectory assistance and local call chargeshave been dramatically raised to re�ect ‘cost-re�ective pricing’ and the withdrawal of so-cial cross-subsidies (Schiller, 1999, p. 57). Ina context where bandwidth and connectivityare, quite literally, the lifeblood of electroniccommerce businesses, these processes workvery directly to prevent new on-line ande-commerce-oriented small businesses fromcompeting within less prosperous, peripheraltowns and marginalised inner-city spaces.Quite simply, ‘the phone line is too small’(Woodbury and Thompson, 1999).

2.3 ICTs, Urban Polarisation and the

Selective Bypassing of the Local

New communication technologies, and ametropolitan transport system, allow peo-ple to stay selectively in touch with thoseindividuals/groups that they want to,whilst disconnecting from the city at large(Castells, 1999b, p. 15).

The third key point to stress is that ICTs alsoallow socioeconomically af�uent urbangroups selectively to overcome the barriersand constraints of local geography by ex-tending and intensifying their access to dis-tant spaces. Increasingly, such groups canuse ICTs to bypass the immediate constraintsand the real or perceived risks of place in theprocess (especially those surrounding crimeand the fear of crime). Thus ICTs like theInternet help their users to connect withoutrisk or fear to services, social groups andpeople across local, national or internationaldistances. At the same time, ICTs can beused to support the selective disassociationof af�uent groups from exposure to the dif-ferences, contrasts, risks and social mixing

traditionally associated with co-habitation inurban streets and spaces. Other technologies,of course, such as the automobile, the priva-tised mall, the mobile phone, the CCTV sys-tem and the gated condominium complex,can be con�gured further to support thisprocess, especially within suburban and post-suburban urban landscapes (Graham andMarvin, 2001).

For some residents in all cities, then, in-stant electronic connection to all geographi-cal scales is becoming more and moreimportant. But, from the point of view ofcities, fracture and social polarisation seemto be the pervasive logic of the intensi�cationand liberalisation of a global capitalist sys-tem within which ICTs play such a facilitat-ing role. As Manuel Castells (1996, 1998)has demonstrated, intensifying global con-nections between the valued and powerfulparts of cities, and the groups and organisa-tions who control and inhabit them, are tend-ing to be combined with a growing sense ofpartitioning and disconnection at the localscale within cities.

The uneven growth of ICTs and ‘cyberspaces’ thus become closely embroiled in therestructuring of real urban space. Walls, ram-parts, security fences, electric fences, armedguards and defensive urban design are thephysical manifestations of this process inboth Northern and Southern cities, as glo-bally connected and ICT-saturated social andeconomic groups and enclaves strive to insu-late themselves from the surrounding land-scapes where poverty and exclusion oftenconcentrate. Once again, ICT systems can becon�gured to help to support the power ofthe well-off to extend their actions in timeand space (with ‘smart’ home technologies,intelligent utility metering, electronic �nanceand consumption systems) whilst also bol-stering the powers they have to maintain safeand secure local spaces (through closed cir-cuit TV-equipped homes, malls and of�cespaces, electronic alarms, movement andface-recognition sensors, electronic gates andelectronically tolled ‘smart’ highways which�lter out the vehicles of the poor).

As cities across the world are restructured


within an increasingly international and lib-eralised capitalist system, it seems that thecommon development model of the South—of high-value enclaves surrounded by land-scapes of marginalisation—is, in a sense,being ‘exported’ to the North, as post-industrial cities face deindustrialisation, so-cial polarisation and the patchy growth ofdigital and service industries and af�uentspaces (Chomsky, 1993). Cities, then, at leastdominant or ‘global’ cities, are the power-houses and innovation and transactional hubsof the internationalising knowledge-basedeconomy. But they are also the places wherethe huge contradictions of ICT-mediatedeconomic, social and cultural change aremost salient and stark. In fact, the explosionof cyberspaces may actually reinforce thestarkness of very real geographical barriersfor many people.

Telecommunications and restructuring in

developing cities. Broadly similar logics ofglobal connection and local disconnectioncan be observed in developing, newly indus-trialising and post-communist cities. PersonalInternet and telephone access tends to bemuch more circumscribed in such cities thanin the global North. Such personal connec-tions are likely to remain beyond the reach ofthe majority of households in most mega-cities and urban regions in the developingworld, in the medium term at least. Infra-structure networks, too, are much less welldeveloped, with many national phone sys-tems falling into a state of disrepair andobsolescence. Even in late 1998, in over 70developing nations, no Internet access ex-isted at all; in many more, text messageswere the limit of the systems and multi-media and even Web access was impossible(Everard, 1999, p. 33).

When they do exist, services tend also tobe relatively much more expensive than inthe North. In Lima, for example, Fernandez-Maldonado (1999) found that, despite in-creased rates of diffusion following theliberalisation of telecommunications in 1990,less than half of all households have a tele-phone and less than one-�fth of the poorest

20 per cent of the city’s households haveaccess to the telephone. When it comes tocomputer access, the overall average is 7 percent, with great differences between therichest (50 per cent) and poorest (1 per cent)�fths of households. With Internet costs atover US$40 a month, the diffusion of theInternet is restricted only to the very rich.Thus the issue of public Internet boothsbecomes critical.

More broadly, in many developing cities,high-quality ICT infrastructures are beingpackaged together into enclaves and indus-trial parks for internationally oriented �rmsand socioeconomic elites. In such spaces,entrepreneurial planning, public subsidies,defensive urban design and liberalised, mar-ket-driven infrastructure development cometogether in the production of ‘high-tech’production and back-of�ce enclaves, and‘Euro-American’-style gated residentialspaces. Consider the following examples:

Bangkok, Thailand. Thailand is a rapidlydeveloping nation which has more cellulartelephones than the whole of Africa (UNDP,1999, p. 62). In Bangkok, the installation of�bre optics in the ‘intelligent corridor’ alongthe major outer arterial ring road is reinforc-ing the linear expansion of the city intoexurban areas (Hack, 1997, p. 11). A ‘leap-frog’ strategy is being encouraged “providinghouseholds and �rms with �bre optics ser-vices in high-income, educational, knowl-edge and high value industrial areas” at theexpense of the wider city (Kaothien et al.,1997, p. 14)

Sao Paulo. In Sao Paulo, Brazil, patternsof investment in advanced telecommunica-tions are starkly uneven. Forti�ed enclaveshave grown up around the Murumbi districtof the city that are designed to meet thedemands of growing middle- and upper-income groups for perceived security, so sup-porting their withdrawal from the publicstreet and infrastructure system (Caldeira,1996). Offering integrated spaces for resi-dence, work and consumption to middle- andupper-income groups, these inward-looking

STEPHEN GRAHAM44

spaces simultaneously turn their backs on thepublic street whilst relying on veritable ar-mies of service personnel, on the time–space�exibility of the automobile, on dedicatedenergy and water connections, and on themost sophisticated telecommunications linksavailable in Brazil. With the collapse of pub-lic planning for energy, water and telecom-munications infrastructure, and theconcomitant withdrawal of cross-subsidies,such spaces have established “high concen-trations of infrastructure services—particu-larly telematics, optic �bre, cable TV andmobile telephone central stations”, asbroader investment regimes have concen-trated on the “supply of sophisticated in-frastructural services for top income groupsin Sao Paulo” (Ramos Schiffer, 1997, p. 10).

Johore, Batam and Bintan. In the export-oriented ‘�agship’ manufacturing enclaves inJohore (Malaysia) and the Riau islands ofBatam and Bintan (Indonesia), Singaporeancapital is equipping each new developmentwith the requisite packages of infrastructuralconnections:

The parks are conceived as self-containedindustrial township … each of these in-vestment enclaves offers linkage to theSingaporean economy whilst minimisingdependence on the wider Indonesian en-vironment (Grundy-Warr et al., 1999,p. 310).

For example, direct links are being made intoSingapore’s state-of-the-art telecoms infra-structure, allowing Indonesia’s poor-qualitytelecommunications infrastructure to be com-pletely bypassed. As a result, telephone callsfrom the enclaves across the national borderto Singapore are classed as ‘local’ calls;those beyond the enclave walls to the rest ofIndonesia, however, are classed as ‘inter-national’.

Malaysia. Giant among the emerging gen-eration of urban planning initiatives that at-tempt to engineer new industrial andmultimedia spaces is the $20 billion Multi-media Supercorridor in Malaysia. Here, in

effect, at the heart of the ASEAN block insouth-east Asia, a whole national develop-ment strategy has effectively been condensedinto a single, grandiose urban plan for a vastnew urban corridor. The aim of the MSC isnothing less than to replace Malaysia’s man-ufacturing-dominated economy by a boom-ing constellation of services, IT, media andcommunications industries by turning a vaststretch of rain forest and rubber plantationsinto ‘Asia’s technology hub’ by the year2020. The MSC starts at the centre of thecapital, Kuala Lumpur. The MSC projectends 30 miles to the south at an immensenew international airport strategically placedon the routes to Singapore. As well as taxincentives, favourable cost structures andhigh-quality customised infrastructure for thespace, Malaysia has even developed cus-tomised laws for the MSC. Incomingtransnationals will have free in-migration for‘knowledge workers’ from all over theworld. A special set of new ‘cyber laws’surrounding intellectual property rights hasbeen created to make sure that �rms canrecoup the investment costs of providingthings on-line.

However, there are dangers that the MSCwill engender a two-tier society withMalaysian workers providing the low-value-added support for hermetically sealed corpo-rate zones operating on global networks.There are also major question-marks over thefate of Malaysia’s peripheral regions andKuala Lumpur’s marginalised urban spaces,outside the MSC. Despite the implication inthe prevailing discourse that the whole of thenational space will bene�t equally from theMSC, its construction is displacing plan-tation communities whilst con�guring newspaces overwhelmingly for the elite corpo-rate and IT professionals and their familieswho will be able to afford the new privatelydeveloped ‘wired’ homes. Low-skill, low-wage service staff—cleaners, securityguards, gardeners—are being brought infrom outside the corridor. Such concernsover the construction of a privatised, hyper-clean city for socioeconomic elites, gated-offfrom the chaotic and polluted worlds of the


rest of Kuala Lumpur, have emerged in criti-cism in the national press.

Bangalore. Within Bangalore—‘India’sSilicon Valley’—the heightened wealth in-equalities resulting from high-tech growthhave created an extremely fragmented andpolarised urban structure. This is based on“participation in the information-intensiveglobal economy by a core elite, and nonparticipation by the masses” (Madon, 1998,p. 232). At the Electronics City complex, forexample, several hundred acres of ‘offshore’technology campus have been con�gured tohouse companies like Texas Instruments(undertaking circuit design), IBM, 3-M andMotorola. The Indian �rm Wipro, anothermajor presence, exploit advanced communi-cations to use India’s cheap software pro-grammers to service many of the world’scomputers remotely from Bangalore. Allthese �rms

are insulated from the world outside bypower generators, by the leasing of specialtelephone lines, and by an international-style work environment (Madon, 1998,p. 232).

Singaporean capital has also constructed anInformation Technology Park on the out-skirts of Bangalore, equipped with dedicatedsatellite ground stations, broadband telecom-munications, uninterrupted power supplies,back-up generators and international-standard, private water, sanitation and waste-disposal services. Because of the poor qualityof the regional telecoms infrastructure, thepark also serves a regional role as a hub linkto global markets

companies within 30 km of the park cansimply point their microwave antennaeand connect by satellite link to clientsanywhere in the world (Rapaport, 1996,p. 105).

This park is integrated with highly luxuriousresidential and leisure facilities, separatingthem even further from the prevailing pov-erty in the shanty towns which still house the

bulk of the city’s in-migrant population (over50 per cent of whom are illiterate). “Youwon’t see many Horatio Algers leaping fromthe shantytowns to workstations in Banga-lore’s infotech �rms” (Wetzler, 2000, p. 16).

Initiatives like Bangalore’s technologyparks tend to compound the polarisationwhich arises from the gradual withdrawal ofthe practices of social and geographicalcross-subsidy that tended to underpin the(admittedly often unreliable and inef�cient)public telephone monopolies of the past(Schiller, 1999). “The present trend towardprivatisation is likely to end all such subsi-dies”, according to Kalbermatten (1999,p. 15):

In the absence of effective regulation (areal risk in most developing countries),privatisation is likely to result in ef�ciencygains and better service for those whoalready have service or who can affordto get connected to the existing system.The urban poor will again be overlooked(Madon, 1998, p. 232).

In Bangalore, whilst the bulk of public andinfrastructural investment centres on linkingthe new parks globally and securing themlocally, the local municipality has activelyworked to bulldoze ‘illegal’ self-built hous-ing areas in the name of a civic modernis-ation ‘clean up’ programme. Thus, it is clearthat “the recent internationalisation of Ban-galore has had a negative impact on thepoor” (Madon, 1998, p. 232). The conditionof shanty-town areas is deteriorating andmany have very poor access to mains water,communications, energy or metalled roadsand motorised transport—a sharp contrast tothe modern landscapes of the new technopo-lis parks, with their international electronicand physical links, that they surround. Infact, a broader infrastructure crisis is emerg-ing for the poorer majority in the city: short-ages and interruptions of power are common;water shortage is looming; and the city au-thorities are desperately trying to attract pri-vate-sector investment into the poorer partsof the City.

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2.4 ICTs and the Cultural and Economic

Biases of the International Information

Market-place

Our fourth and �nal key point to stress is thatdominant applications of ICTs, and thethings that �ow on them, are currentlyheavily biased in a cultural sense. The con-solidation of digital multimedia conglomer-ates—fuelled by the Internet, the shifttowards digital media (CDs, DVDs, digitaltelevision, web TV, digital magazines, etc.),along with the volatilities of stock marketsand global liberalisation—is supporting glo-bal trends towards the centralisation of elec-tronic power on a smaller number of people,institutions and places. These increasinglydominate the global �ows of technology,capital, infrastructure and intellectual prop-erty rights, transcending the traditional pow-ers of (some) nation-states (Everard, 1999).

The world is thus facing increasing globalconcentrations of what we might call ‘elec-tronic economic power’. This process raisesmany questions about geo-political relation-ships, accountability, democracy, global citi-zenship, the ownership and control ofdigitised information and the means of cul-tural expression, and the relationship be-tween the global and local cultures thatsurround global urbanisation. This is es-pecially so given the extreme asymmetries ofNorth–South relations that surround this pro-cess. In many developing nations and cities,for example, TV and Internet media providean overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon content asUS culture in particular is extended throughthe growth of electronic connections. AsEverard (1999, p. 38) suggested, in a tellingexample,

it is far easier for a Russian languagespeaker with a computer to download theworks of Dostoyevsky translated intoEnglish to read than it is for him to get theoriginal in his own language.

The capital, technology, skills and �nance ofthe North are taking a dominant role, encour-aged by the WTO, in supporting the inter-national liberalisation and consolidation of

telecommunications, media and technology.These processes are encouraging the ‘open-ing up’ and integration of trade and �nancesystems. They are leading to the privatisationand internationalisation of scienti�c research.And they are supporting the imposition oftight systems for allowing corporations toextend their control over intellectual propertyrights (everything from media contentthrough software, information, knowledge, tohuman genetic sequences and bio-engineeredlife-forms). The industrial strategy of the US,in particular, as the world’s only ‘infor-mation super-power’, is essentially to extendand intensify its dominance in telecommuni-cations, Internet backbone infrastructure, e-commerce, multimedia, biotechnology,education, R&D and digital content, withinwidening, liberalising, global markets. Withmany nations having better and lower-costInternet connections to the US than to adjac-ent nations and regions, Kenneth Neil (1999)calls its strategy one of ‘bandwidth colonial-ism’.

This interrelated array of processes ofchange tends overwhelmingly to bene�tNorthern corporations, the af�uent socio-economic metropolitan elites of key Northern‘information cities’ and the metropolitan�rms and socioeconomic groups in develop-ing cities, who bene�t from the growingarticulation between developing nations andthe global economy. As Dan Schiller (1999,p. 205) suggests

A couple of thousand giant companies—asemployers of workers, laboring on net-worked production chains, as advertisers,and, increasingly, as educators—todaypreside, not only over the economy butalso over a larger web of institutions in-volved in social reproduction: business ofcourse, but also formal education, politicsand culture.

As a result, the (parts of) the largely North-ern ‘global’ cities where such corporate�nance, research, decision-making and tech-nology are orchestrated seem to be furtherconcentrating wealth and power. The clear


worry here, as the French communicationsscholar Armand Mattelart has written, is that

the dynamic of the economic model ofglobalisation now unfolding risks leadingto a ‘ghettoized’ world organised around afew megacities in the North, but occasion-ally in the South, called on to serve as thenerve centres of worldwide markets and�ow (Mattelart, 1996, p. 304).

Ricardo Petrella (1993), an ex-EU commis-sioner, is even more bleakly pessimistic. Tohim, current logics on the centralisation ofwealth and power in key cities in the techno-logical core of the global economy risk littleless than a “new Hanseatic phase in theworld economy” ridden by a stark “techno-apartheid”.

The worry is that the gradual consumerisa-tion of digital media by a dominant group ofglobal media conglomerates will actuallyshape the use and con�guration of the ICTsthat most consumers use in very real ways.Many people, even when they do gain accessto digital networks, may only be able toconsume passively the media and retail prod-ucts produced by the media and communica-tions transnational that serves them. Theywill tend to be in a position of relative pow-erlessness towards the con�guration and roll-out of digital media and communicationssystems to support greater ‘horizontal’ com-munication rather than ‘vertical’ communi-cation back to the supplier and the associatede-commerce af�liates. If current trends con-tinue, many peoples’ experience of electronicinteractivity—especially as narrowed Inter-net functionality is integrated with interactiveTV and home consumption for mass mar-kets—is likely to be ‘press now to purchase’buttons rather than the potentially more liber-ating interactivity of the full, unconstrainedInternet (Calabrese and Borchert, 1996).

Thus, the growth and geographical andsocial diffusion of the Internet to lower-income users may be associated with itsrestructuring as a corporately con�gured con-sumption conduit with limited capacity forupstream and horizontal communication tothe full range of free information sources. In

fact, a new range of Internet protocols—thesoftware codes and algorithms that route‘packets’ of information around the system—are now emerging to replace the previousnotion that all information �owing on theInternet has equal priority. These new routersactively discriminate between different users’packets, especially in times of congestionwhen ‘smart’ routers can sift ‘priority pack-ets’, allowing them passage, whilst automati-cally blocking those from non-premiumusers. Thus, high-quality services can now beguaranteed to premium users irrespective ofwider conditions. This further supports thecorporatisation of Internet services as differ-ent qualities can be packaged and sold atdifferent rates to different markets. As EmyTseng suggests,

the ability to discriminate and prioritisedata traf�c is now being built into thesystem. Therefore economics can shapethe way packets �ow through the networksand therefore whose content is more ‘im-portant’ (Tseng, 2000, p. 12).

3. Challenging Urban Digital Divides:

Harnessing ICTs to Address Urban

Polarisation

Above, we have explored four aspects ofhow dominant applications of ICTs are cur-rently tending to support urban polarisationat all geographical scales. These dominanttrends are crucially important. They set thecontext against which efforts to use ICTs tosupport more equitable urban processes ofdevelopment will need to work.

However, it is crucial to emphasise thatthe picture is by no means all gloomy. Cer-tainly, ICTs and their effects are currentlystrongly shaped by the ways in which theyare being mobilised to extend the powers ofthe powerful and socioeconomically power-ful. We cannot doubt that dominant uses ofICTs currently support the deepening of geo-graphical unevenness at all scales. But it iscrucial to remember that ICTs are inherently�exible technologies. The ways in whichthey are con�gured, diffused and applied are

STEPHEN GRAHAM48

not set in stone. The remarkable powers ofICTs for supporting new types of infor-mation �ow, communication, transaction andcultural experience can be mobilised andshaped in other ways which can help to makeeffects on cities and human developmentmuch more progressive and positive:

It is this enabling capacity of ICTs—thefact that it allows the user, whether indi-vidual or community, to take advantage ofit in ways that the individual or com-munity chooses—that gives these tech-nologies their democratic and empoweringpotential (Souter, 1999, p. 412).

As the communications scholar GrahamMurdock has written

The history of communications is not ahistory of machines but a history of theway the new media help to recon�guresystems of power and networks of socialrelations. Communications technologiesare certainly produced within particularcentres of power and deployed with par-ticular purposes in mind but, once in play,they often have unintended and contradic-tory consequences (Murdock, 1993,p. 536)

Beyond the dominant application of ICTs,many efforts are now emerging at the local,urban, regional, national and internationalscales, which seek to exploit their capabili-ties to support models of development whichare more equitable, democratic and sustain-able than the cases explored above. As dif-fusion of ICTs widens, many more efforts towork ‘against the grain’ of commodi�cationand polarisation are emerging: crucially, the‘space of �ows’ is starting to be tied to the‘grassroots’. As Manuel Castells argues

creative cacophony and social diversity,with their plurality of values and interests,and given the linkage between places andinformation �ows, transforms the logic ofthe space of �ows, making it a contestedspace. And a plural and diversi�edspace … Through a blossoming of initia-tives, people are taking on the ’Net with-

out uprooting themselves from their places(Castells, 1999a, p. 301).

In what follows, we explore some of thehuge range of initiatives and experimentsthat are emerging within this “creative ca-cophony”. This is done in a way that stressesthat these often-experimental efforts offer usinsights into how ICTs might be used morewidely to work against urban polarisationthrough sustained policy intervention whichintegrates them fully into development strate-gies for human settlements. Three broadtypes of effort can be highlighted.

3.1 Addressing Market Failures and Unmet

Demand for Digital Infrastructure

First, new challenges are emerging to domi-nant neo-liberal approaches to the develop-ment and regulation of ICT infrastructures.Recognising that new market-based and in-ternational regimes of telecommunicationsdevelopment are not going to deliver equi-table social and geographical access, a rangeof non-pro�t and municipal agencies acrossthe world are developing strategies that ad-dress these new ‘market failures’ in creativeways. More broadly, new regulatory effortsare emerging in poorer developing nationswhere public monopolies were slow,inef�cient and poorly �nanced, to meet theunmet demands for phones and ICT servicesin relatively equitable ways.

In the UK and Australia, campaigns havemobilised coalitions of non-pro�t agenciesand lobbyists to argue that concepts of uni-versal service developed for the age of tele-phone monopolies need to be expanded forthe age of multiple, private ICT providers. Inthe US, federal and state-level programmeslike the E-rate programme are emergingwhich provide discounts on telecommunica-tions services to underserved schools andlibraries. The European Union has workedhard to overcome the US dominance in Inter-net topologies, establishing partnerships andregulatory regimes aimed at forging pan-European Internet trunks which do not relateprimarily to the US, as did earlier genera-


tions of Internet infrastructure. And munici-palities, especially in the US and Europe,have started to intervene directly in telecom-munications infrastructures to ensure equi-table roll-out of ICT infrastructures andservices to all citizens in their areas. Such aprocess is reminiscent of the ‘gas and water’socialism of the 19th century, where munici-pal intervention, regulation and ownership incritical networked infrastructures were seenas powerful antidotes to the fragmenting andpolarising logic of market-based approachesand broader forces for economic modernis-ation.

Take some examples. Glasgow, Kentucky,has extended its own internal broadband net-work to offer high-speed Internet services tothe wider population. Municipalities in Cali-fornia (Alameda, Anaheim, Palo Alto andSan Bruno), Oregon (Eugene, Spring�eld),Washington (Tacoma) and Florida (Lake-land) have worked in partnership with utilityand telecoms �rms to install trunk optic-�brenetworks to overcome the uneven geographyof market investment (Strover and Berquist,1999). In some cases, municipalities havebuilt the conduits and then opened them upto telecoms providers with conditions formaximising access. In others, they actuallybuilt and leased out the �bre networks them-selves. Such initiatives are usually developedthrough legal agreements which oblige carri-ers to connect libraries, schools, health ser-vices and community facilities, in exchangefor the rights to use the conduits and rights ofway. Meanwhile, cities in Europe such asAmsterdam (Netherlands), Roubaix (France)and Bochum (Germany) have also installedmunicipally operated �bre backbones acrosstheir urban spaces. Like their counterparts inNorth America, these are being used to offerhigh-quality and competitive broadbandtelecommunications to entire urban areasmuch more quickly and more equitably thanwould have emerged through the market.

In many developed and developing na-tions, broad public–private partnerships aredeveloping so-called ‘national informationinfrastructure’ (NII) strategies that attempt toharness ICTs to national social and economic

development (Mansell and Wehn, 1998).Many stress the need to wire up all schoolsand public institutions. But it remains unclearwhether the goals of equity and ubiquity inaccess can be reconciled with those of liber-alisation, privatisation and heavy investmentto secure the investment of transnationals, asrecommended by the recent (1999) WorldBank report Harnessing Information for

Development.

3.2 Widening the ’Net: Efforts to Extend

Access to ICTs

Secondly, a wide rage of efforts by non-pro�t agencies, social movements and mu-nicipalities have emerged in the past decadewhich aim to extend access to ICTs to pooror marginalised groups and communities—precisely the people that dominant trends aretending to by-pass. This is not to imply thesimplistic idea that delivering ICTs to peoplefacing poverty and marginalisation will actas some ‘silver bullet’ to the complex prob-lems of poverty and marginalisation, as im-plied by the US speaker, Newt Gingrich’spatronising ‘laptops to the ghettos’ rallyingcry in 1996. Indeed, sometimes, the veryrelevance of Internet access can be ques-tioned for those facing the most severe socialcrises.

Just giving someone time at a terminalwith Internet capabilities—or, by exten-sion, at a kiosk in a public place—will notbene�t anyone who feels confronted witha seemingly insurmountable problem, orwho has no idea where to begin (Rockoff,1996, p. 59).

Jones argues that

connection to the Internet does not inher-ently make a community, nor does it leadto any necessary exchanges of infor-mation, meaning and sense-making at all(Jones, 1995, p. 12).

Instead, it is clear that ICT connections, ser-vice, skills and spaces of expression, need tobe built up within wider strategies of econ-omic, social and cultural development. Be-

STEPHEN GRAHAM50

yond basic access to ICT networks and ser-vices, supportive training and community-oriented physical spaces are required to helppeople to overcome the fears and reserva-tions they might have about using the tech-nologies. A wide range of such experimentsare now developing across many urban con-texts.

Public Internet booths. These offer one di-rection. In Europe, Amsterdam is installingpublic Internet booths across the city’s fabricas part of an integrated media strategy for thecity. In Estonia, public Internet access pointsare being planned across the entire nation(UNDP, 1999, p. 64). In developing cities,public booths are even more crucial becauseof extremely low household access to theInternet. In such cities, public Internet boothshave been deployed in libraries and smallrented rooms in many informal districts,backed up by all-important training and sup-port.

In Lima, Peru, for example, over 200 suchbooths, funded both privately and by munici-palities, have been complemented by manyinformal ones set up by entrepreneurs. Suchbooths now mean that “the average residentof Lima can have access to computer andInternet services at relatively low cost.” (Fer-nandez-Maldonado, 1999, p. 13). Thesebooths are also part of a wider cluster ofinformal ICT-based economic growth inpoorer parts of the city which is improvingthe prospects of economically upgrading in-formal settlements. This offers the tantalisingprospect that low-cost electronic means ofcommunication, information retrieval andtransaction might offer major economicboosts to the tight clusters of small and mi-cro-�rms in informal settlements. Just aswith ICTs and formal �rms, Internet kiosksmight help to develop major growth potentialbased on organising new routes to markets,new ways of supporting inter�rm relationsand new routes into training and work forsurrounding populations.

Wireless and mobile communications. Thesecond emerging range of initiatives centre

on exploiting the relatively low ‘roll-out’costs of wireless and mobile communicationsto allow previously excluded people andspaces to gain access. In Tanzania andGhana, for example—where land-line tele-phony is the preserve of small economicelites—the US �rm Adesemi has developedwireless systems to bring personal telecomsservices to unserved poor urban and remoterural areas. Individuals can carry around low-cost pagers which notify them of incomingcalls; these can be picked up at a network ofwireless pay phones (see www.adesemi.com). With the right marketing,even rural wireless systems offering pay-phones and phone shops to rural developingareas at reduced costs have been shown togenerate pro�ts. Rolling-out wireless net-works is often most effective when wirelessphones are offered with pre-payment cards,so avoiding the fear of debt which under-standably inhibits many people on low in-comes from investing in phones withperiodical bills.

‘E-gateways’: community telecentres. In bothdeveloping and developed cities, community

telecentres—a third policy avenue—are pro-liferating, often linked with existing com-munity centres or schools. Communitytelecentres strive to deliver the ‘street-level’interface between ICTs and the Internet andmarginalised populations. Most offer train-ing, support, drop-in services and access tofax, computers and the Internet; some aremoving into e-commerce and telemedicine.In the UK, some are geared towards speci�cethnic or disadvantaged groups (theBangladeshi or Chinese communities, andwomen in Manchester, young people inNewham—see www.youth.newham.org.uk /;and Twist, 1999). This re�ects the widerneglect of the needs of such groups by main-stream ICT providers. As Souter argues, forexample,

few telecommunications projects havetargeted women, noted the impacts onwomen of telecommunications systemsand technologies, or explicitly incorpor-

http://www.youth.newham.org.uk/


ated their perspectives and needs (Souter,1999, p. 412).

In response, the Indira Ghandi Open Univer-sity in India has explicitly targeted keywomen decision-makers in its efforts to de-velop community distance education centresin poor Indian villages (Souter, 1999,p. 412).

In the US, centres like the computer club-house in Boston and the national network ofcommunity technology centres (CTCs) areemerging. These focus on building techno-logical ‘�uency’ in poor communities—theways in which “new types of social interac-tion, new types of activities, new areas ofknowledge, and new attitudes towards learn-ing” can be constructed culturally on top ofthe provision of access to technologies (seewww.computerclubhouse.org; and Resnick et

al., 1999, p. 267).Community Telecentres in Sharkeya,

Egypt, meanwhile, are planned to integratewith women’s health centres to offer appro-priate telemedicine applications. Such cen-tres, to succeed, need to “become hubs forskills training and capacity building”(UNDP, 1999, p. 65). They also requirestrategies for continuous fund-raising beyondthe initial support, to pay for on-going costsof trainers, key social entrepreneurs and con-tinuing generations of new software andtechnology.

3.3 Efforts at Asserting Local Control over

Content

Finally, efforts are now emerging to pluraliseand democratise the content of electronicmedia—a crucial step within broader effortsto rebalance international systems of biasedcultural and economic power in this techno-logically mediated and increasingly commer-cialised and internationalised age. As theUNDP suggest

the information highway cannot be a one-way street. Web sites need to be createdlocally, adding new voices to the globalconversation and making content relevantto communities (UNDP, 1999, p. 65).

Alongside broader international movementsto urge for global regulation of unfetteredglobal markets in ICTs and digital media,many local instances are emerging to supportthe incorporation of excluded voices intoelectronic domains. In Tamil Nadu, India, forexample, keyboard standardisation and soft-ware in Tamil, the local language, are beingpromoted. In the US, the Seniornet project isproviding applications, discussion space, ser-vices and support to the older population,usually so underrepresented in ICTs. Andacross the complex diasporas of the world,dedicated community networks such as Viet-net are emerging to allow cultures to survivein the context of extreme dispersal and cul-tural volatility. Such networks are crucial asthey can bring together the scattered people,resources and cultural media of fragmentedlinguistic or national communities. Beyondthe overall dominance of English, the Weboffers opportunities for speakers of minoritylanguages to access remotely

government information, educational ma-terials, scienti�c journals, and, ultimately,the digitized collections of major nationallibraries. No less important, the ’Net cre-ates new forums for informal exchangesamong the members of geographically dis-persed communities. At present, there arediscussion groups in more than 100 lan-guages (Nunberg, 2000).

Developing local content and spaces for localexpression can also feed into wider efforts atincorporating marginalised voices into urbanand local governance and the mainstreameconomy. This is important because the �rstefforts by most cities to use ICTs are formarketing and promotion aimed at touristsand potential investors (Graham and Aurigi,1998; Nunn and Rubleske, 1997). In the US,the civic networking movement, a 20-year-old groundswell of community IT initiativesorganised by non-pro�t agencies, has nowmatured into a powerful support for citizenmobilisation and action (Schuler, 1996;Beamish, 1999). In Santa Monica, California,for example, the public electronic network(or PEN) system has enabled homeless and

http://www.computerclubhouse.org

STEPHEN GRAHAM52

street people to have their own e-mail ad-dresses, allowing them spaces of expressionand contact-points to support access to jobs,services and democratic rights (Doctor andDutton, 1998). The Neighborhood Knowl-edge Los Angeles initiative is directly chal-lenging the privatisation of local social,demographic and economic data in the cityof Los Angeles. Integrating previously frag-mented knowledge about the condition ofat-risk neighbourhoods in the city, NKLAoffers bilingual services which help re-sponses to social and economic deterioration,support community awareness about theproblems faced by neighbourhoods, help tochallenge and expose ‘red-lining’ by major�rms and institutions, and democratise ac-cess to digital and geographical information.Similar efforts to use web-based geographi-cal information systems to help to supportnew ways of viewing and visioning placesare also emerging in the Mexican-AmericanChicago suburb of Pilsen (Al-Kodmany,2000).

Across Europe, �nally, ‘virtual’ townhalls, community intranets and communitytelecentres—from Amsterdam and Berlin toAthens, Bologna and Barcelona to east Lon-don—are starting to allow some marginalisedcommunities to assert democratic rightswithin structures of governance, often for the�rst time (Tsagarousianou et al., 1998). Per-haps the best-known example here is DeDigitale Stadt (‘the digital city’), an Internetspace in Amsterdam, which now has over100 000 ‘residents’ (both locally and glo-bally). Using an explicitly urban metaphor ofthemed ‘town squares’ and ‘cafes’, DDS sup-ports a vast range of specialised political,social, environmental and interest-basedcommunities and discourses which, withinthe constraints of biased social access to theInternet, support a “gigantic alternative andunderground world” as well as “an of�cialcity on the surface and in the open” (Lovinkand Riemens, 1998, p. 185; see http://www.dds.nl). To its founders, tellingly, “thecity metaphor” used as the web interface forDDS, “stands for diversity … What we havein mind are all those different ‘places’ and

localities that are possible in a real as well asa virtual city” (Lovink and Riemens, 1998,p. 185). Other web initiatives, like BolognaIperbole, have involved the distribution offree e-mail accounts to municipal popula-tions, as attempts to develop direct forms ofelectronic interaction and democratic gover-nance between citizens and municipalities(Tambini, 1998). The central challenge hereis to design local ICT systems which areequitable in terms of access as well as sup-portive of genuine community and civic dia-logue. Too often, municipal and localgovernment websites amount to little morethan ‘government shops’ which simply‘broadcast’ information about services toconsumers.

Far too few such initiatives genuinely ex-ploit the potential of ICTs, backed up bycommunity development and training, togenerate the sorts of interaction, participationand debate necessary to help invigorate localdemocracy (Steyaert, 2000). Above all,though, such efforts to build up ICT, socialand institutional capacity in parallel in localcommunities need to build on knowledge andunderstanding of how people and communi-ties communicate, obtain information andtransact at present. Too often, all people andgroups within a settlement or community areforced into some imposed and standardised‘top-down’ model which neglects the hugediversity of communicational cultures be-tween them (Shanmugavelan, 2000).

4. Conclusions

Dominant trends surrounding the current ex-tension of ICTs are far from being socially,geographically or culturally neutral. Closelybound up with wider processes of globalisa-tion, urbanisation and the concentration ofcorporate power, they tend to extend thepowers of the powerful over space, time andpeople. At the same time, because socialpower is always a relative experience, theexplosive growth and extension of on-lineworlds and cyberspaces (note the plural) canactually compromise and erode the social,

http://www.dds.nl

http://www.dds.nl


economic and cultural powers of thosegroups and spaces that are rendered off-lineor marginal.

Consequently, as the UK think-tankDemos (1997, p. 6) put it, in contemporarynetwork-based societies and cities it could beargued that “the poverty of connections” isnow as important as traditional povertywhich comes from the lack of housing, food,water, work and essential services. Such a‘poverty of connections’ limits a person’s ora group’s ability to extend their in�uence intime and space, often condemning them tolocal, place-based ties and relationships. Itundermines group, neighbourhood and indi-vidual ability to tap into and bene�t fromdominant technological and economic pro-cesses. And it means that people and groupswill be in a subordinate position when itcomes to controlling and adding value totheir information, and their expressive andsymbolic worlds, within extending domainsof digitisation and electronically based econ-omic appropriation.

The key question, then, is clear and stark:can we generalise and democratise the op-portunities that come with the high-tech ur-ban revolution? Can we found moreequitable ways of developing cities and set-tlements in an electronically mediated age?

It remains too early to say. Certainly, themassive global diffusion process of the Inter-net and mobile phones is serving to bringelectonic connectivities to much wider sec-tions of urban, national and internationalpopulations and spaces. Costs of hardwareand access are going down in many cases,fuelled by maturing markets. And the ‘clubeffects’ of network externalities do mean thatnetwork diffusion tends to work as a cumu-lative process; as more users join the net-works, so too the utility of those networksgrows. Also encouraging is the upsurge ingrass-roots experiments and innovationswhich are attempting to harness ICTs toequitable and empowering models of devel-opment. The problem is that the latter areclearly weak, underfunded and fragmented,whilst the former threaten to be ‘digitalsteamrollers’ of globalisation and com-

modi�cation which �atten, destroy and over-whelm all resistance and undermine theprospects for developing viable alternatives.

It is also clear that the essentially egali-tarian nature of the early Internet is increas-ingly being replaced by ‘smart’ corporatelycontrolled systems which sift users preciselyaccording to their pro�tability and allocatethem different functionalities accordingly. Inthe medium-term future, the question ofwhether or not ‘Net access is available willgradually diminish as an issue, at least formiddle-income groups and spaces in manycontexts. At the same time, though, the ques-tion of what type of Net access one has—freeand uninhibited broadband connectivity withequal upsteam and downstream links, orcommodi�ed and dominated by ‘press nowto purchase’ buttons—will become ever-more important. The corporate com-modi�cation of the Internet as a set ofintegrated electronic consumption spaceswill be parallelled by a diversi�cation ofusers’ positions and experiences within con-verging market-places for electronic connec-tivity, commerce and media.

What are needed, �rst, are new models ofsocial innovation within which transnationalmedia and knowledge industries are madeaccountable for their actions. We require pro-cesses and structures of governance withinwhich the vast economic and �nancial gainsbeing made from the shift to global digitalmediation are actively redistributed awayfrom the powerful people and organisationswho currently tend to monopolise them.Here, we face the very dif�cult challenge ofregulating, governing and taxing truly globalICT systems like the Internet in order tointroduce systems of cross-subsidy like thosethat characterised other infrastructures in thepost-war period (and which were essential indemocratising access to the telephone andother utilities during the post-war period inthe West). Achieving a workable approachhere is crucial, as the Internet itself is allow-ing many corporate players to reduce rad-ically their tax obligations to all territoriallyde�ned jurisdictions (municipalities, regionalgovernments and national and supranational

STEPHEN GRAHAM54

states and bodies). In the age of the Internet,the extreme dif�culties of achieving real cor-porate regulation and transparency at thetransnational scale are likely to make tax-avoidance an ever-more central element ofcorporate operations. For, increasingly,transnational corporations are likely to installtheir

web servers where taxes are lowest, dis-guise their trade in goods as a trade inservices, and even launch their own virtualcurrencies. The tax burden, in other words,is shifting to those who are unable to movetheir assets off-shore or out of the oldeconomy into cyberspace. With little elseto offer, poor countries [and settlements]end up giving everything away in adesperate attempt to attract ‘investment’.If taxation is not to become whollyregressive, we will have to revolutionisethe means to which the rich are charged(Monbiot, 2000).

Secondly, we also desperately need to re-place the ideas that ICTs are intrinsicallyliberating and that cyberspace is some singu-lar domain, with more sophisticated ap-proaches which recognise the biases that arecurrently wrapped up in the ways in which awhole variety of cyberspaces (note the pluralagain) are currently being constructed,largely by, and for, the more powerful. Weneed to recognise the complex relations be-tween ICTs and places. We need quickly toincorporate ICTs into our core thinking aboutcontemporary human settlements. And weneed policy models within which the tenden-cies towards urban and social polarisation,inherent within current models of develop-ment, are substantially addressed by new ap-proaches to governance. These must tietogether local, urban, national and inter-national scales in ways that explicitly seek tomatch the dominant development logics ofour time.

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