Local information and communication infrastructures: An introduction

Abstract

The ICT revolution has had a considerable impact on the city: It has affected the urban economy, the global urban networks, various dimensions of urban life, and social divides within cities. In this introduction we discuss some of the effects of ICTs on the city, to put Digital Cities experiments into social context. Next, we describe the diversity of existing local ICT infrastructures, followed by a summary of this volume. The 26 chapters give a broad overview of some ten years of experimenting with and research on digital cities. We conclude with a few observations about the research field. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.