Electronic Infrastructures and the City: Some Emerging Municipal Policy Roles in the UK

Abstract

This paper first outlines the problems and opportunities which are presently motivating urban local government in the UK to begin intervention in the development of strategic urban information and communications technologies (ICTs or 'electronic infrastructures'). This intervention, it is argued—although just commencing—is likely to have important long-term implications for urban policy and governance, as ICTs become ever-more central strategic urban infrastructures. Survey evidence of the perceptions of the impacts of electronic infrastructures amongst local policy-makers is then presented. The paper finishes by discussing a spectrum of local policy roles in ICTs presently under development in the UK amongst beading-edge' local authorities, and attempts to examine these within their wider contexts of contemporary urban strategy-making.