Emmanuel Eveno
For the disciplines of the social sciences concerned with information and communication techniques, the considerable emphasis put on these topics by contemporary debates opens a series of opportunities but also induces one to be most watchful. If it is admitted that on such subjects, geography borrows from many other social science disciplines by insisting upon space problematics, it is advisable to proceed to a synthesis of the various disciplinary approaches.The topic which concerns us here is that of the socio-spatial effects of the Information and Communication Techniques -ICT-. The confrontation of this transdisciplinary journey with urban geography will provide an analytic scope of the ICT effects present and expected in a given space.
Two research themes run across this scope of analysis : the one related to the matter of the hold of technique over Society to which that related to the"communication society" belatedly adds itself.
While modern science was born in the 17th and 18th centuries, it became, in the course of the 19th century, the object of a real faith, with its canons, its dogmas, indeed even its hagiography and its martyrs. The progress of the scientific thinking provokes a reappraisal of the place and role of man in "Creation". Science and technology become the driving force of the industrial and sanitary revolutions.The discoveries of the naturalists, Lamark's transformism and above all Charles Darwin's evolutionism, the invention of Prehistory by Boucher de Crèvecoeur de Perthes, precede such philosophical movements as the "new science" of the Count of Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte's Positivism, rationalism and give geography and all the sciences that study man and man's relation with his environment, a radically new scope.
In those days, science and technique establish themselves as liberation forces. They are supposed to allow man to assert his hold over his environment, to transform it for his own usage. "God is dead" claims Nietzsche in "Thus spoke Zarathustra". He is dead for there is, so it seems, no more need to turn to the religious systems to explain, one day, the meaning of life.
Fiction books, the novels of that time bear in themselves these new concepts. Among the most famous, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley but also "La nouvelle Eve" by Villiers de l'Isle Adam introduce the promethean virtues of science and technology. Contrary to the old Alchemy researching the vital principle, modern science uses rationalizing reason.
It is this ambition of a total explanation of science that leads to "determinism" and that, (to use a term dear to hermetic philosophers), proceeds to an "interssuception" of the sociall world by technique. The concept of determinism "a complete explanation of the working of a machine" after the definition in Le Robert dictionary, applies to the social world by resorting to the machine model. In fact , the machine takes up an ambivalent place in social science. It is the object of analyses, but also a model of analysis and metaphor. The machine, a technical world or system, is gradually becoming a dynamic myth "which suggests man to realize his dreams by making nature a slave to His Law"(1)
With geographers like the Germans Karl Ritter and especially Friedrich Ratzel, determinism becomes an operating concept to analyse the relations between human societies and their natural environment. Then rose the pretention of geography to overcome an idiographic perspective to reach the dimension of a nomothetical science. But, with the environmentalism of the American Hellen Churchill Semple, this determinism finally imprisons man in a series of causalities immanent in the functioning of the universe machine. One can perhaps detect in this passage fom a liberation to an imprisonment of man by science an aporia or at least a paradox. This paradox has nourished a tradition in science- fiction with such authors as Aldous Huxley, Arthur C.Clark or George Orwell who describe the defeat of man against the machines he has invented : brain-manipulation, the rebellion of robots and computers, the spectre of government by technique, the programmed society...
With the 20th century, the criticism of philosophers like Henri Bergson, has revived a logical empirism founded on an inductive method and conscious of the limits of the deductive method. The answer to the exaggerations of environmentalism will be brought about by the "Possibilism" of the French geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache. It is also in the course of the 20th century that the idea of a linear social progress bumped against the contradictions of the Great Wars. Science and technique become foundations of the contemporary military strategy. The notion of Progress which underlay the "triumphal march of science" is thus challenged and opens new perspectives to a criticism of the "technicisation of society". For Raymond Aron, the dialectic of modernity has given birth to "The disillusions of Progress"(2)
The criticism of the "technician society" has been elaborated mainly by philosophy and to a lesser degree by sociology.Contemporary philosophy has particularly endeavored to question the scientist vision then the marxist philosophy which both praised reason; science and technology. Many contemporary philosophers denounce in turn the dangers of techniques that threaten the social world, by reducing the analysis of social processes to rational models. One might thus consider that this critical dimension begins with Bergson and is one of the most widely shared themes of the "Frankfurt school" Théodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, or Jürgen Habermas... Other authors, such as Gilbert Simondon, Gilbert Hottois, Jacques Ellul or Michel Foucault fit in with comparable processes.
As signalled by Michel Seiris, philosophical criticism focuses mainly on an ethical dimension, which is a characteristic of a discipline that, according to the latter "tends to place itself in relation to technique, in a position of exteriority which is no way correlative to an attitude of benevolent neutrality".(3)
The other discipline of social sciences which has considered the hypothesis of a technisation of society is sociology, via such questions as those related to a "scientific" organization of work, of bureaucratization" (and the Weberian couple scientist-politician,)of the spreading of innovation (the current of the sociology of innovation). On these matters, the links between philosophy and sociology have been fecund./4/ In a way, the sociological approach of these processes is marked by a concern to conciliate the theoritical and empirical requisites.
The criticism of the "communication society"matches up with the dialectic of the criticism of the " technician society".As it gradually became a fundamental right of man in society, it is also denounced as a technique of social control, of alienation. There too, the experience of war and totalitarism unveils the harmful side of the mass communication medias./5/ These communication and information techniques are a modern image of Aesop's tongue, the worst or the best of things according to how it is used. In its most recent developments, the study of the communication and information techniques is also perceived as a heavy tendency in the evolution of our societies. If the critical approach of the processes at work remains a fundamental dimension of the scientific reflection, a pragmatic approach without the dramatization of the effects of the communication and information techniques is also more and more strongly invested by the disciplines of social sciences.
In this criticism of the "technician society", the "communication-information" dimension ranks as an example of the sophistication of the universe of techniques. Thus, the sociology of communication or the sociology of the medias did not find its inspiration in the philosophy and the sociology of sciences and techniques. The study of the attitudes, behaviours, uses of the communication tools seems to have masked the "technological" substratum.
The study of the communication phenomena devoid of technical vectors, interpersonal, gestural, verbal communication... provoked the claim of semiology, indeed even of sociolinguistics to set themselves up as human sciences of communication. In France since the seventies it has given rise to a new discipline, the "sciences of information and communication".
Our position is to consider that the debate about the socio-spatial effects of the Communication and Information Techniques must draw its inspiration mainly from these trends of thought and confront them with socio-spatial complexity. Does that mean that one should grant geography a work left unfinished by disciplines that, splitting up on each of the two dimensions "communication and information" and "technique", could not untangle their intricacies? That would be stimulating but we shall keep to a more modest level which consists in making an inventory of the arguments of an analysis of geographical realities.
Myths certainly are scientific objects but do they intervene in the scientific process? It seems at first that the scientific mind has the mission to destroy myths systematically inasmuch as they act as screens for a reality experimentally validated. In the same way, perceptions, representations would be errors anchored in cultural experience. "There is no intrinsic justification allowing us to regard what we take for "normal" experience as the "true configuration of the world" stresses Ludwig von Bertalanfy./6/ However, beyond these scientifically counter-productive aspects, these myths, these perceptions, these representations also have a political, cultural and social meaning.Abraham A.Moles and André Noiray even consider that "Myth remains at the basis of the motivations of the scientific act : under every great discovery often lies a myth which has enriched it, prepared it, fed it and given it the necessary repercussion for its development"./7/ The geography of representations reinstates into the corpus of geographical reflection the perceptive, representative data and deals with the images, signs and even the geographical myths and chimera. The work "Ville, paraître,être, à part" by Robert Ferras takes the aspect of an essay on subjective geography, whereas the "Vision of the "subjective" city represents a complete change of the usual "geographical" approach"./8/ Referring to the works of Kevin Lynch (L'image dela cité), Mircea Eliade (Images et symboles. Essais sur le symbolisme magico-religieux), Jérôme Mounet concluded : "The imagination, though it is not a physical object is nevertheless an active principle of reality"./9/
This contribution could be entitled "In search of Cybernopolis". A city governed by the Communication and Infomation Techniques is certainly a geographical chimera. Like all the utopias, or rather, in this case, counter-utopias or even better, the dystopias (inspired by science-fiction), it is nevertheless minutely described, inventoried, located, named...But if itt does not exist, what allows one to imagine it? Pure literary convention? But it arouses many echoes, old fears among the readers. Could it be a daring projection of tendencies detectable to-day in the hold of technique over societies, which would have the effect of appealing directly to the reader and his representation of the city where he lives. The existence of Cybernopolis is in fact conceivable if only through its metonymic use. It would be the symbol of the modernity of the urban, social, economic, cultural crisis.Cybernopolis is a dynamic myth. If at the end of this reflection it is not "discovered", the scientific act of this search offers many heuristic interests.
The majority of geographers who question themselves about the socio-spatial effects are confronted with the "mythical" dimension taken by these objects in the imagination, in the scientific vulgate, in the discourse of numerous experts, in the discourse and in practical experience of Politicians, particularly urban Politicians. One can conceive that the foundation of a strict methodology of the discipline requires the evacuation of "pretences", "lures" and other "promotional discourses".
It is the course adopted particularly by Gérard Claisse in "Telemythes"/10/,and by the authors of the "Groupe Prospective et territoire dela Datar" in a passage of the collective work "Communiquer demain"/11/ in the special issue of the review "Sciences de la Société" devoted to the question "Territoires, Sociétés, Communications"/12/. This concern also conveys, in our opinion, an implicit will to found an expert practice. It is up to the social science specialists, among whom the geographer, to bring out the possibilities, to distinguish them from what is just only fantasy and nonsense.
In recent years, social sciences, geography included, have been more and more appealed to and particularly by the public authorities, in order to produce elements of knowledge, to decipher the intricacies of the socio-spatial effects of the objects of remote communication. Their role consists in producing new angles of perspective of the processes at work.This fairly new situation (it began in the sixties) allows a notable accumulation of the empirical studies. But this accumulation poses a problem. In this case, this empirism might also be the expression of a syndrome that legitimates itself in a relentless pursuit without bothering to try a theoretical and conceptual overhaul.
The scientific debate must clearly specify its positions regarding the political, technocratic or ideological discourse. The scientific method is supposed to protect it against th over-valuation conferred to each object by the impact of fashion. If the communication and information techniques are much in evidence in the definition of public policies, nothing shows they have the revolutionary nature very often attributed to them. Does the post-industrial revolution, predicted as soon as the sixties, qualify itself by the devlopment of telecommunication medias ? Is,- thanks to these techniques- a longer social distance likely to produce new models of society, new forms of territory regulation ? Does our modernity characterize by a revival of Empires/13/ founded on a discriminatory control of telecommunication medias.
In the sixties/seventies, the idea that developed societies enter a period of transition is becoming more important in the scientific debates, particularly in the United States. The theses of futurologists and prospectivists, from Porat to Toffer like those of reputed research teams such as that of the M.I.T. at Cambridge (Massachusetts) or Stanford (California) are leading towards the same direction. Regarded as one of the main crucibles of contemporary modernity, communication is then displayed as one of the main vectors of what Alain Touraine or Daniel Bell name the "post-industrial" revolution.
The announcement of a revolution in the social and economic order leaning on the progress of information and communication thanks to the technological evolutions provided a scientific literature of a particular prolix and inventive nature. A US author, James Beniger, in a work entitled"The Control Revolution:Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society"/14/ had attempted to identify the genesis of these great"revolutionary" theses since 1950. He had thus discovered nearly seventy-five conceptual inventions requiring the"revolutionist"metaphor, or the announcement of a"modern social transformation".From the "solitary crowd" of David Riesman in 1950 to the "second industrial divide" by Piore and Sabel in 1984 proceeds, step by step, a history of research endeavoring to detect the great vectors of that fundamental social event. In this disparate whole, the best part, by far, is attributed to the set"information/communication"with or without its technical dimension. So, as soon as 1962, Edmund Callis Berkeley evoked a"Computer revolution". The notion of"global village"was formalized by Marshall McLuhan in 1964. These concepts were the beginnings of a rather convergent whole : "Computerized society", Marin and Norman, 1970, "Technetronic era", Brzezinski, 1970,"Age of Information",Helvey, 1971, "Compunication", Oettinger, 1971, "Information revolution", Lamberton, 1974, "Communication age", Philipps, 1975,"Mediacracy", Phillips 1975, "Electronics revolution", Evans,1977,"Information economy", Porat, 1977, "Network nation", Hiltz and Turoff, 1978, "Informatisation de la société", Simon Nora and Alain Minc, 1978...etc..., to gain speed in the eighties, sanctioned by the terms of "informational society", "communicational revolution", "information age", "computer state"...
In French research, the works that go in that direction often claim to be in continuity with the thesis of Daniel Bell and Alain Touraine about the "post-industrial"society. Authors like Jean Voge have allowed a whole generation of French researchers to get to know this US production. More recently, the works of Joèl de Rosnay"Le cerveau planétaire"or Albertt Bressand and Catherine Distler "Le prochain monde Réseaupolis"clearly belong to this lineage.
The main arguments put forward by these works are well known : deep changes in the working world with the assertion of a fourth activity sector , specialized in communication, of a growing market for I.C.T., (from the computer to telecommunications and radiotelevisions), of the birth of a new social order based on remote communication, of a new global economic order etc...AT&T; , the US Telecommunication giant was for a long time the biggest firm in the world and the"Bell laboratories" were true Nobel Prize winners nurseries. The sale of 51% of the shares of the capital of British Telecom (£ 4 billion) in november 1984 represented the most important stock transaction to that date./15/
So, little by little, these arguments"spin the web"of "great discourses", founders of such myths concerning geography, like those of transparent space, ubiquity and sometimes founders of new ideologies, scientisms revisited by post modernism. The I.C.T become symbolic objects of our modernity. Thus can be initiated works the most characteristc of which is that of Marshall McLuhan, which reconsider history according to the technical evolutions of information and communication.
This scientific production has had important effects on the way public policies were led to consider the object CIT. Some of the above mentioned authors have thus more or less directly inspired these public policies : Daniel Bell within the US Prospective Agency, Zbigniew Brzezinski, adviser of US President Jimmy Carter, Simon Nora and Alain Minc have widely contributed to give a "scientific substance" and a value of social experimentationto the different policies that have invested in the CIT. The scientists are thus invited to take on the attributes of the expert / instructor and thus give backing to the discourse of experts. So, the various French "Plans"that invest the sector of the CIT, from the"Plan Calcul"to the"Plan Télématique"or"Plan Câble", are invariably preceded and prepared by"official reports" of experts and scientists. The scientist /expert is then actually commissioned. The letter sent by Prime Minister Edouard Balladur to Chief Inspector Gérard Théry is very clear on the responsabilisation of the expert : "The industrial, economic and social stakes linked to this evolution (of the information superhighways) are considerable. After the United States and Japan, The European Union has become aware of it (...)While taking an active part to this European process, our country must,as well, define its own project"./16/ The official reports, ordered by the highest authorities of the State ( President of the Republic, Prime Minister )are not only destined to clarify their government policy, they are also supposed to explain, under scientific guarantee, that policy to the population. If it can be admitted that one finds in this model of implementation of public policies a French specificity typical of a "High Tech Colbertism"/17/ it should be noted, however, that it is reproduced with some adjustments in many other countries such as Chile, Argentina, Singapore...
One can also perceive, through the planned programs ("the information superhighways" of the Clinton Administration or the great telematic programs of the European Union, the mostt widely mediatized), the expression of a technocratic will typical of a culture which bears the mark of"technological determinism". Technology would be the new instrument of the macro-policies of intervention on economic and social matters, town and country planning, etc. The interest of all these works is hardly questionable just because they are in themselves good study objects. Moreover they are used as a framework and justification of a number of ambitious public policies. But it is undoubtedly for social science specialists to put back these debates in the socio-territorial realities, and to indicate clearly in what cultural and political contexts they appear.
The development issue is thus symbolic of an ambiguous position on ICT between the decision-makers and the scientists. The transposition of models of development from a national context to another, from an industrialized country to a developing country raises formidable problems. Is politico-technological voluntarism able to organize a transition of the socio-economical frame of a country? The myth of "technological leap" has been an argument of great weight in the spreading of new models of development.
The great international organizations such as the"Union internationale des télécommunications" or the UNESCO have heralded these models with programs like the"world conferences on Telecommunications"of the UIT, the "Nouvel Ordre Mondial de l'Information Communication"-NOMIC-of the UNESCO. "The telecommunication equipments and services are not only the product of economic growth, but also a preliminary condition to a general development. This statement of the"Union Internationale des Télécommunications" as the beginning of one of its important resolutions (Nairobi, 1982) seems to be obvious" noted Victor-Yves Ghebali./18/ So, beside the traditional ratios which try to define the scope of a criteriological analysis of development, the number of main lines for 100 inhabitants, the number of calls per inhabitant, the amount of money per inhabitant spent on telephone services would become as relevant as the GDP per inhabitants, infant death rates, percentage of girls in full-time education, number of doctors per 1000 inhabitants, etc...Beyond the real interest of such analyses, one cannot do without studying the social and cultural conditions of communication in different countries, the principles of social validation of information, and interactive solidarity.
The idea according to which the CIT would contain in embryo a social and spacial "revolution" must be confronted to the dimension of the markets they generate or induce. Thus, the annual growth of the world market of telecommunications (equipments and services)would be, according to the "Observatoire Mondial des systèmes de communication OMSYC," 1,7% between 1986 and 1992. On the basis of the growth rates recorded in constant dollars of the year 1991 and admitting a growth rate of the global GDP of 3%, the share of this telecommunication market in the world market would grow slowly : 1,9% in the year 2000! Considering these figures the OMSYC noticed that one would be "very far from the predictions made notably by the economists and futurologists who forecast a share of 10% of the global GDP devoted to the sector of telecommunication in the year 2000". Of course, this weakness in the market of telecommunications is quite relative. This relative weakness does not mean calling into question a model of growth, or equipment policies and does not mean a decline in the use of telecommunications, either. It is explained far more clearly by an evolution in technologies, allowing the communication of more and more rich and complex informations, the liberalization and internationalization of that market. This phenomenon is classic and seems to indicate a gradual economic banalization of telecommunications, the passage from a market in the hands of national monopolies or oligopolies, characteristic of a supply-regulated market, to a more and more demand-regulated market. The contemporary debate on the development of multimedia tools is equally symbolic of a resurgence of the misunderstandings between "technical time" and "social-time". If the techniques exist and are now relatively "mature", nothing shows that there exists sufficient demand to allow their development, nor that this demand is really creditworthy and fits in with the economic processes of market-regulation.
Facing the supply in new technologies, the question of the social uses, of the modes of socio-spatial regulation when compared with the supply in information and communication techniques, fairly often sends back to the question of social practices and the social demand concerning these techniques. The latter is however often evaded, being assimilated, in the technocratic rhetoric to the question of"needs". Now, as pointed out by Henri Mendras and Michel Forsé in their work devoted to social change/19/ "needs do not exist(...) the distinction between the"basic"needs that every man must satisfy and the "non-essential"needs is absurd : all the needs are social products, and they are defined by the means of satisfying them that every society puts at the disposal of its members. A need exists only according to its possible satisfaction". During all the development of standardized mass-production, (from the fifties tot the beginning of the crisis in the seventies)the feature of the consumer society would have been to produce a logic of supply likely to give structure to demand, to provoke it -thence this conceptual shift which goes from the uses to social practices and as far as the demand or the social needs. The prospect of the advent of a society of information and communication lets show through the idea according to which communication between social actors would be an ever-growing need. In this case, the still faint substitution of a referent"technological push"by that of a "social pull" does justice to the thought processes of the social sciences and undoubtedly represents an invitation that should be seized. "It took a long time to realize that receptors are actors in these phenomenons of communication" underlines Anne-Marie Laulan. Now, this comeback to the foreground of the communication receptor /actor allows to catch a glimpse of the questions relating to the psychological, symbolic dimensions, to the modes of perception or of representation.
The Communication and Information Techniques are certainly not the first research themes to question the disciplines of the social sciences as to their cpacity of cooperation. Among others, the theme "the City" has appealed and still appeals to such an effortt even if it is often monopolized by the dominating couple : urban sociology /geography. The urban problems being notoriously appealed to in order to reconsider those of the socio-spatial stakes of the ICT, we find there a heuristic crossing particularly fertile. One will find in these problems the convergence of the discourses about transition, which some call a "revolution" by the ICT and by the City. While urban growth and crisis require a more and more asserted intervention of the CIT, this couple "City /ICT" should display its capability to assume"modernity"and its capability to pose itself as a laboratory on social matters.If traditionally geographical themes are to be altered by the growth of ICT in contemporary societies, it has become important for geography to put them back into its corpus even if it means some conceptual adjustments.
Thus, the works of the Palo Alto school have founded a way of apprehending space. Human ethology and the concept of proxemy wrought by E.T.Hall appeal directly to the relations between individuals in the society and territoriality : "The telephone, the television,and the portable transmitters have extended man's social distance, allowing to integrate the activities of very distant groups. The extension of social distance to day changes the structure of social and political institutions in accordance with modes one has just started studying""/20/
Even so, geography will, as a whole, remain very reserved, fhe concept of proxemy being especially used by interdisciplinary scientists such as Abraham Moles and Henri Laborit. The transposition of research in human and animal ethologies doubtless arousing some reluctance, these works have had, so far, little influence on social science researchers. The complexity of man's social world made suspect such transpositions guilty of producing a simplistic vision of the field of relations between societies and their territory.
The reluctance of geography lies within the scope of a critical dimension which consisted in bringing to the fore elements of resistance and even opposition in the face of some"deterritorializing"theses. Thus the "global village" of Marshall Mac Luhan did nott succeed in convincing geographers for whom the intrusion of a communication specialist on a familiar ground, that of a village, was found irrelevant. The study of the subtle relations between societies and territories brought more than mere nuances to positions denounced as too gobal and simplistic.
For Henri Bakis, this disciplinary reserve might come from a difficulty to seize phenomenons deprived of materiality and real territorial legibility. The flows interest geographers in their materiality : trading, flows of money, shifts in populations...Exchanges of ideas, intellectual and emotional exchanges, the market of information and communication (the territorial economy of the great medias for instance), the role of the great infrastructures(telephone, road"information"...) leave the geographer all the more perplex since he is relatively helpless. Yet, from the moment these questions take a more and more important place in the analysis of the evolution of societies and the relations between them and the different dimensions of space, there existed for geography an obvious risk in persevering with its defensive and critical attitude all the more so since the assertion of a new discipline, the"sciences of information and communication", was accompanied by renewed interest concerning territorial questions :the issue of"barriers to communication" for instance, would meet again, to a certain extent, the problems of borders, natural obstacles...
These elements of appraisal seem to have such an importance in the recent history of our discipline that remote communication is felt to be a stake not only of enrichment, of thematic diversification but, in some respect, of renewal, of revival. This new perception already seems to have started inasmuch as it is mentioned iteratively in institutional and academic geography. It was already the case in 1970 when Pierre George wrote in his"Que sais-je?" devoted to the"methods of geography" : "Within the frame of the geography of trading lies the geography of communications, in the sense of communication of information, publicity, thought""But this author also admitted that the theme had been greatly neglected by the discipline. Since the eighties, many academic books and readers have tried to remedy this omission. A work Committee of the International Geographical Union is now entirely devoted to these themes : "Geography of communication and communication networks" while Olivier Dolffus dedicates several chapters to the subject in volume I of the lastt issue of "Geographie Universelle".
But, if one notices a real and progressive awareness of geography towards the problems of information and communication, one can also notice a calling into question of old methods, questioning about the concepts and borrowing from other disciplines.
What can the scientific position of geography be concerning these questions? The attempts to renovate the corpus of geography have, of course, been numerous; from the"new geography" to the development of geography of representations and the geography of powers. The advances of these innovations either academic, institutional or scientific are invaluable lessons and are evidence of the convergent efforts to take into account phenomenons and processes too often left in the dark. They also testify of a will of systematic questioning about the concepts and the theoretical references. The realization of these advances at the epistemological level has, in a way, prepared the ground for a geography of the ICT.
What interests us here is the way a discipline of social sciences, geography, is led to reconsider its processes of analysis, scalar and temporal, facing the more and more massive and influent intrusion of the communication and information techniques. To what extent do the methods of geography allow a critical approach of the processes which go together with the development of communication and information techniques? Do these processes influence the evolution of the geographical thought?
These techniques are said to have important even formative effects, on the reconstruction of scales. The intertwining of electronic communication networks would produce telescoping or intersecting between the levels that go from the micro-local to the planetary. Thus, the teleports would be these territorial and technical devices which would bring"the world to one's doorstep"This reconstruction of scales would go with that of temporalities which could see a cohabitation of more or less long times (in the scope of social production) and "nanoseconds" or "machine-time". Are these innovations likely to change completely the social temporalities and their inscription in the territories of life? Cultural imperialism conveyed by the great mass-medias is to be confronted with the emergence of alternative medias such as neighborhood newspapers or"public access channels"/21/ which appear on the cable T.V.networks in the big US cities.
The communication and information techniques play a part in the technization process of the Cities./22/ But their growth corresponds to another necessity. "Urbanization finds its motivating forces in the need for interaction"/23/ states Paul Claval. The encounter between the socio-spatial problems of communication and information techniques and the urban problems consists in analysing the City as a social commutation switch. The intercession of technique in the need for interaction is essential with urban growth. The globalisation of trade has given rise to"World Cities", these few towns that organize planetary trade thanks to the density of the networks which link them and define an efficient economic space.According to Abraham A.Moles,"The City is more and more becoming a synonym of society. Quantitatively, as we know, for our technological societies, over 90% of the human beings will be living in what we used to call towns, by the end of the century.The behavior of the urbanite in the environment of the city is becoming the only normal behavior, all the others being exceptions"/24/. In this ecumenopolistic promise the communication and information techniques are endowed with the power to restore a social link that urban gigantism has slackened. The entropization of the urban system would be thwarted by the neg-entropic potentials of these techniques.The study of the megalopolis of the US north-eastern coast by Jean Gottman has clearly shown the importance of the part played by the telecommunications in the cohesion of the urbanized entity./25/ Technopoles, teleports already pose themselves as attributes of the City of the future. In many cities around the world, vast programs to develop areas devoted to accomodate electronic equipment infrastructures are growing in number."Singapore provides insight and lessons about the issues faced by a metropolis planning for an information economy, society and spatial structure " states Kenneth Corey/26/ But the success of a number of these voluntarist policies in many countries and cities is far from obvious. Having studied in Japan the Teletopia project, significant of the ""jôhôk to toshi-zukuri (computerization and urban development, literally : construction of the city), Richard Piorunski noticed that, five years after the beginning of the program, "after investigating in Kansai with the planning services of the cities of Osaka, Kôbe, Himeji, Kakogawa, Tanabe, with firms exploiting the new medias and with NTT...about a quarter of the systems that were expected have actually been completed"/27/ . In spite of these disappointments, in Japan and elsewhere, the myth of the driving and structuring effects of the communication and information techniques still inspires the public actors and the urban authorities. Research has, yet, many times proved that these techniques cannot have such effects, that they are the result of an evolution of the urban structures which bear them in seeds, contextualize them and confer them all their relevance, that they result from a structured demand and that they correspond exactly to a logic of use which cannot be easily anticipated.
From a general point of view, till recently, there existed relatively few studies on communication and information in the city. As pointed out by Pierre Merlin "The track had, yet,been cleared by Richard L.Meier'book"/28/ (A communication theory of the urban growth, Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T.Press, 1962; )The fundamentally original approach of R.L.Meier did not gain widespread acceptance,nor did the works of Allan Pred/29/ or of Gunnar Törnquist/30/ as noticed by Paul Claval : "The concepts of these researchers still appear to some as slightly on the fringe of the concerns of our discipline"/31/ Like other disciplines, geography appears, in fact, to be helpless in the analysis of the processes at work. Semiologists, specialists of information /communication, engineers...though they incidentally take the city as a scope for their analysis, fairly often elude the issue of the urban functioning, its regulation, its logic. In Japan, the sociologists working on the problems of the regulation of Tokyo's conurbation in connection with the C.I.T. showed, as soon as 1975, the interest of a critical reflection about such objects. It is only recently that urban studies, especially in sociology, have taken up again with works whose ambition is to decipher the relations between the City and the CIT as shown by the works of Manuel Castells : "The informational City" then "Flows, networks and identities. A comparative theory of the informational society"/32/ This encounter of two issues"City"and"CIT" carries new problematics even new methods inasmuch as the definition of the City poses more and more problems. It is rather symbolic that, confronted with this difficulty, one coud expect methodological and conceptual innovations in disciplines which, for a long time had hardly been concerned with the couple"City" and"CIT". Books such as Louis-Jean Calvet's, "Les voix dans la ville. Introduction à la sociolinguistique urbaine"/33/ and Antiquity historian Guy Achard's"La Communication à Rome"/34/ are good examples of this type of invigorating and fecund analysis. They contribute, beside the classical problematics of urban sociology and geography to the emergence of a coherent corpus.
About these issues, the originality of the geographic thought process is to draw from several sources. Aside from some pioneering work, it built itself up rather late in time during the eighties. It is significant of the situation of our discipline, at a "crossing" of many social sciences. One may consider globally that the thought process of urban geography consists in analysing the encounter between an environment : "the city" and a tool with complex and symplectic properties : the CIT. The geographical issues which allow to establish a fecund scientific link between these objects are a good reflection of the plurality of the possible approaches. One of the first approaches between the city, urban development and telecommunications is that of Walter Christaller. With him, the notion of a "network" appears, at once, like one of the conceptual keys.This approach is fundamental but passed unnoticed at the time it was expressed./35/ Afterwards, the concept of network in geography will give rise to two modes of use, one metaphoric, the other structural.
The use of the metaphors and analogy leads to abstraction, to modelisation and to objective and objectivizing distance. Metaphors, asserts Lucien Sfez are "islands of imagination which motivate research and create zones of attraction for the concepts(...). Often borrowed from close or remote disciplines, they light up by refraction the point they seem to get away from"./36/ It is undoubtedly one of the most obvious heritages from the works of Christaller who, to describe the geographical space would take objective detours. The type of geography had many developments with, for French geography authors like Jean Labasse,during the fifties, then Denise Pumain, Thérèse Saint-Julien, Lydia Diappi, Lena Sanders...to some works by the geographers of "GIP Reclus" (whose volume I of the Universal Geography is fully significant). These works often refer to debates and theories on"complexity" and come close to some theses developed by Henri Laborit, particularly by the use of organic metaphors.
Another approach is the one that considers urban space the knot of multiple networks, going as far as defining the City as a sedimentation, a juxtaposition of networks. It is a matter of analysing via the concept of networks, territorial devices and social processes. The thought processes of town-planners or specialists of networked urban infrastructures meets the ICT dimension in authors like Gabriel Dupuy, Jean Laterasse, Michel Gensollen or Nicolas Currien.
Via the issue of social networks, the social question makes a return in strength. The CIT are then supposed to allow a reproduction and a regulation of social matters in a more and more complex space. Then rise the issues of social link, citizenship, local democracy, use of ICT.
Taking these considerations into account one can conceive that the ICT are a tool, a lever to develop and modernize the City, or rather, that the modernization of the urban society could pass through a development of the use of the ICT.Two points of view clash then classically : that of development through the offer in technology and that of development through use,, capability of appropriation and social invention (classical conflict"technological push"or"social pull"). However, still remains the question of the regulation processes at work in the urban societies in developing countries, almost utterly deprived of modern telecommunications medias. Studies concerning the role of telecommunications in the big cities of the third world countries are still too few to allow to have a precise idea about the real stakes.
Further questions have added themselves to these .They are linked to the role of two types of activity, : economic /industrial and public. One is then, with this"return of the actor"in a kind of geography rather different from the one evoked at the beginning.
Among the geographers interested in the development of the economic activities in the urban space, the methodological indicators depend especially on the scale on which the analysis is focused : micro (infra-enterprise), local, regional, national, international. Telecommunications are then perceived through a double dimension : it is first of all an economic and industrial activity, assessed by the classical methods of economic geography (origin, number of employees in such and such firm market area, modes of territorialization, analysis of flows...), it is also a meta-activity, in other words an activity that creates others,, catalyses and multiplies them and above all provokes new logics of territorialization ("relocation",computer-work at home).
For the geographer interested in the public actor, the matter is to analyse the way a public actor uses telecommunications in his policy. Stephen Graham, a British researcher from Newcastle-upon-Tyne made an excellent synthesis of the different modalities and of the different intervention area of the urban political actors in the United Kingdom.: Electronic Infrastructures and the City : Some emerging Municipal Policy Roles in the UK"./37/
Another thought process partly at the joint between the two previous ones, the issues of town and country planning, regional geography which devote a part of their efforts to the study of the effects of telecommunications at the joint between the metropolitan City and the region : rural and semi-urban. The stakes of relocation, of metropolization, of the new economic polarities on the territory and how to regulate them are recurrent themes.
At least, where geography and other social sciences articulate, one can study the issue of the relations between urban authorities and ICT This issue will constitute the third part of this article.
The encounter between computing and ICT on the one hand and urban Administration on the other hand is not fortuitous. It is not a matter of a forced grafting but of a meeting between two worlds : the technical world and the social world on a choice space : the City. Easier to test and to implement than in the scope of a state Administration in its entirety, computing was bound to find in urban Administration a field for experimentation.. As stated by Haroun Jamous and Pierre Grémion in the subtitle of their book : "Essai sur les projets de rationalisation du gouvernement et des hommes"/38/, it is certainly in the urban environment that this project could become operational. There have been still more audacious attempts, such as the one that consisted in automating the management of the Soviet society during the Brejnev era;/39/ It seems that the complete failure of the computerization of the Plan provoked the discreet but final renunciation to that type of administration. Behind such a program one can perceive the technocratic and totalitarian designs. If the urban environment seems to be more adapted to the modern conceptions of administrative computing, it is also because the risks of deviation are lower than in the case of a State, essentially because the political power of the urban authorities is always more restricted and more contingent than that of the national governments and more confronted with opposition forces.
Moreover, the cities, these"bits of State"quoted by Michel Maffesoli/40/ appear to be, at the present time, the places of experimentation for new forms of management of social matters. Urban growth and the processes of administrative decentralization focus the attention on the City more and more supposed to sum up (or to reduce?) society. It is therefore natural that technical and social matters meet in the City.
A laboratory for social matters, the City has also become a laboratory for political matters. But taking into account the stakes of the technological development has above all given rise to analyses on the capacity of urban sites to pose themselves as attractive sites in the productive systems with high technological value. In this prospect the ICT especially interest the urban economy and the urban authorities in their capability of planning the economic development of the city; The chapter that Jean Bastié and Bernard Dézert devote to telecommunications and computers in their work"La ville" clearly belongs to that type of approach.
However one can view this question under a different angle which could be that of the connection between the political power and the technique. The technique penetrates into politics and is supposed to change it. That was part of the project of the founder of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener/41/. "Philosopher F.Dubarle, a French member of the"Wiener network" can thus entitle the article in which he introduces cybernetics, published in"Le Monde" december 28.1948 : "Vers la machine à gouverner"./42/
In"La ville, symbolique en souffrance", the authors have chosen to use as a research material science-fiction literature considering that"the science-fiction writer when speaking of another city located in his imagination, in fact speaks of his own city, hypertrophying and distorting some of its characteristics"/43/
Could Cybernopolis be a hypertrophy of an existing model? Is this hypostasis of sociall and political matters by the Technique, in this case communication and information techniques, in gestation?
If Cybernopolis does not exist since it is not a real city, it is well and truly in order to impede its advent that contemporary democracies have put legislation in place to protect the names included in computer data. Thus, the French"Commission nationale informatique et libertés"(CNIL) sets itself up as a rampart of democracy against the "threat" of computers/44/ The title of the report of the"Office parlementaire français d'évaluation des choix scientifiques et technologiques" on the consequences of the new communication and information techniques on men's life : the cybernetic man, "illustrates the recurrent concern of the Politicians. Cybernopolis is the"image behind the mirror" the perverse double which is a classical figure of psychanalyse. Cybernopolis would be an anthropomorphization of R.L.Stevenson's Mr Hyde or Edgar Allan's Poe's William Wilson. We know that these doubles exist and make the ambivalence of each personality.
Literature about the city, as a whole, presents two types of cities : monstruopolis and anthropopolis, the city that crushes the humanity and the agora rediscovered, an apocalyptic vision and an apologetic vision. The negative vision is brought especially by novels and science-fiction books whereas the positive vision is a product of a "literary" category which is that of expert reports, planners, network operators, bench scientists. It is obvious that Cybernopolis belongs to the first category and would rather be found in fiction works. "What would happen if, instead of regarding the images used by the authors as literary conventions one studied them carefully regarding them as rigourous systems of recollection meant to give free rein to memories? " wondered Edward T.Hall in"La dimension cachée"./45/ Futuristic utopia , cybernopolis would make up a"system" aiming at freeing man from his fears in the face of a"technicization of society", of"planetary networks", of antidemocratic potentialities supposedly attached to the handling of these techniques...But according to James Beniger/46/ , the revolution of the social control is a contemporary reality. One could find numerous traces in contemporary cities which strive towards this perfect model of Cybernopolis.
Edward T.Hall's methodological proposal enables to anticipate the use of a material of great richness and still hardly exploited : literature, and especially science-fiction literature./47/ A few authors, such as philosopher Gilbert Hottois, have started prospecting in this direction. For Gilbert Hottois , "the most striking, the most accomplished example of a technocosmic city is tobe found in one of A.C.Clarke's masterpieces : The city and the stars(...). An electronic brain commands the whole city which can be modified only in accordance with the programs and data from main central computer memories..."/48/ In his description of New-York City, an intermediary version of a cybernetized city,the science-fiction writer Frederick Pohl takes care to explain in the introduction to his "Annals of the city" : "Considering the fact that I earn my living by writing science-fiction, I have been thinking a lot about everything concerning the future, especially the future of cities", and he tells the anecdote of his meeting with the mayor of New-York City John Lindsay, in 1973 (at the beginning of the great financial crisis which was to end up eight years later in putting under supervision by New-York State the urban Administration.) One of the main characters in the novel is a social science researcher working in an institute, and whose work consists in conceiving"social inventions"based on the use of electronic communication medias supposed to remedy the urban dysfunctions and especially the problems about local democracy. As he presents his inventions to the key man of the municipal Administration, the inventor comes up against a refusal and concludes"We have proposed Saul Wasserman a plan intended to eliminate him. No wonder he did not appreciate it ! "/49/ The evoked alternative of substitution of a machine for a human decision represents an opposition of the Politician /Administrator against the Technician. The hyperrationalization of the futuristic projection establishes the supremacy of the second over the first but it is only the simple exaggeration of a current process visible notably in the procedures of aid to decision-making It should be noted however that, in this model, the power is not that of the machine, but that of the technician who programs it. In this case too, the model draws its inspiration from contemporary realities and from the figure of the"computer gurus" who have succeeded in conquering a power of regulation in some urban administrations.
Through the issue of urban powers, we shall deal with the principles of administrative management and of production of a political power for which the city is the theater of action. Urban powers are regarded as organizational structures subject to technical changes. The sociology of organizations, the strategic analysis, the problems of conflict, of innovation, the concepts of rationalization, modernization, regulation etc...are at the heart of our research work.
The transformation of urban powers is apprehended through the analysis of the conditions of their modernization, mainly through the conditions of the assimilation of tools like computers or other ICT. We shall be attentive to the question of the constitution around these new tools of"local technostructures", regarded as power structures, power stakes and structures of production of new competences...
The study of the conditions of the integration of computing in the politico-administrative machinery of big cities will allow us to build an analysis of the types of evolution of the modes of urban government.
The conditions of the computerization of French cities have, so far, been hardly studied. About that question, the reference elements are Gabriel Pallez's/50/ report, in 1979, Gérard Saumade's/51/ report, in 1986, and the study of the"Atoll" association "Informatique, nouvelles technologies et gestion locale"/52/, published in 1992. Other authors have written guides to the computerzation of local communities, among whom Claudie Panchetti, former member of the"Commission à l'Informatique" near the DGCL/53/, Henri Robert, secretary of the Association of the Mayors of French Cities(Association des Maires des Grandes Villes de France)/54/ The researchers that studied the process leading to computerization, among whom, Gabriel Dupuy, Dominique Lorrain...consider, all the same, that "this process is certainly a major innovation"/55/ The majority of the research productions we have at our disposal at the present time are mainly general studies about the computerization of local communities. The research in question focuses chiefly on the analysis of administrative modernization, (Jean Frayssinet, La bureautique) on the evolution of Training-Skill-Job (Joèlle Lévy, L'informatisation dans les collectivités locales) indeed even on the specific conditions of the evolution of computing systems in the local community environment (A.M.Alquier and M.F.Barthet, Le devenir de la bureautique dans les communes. L'informatique de l'utilisateur final). The synthetic approaches (G.Dupuy, L'informatisation des villes) are fairly rare.
With the exception of some research work initiated on well-defined terrtories, (the rather oldish work of Jean Frayssinet/56/ about Marseille and Jean Bouinot/57/ about Orléans), there is very little research work explaining the local contexts of computerization. The main sources are the specialized press(01 Informatique, le Monde Informatique, La Lettre Informatique des collectivités locales...) Monographs are rare or old excepted some works about the towns of south-west France. For telematics, the main sources of information are the documents of the"Rendez-vous de la Télématique locale", the letter of ACTTE(Association des Collectivités Territoriales Télématisées Européennes)-an association of European telematized communities-, the magazine "Solutions télématiques" and the publications of"l'Observatoire":"Les télécommunications dans la ville".
At the international level, the OECD seems to be concerned by these issues, since the first survey, in 1971,in five European countries on : "Computing and local communities"; the study published in 1978 on"local communities and computing" until the publication of the work"Villes et technologies nouvelles"-Cities and new technologies- published in 1992. In its last publication "Systèmes d'information pour la gestion des villes"-Information systems for the management of cities-, published in 1993, one can read "The OECD urban affairs group has given, in the past few years and in the scope of its research program, considerable interest to the definition of an information policy for the management and functioning of cities"./58/
The European Union with the Sprint program but especially with the Fast program has been for some time involved in research about this type of problematics. In the reports of the FAST programs (Forecasting and assessement in Science and Technology), the synthetic report"The future of European cities, the role of science and technology"devotes a whole chapter to"City networking : The impact of Information and Communication Technology".
However that may be, these studies generally deal with the modes of use of the ICT in cities. The city, then, is an experimentation site, especially in the field of management of the networks, innovation in the matter of economic development...But the local power is hardly present. The links between the ICT and the urban government are seldom in the center of the problems.
One of the rare studies in which this link is clearly expressed and posed as a problem is the study of H.Jamous and P.Grémion performed within the framework of the program Données pour le développement"-Data for the Development- financed by the"Comité d'organisation des recherches appliquées sur le développement économique et sociall (CORDES, 1974 ). (Committee for the organization of applied research on social and economic development ). This study, entitled"L'ordinateur au pouvoir. Essai sur les projets de rationalisation du gouvernement et des hommes" published in1978 deals with the question of government and especially urban government, through French, British, American and German cases.
The reference model on these issues is the U.S.model. Today it is well known thanks to the numerous and remarkable works of California University (mainly Irvine and U.S.C.) researchers who have examined closely the computerization of over 700 american cities (which represents, and by far, the widest sampling in the world). This vast investigation being accompanied with 42 very complete monographs, it is a whole panorama of the computerization of US cities that has been deciphered and brought up to date for over thirty years. The history of research about the computerization of cities in the USA appears to be strongly linked to the existence, from 1973 to 1978 of the URBIS (Urban Information System )project brought by Urbis Research Group of Public Policy Research Organization (PPRO) of the University of California, Irvine. According to its main leaders "The purpose of this project was to assess the state of the art in local government computing, to evaluate the impact computers have had on government services and management decision making, and to develop recommendations that local managers and officials could implement in order to make better use of information technology" The character and the orientations at once operational, from the moment it is a matter of developing a"good policy"seems tobe a US specificity. This speficity being sanctioned by the fact that the Kennedy School of government of Harvard University (Cambridge /Massachusetts), whose aim is to form the elite of city managers produces regularly a sort of innovation competition in city management in which operational products are presented (sort of"Lépine" competition-extravagance apart- for the benefit of local communities).
The question of the ICT in the urban politico-administrative organizations sends back to that of their capacities of evolution and indirectly, allows to put renewed questions on the nature of urban powers, on the concepts of urban regime, of management, of local power, of urban policy...The appearance of the ICT is interesting in the fact that it brings to light operating logics through the disturbance it instils into former operating modes.
The analysis of the modes of exercising power in urban governments is at the center of our concerns. If urban government is the expression of political action, the problems to be dealt with by the"governments of cities" as well as their traditional competences are narrowly defined, which noticeably reduces their capacities of intervention. It is a political action supposed to confine itself to the daily management of a society, but which is structurally unwilling to innovate, depending only on its own capabilities. The intervention of this"discreet" government is felt essentially on the production or supply of local public services. Jean-François Auby's/59/ typology can be used concerning the development of the notion of public service linked to the needs of the population in these matters : hygiene, communication (terrestrial and unmaterial),energy, environment protection, economic drive. Through these missions, the"local government" acts on urban society. Moreover, it is also supposed to be the guarantee of an identity, an urbanity, an integrity, which requires the use of modes of expression (architecture, publicity...) and of means of regulation (town-planning, police...) likely to maintain the cohesion of an urban society in never-ending renewal.
The missions of these urban governments assert themselves or are linked with the development of techniques within the city. Hygiene, communication, energy...are essential needs with the growth of urban populations. The answers will be given thanks to an ever-growing resort to technique. Can we, for all that, infer that we are witnessing a technicization of the modes of exercising the government of cities? Has the diversification of the needs of the populations in terms of local public services affected the way of governing and administering cities, what role has technique played in this process?
But, if, as shown by researchers such as Dominique Lorrain, the technique has a historical role in setting up urban services, modern management constraints lead to reconsider how roles and competences between the urban public actors and market actors are divided up.The very foundations of the traditional dialectic between public sector and private sector can here be reconsidered.
One can also consider a market logic, presented by the firms that produce new technologies and whose interests can be taken over by the State or by great government Agencies within the scope of sector-based support policies. The "modernization /technicization" of urban administrations thus represents a market where the usual processes of competition, concentration, alliances can be met with. The modes of management of this market are particularly interesting : what types of partnership can be imagined between public actors and private actors, what are the principles of experimentation in urban sites? (Orlando in the United States, Parthenay in France, are symbolic places for these experimental markets).
The inflation in contemporary discourse on the role of the ICT in the cities does not really correspond to the way the cities use these new tools in practice. Beside utopias or counter-utopias of technique-governed cities, indeed even cities on the way of cybernetization described in science-fiction novels, the experiments tried by urban administrations in using the ICT remain very timid and under pernickety surveillance from some administrations created for the purpose (CNIL in France, for example). So, one can wonder how the ICT are perceived, historically and culturally by urban politicians. Shall we find the dialectic or a clash between the expert and the politicians, updated and trivial form of the couple made by the scientist and the politician?
In spite or because of its ambiguousness; the impact of the ICT on democratic regulation should not be underestimated and even less disposed of. It corresponds to a weakening of the role of the political parties and of the demands and interests of the individuals or the groups. This weakening leaves a political vacuum that new modes of mediation might try to fill by the creation of new public spaces, new modes of exercising citizenship and of which the ICT could possibly be the supports.
There exists a logic of innovation linked to the movement of rationalization of the urban politico-administrative organizations. The complexity of the system of local government has generally increased in big cities since the sixties on account of a widening of competences of the local communities and a diversification of the demands from the citizens and from the actors playing a part in the management of cities. This complexity requires the mastery of a greater number of informations, the coordination of a greater number of decisions and of sector-based policies. This movement is accompanied by an increasing professionalization of the local representatives , which corresponds to a "technicization" of the cases to be dealt with.
There also exists a logic of technological innovation linked to the spreading of a modernistic culture among the local actors, in relation with a technicization of the urban environment. What are its main causes? If we set aside the idea of an autonomy of the technician system, or of a technological determinism, that amounts to consider that the causes which interest us are of social, cultural, economic or political order. Consequently, the logics at work can be analysed starting from some significant elements or events : younger blood into the managers of the urban administration, administrative decentralization, integration into wider and more complex circuits and economic logics... Besides, this logic of innovation seems to be linked to the fortune of new professional groups, among which that of computerists is no doubt the most charasteristic. One could thus approach the different modes of insertion of the new technologies in urban administration by studying and presenting a typology of the"attitudes"and "behaviour" of the actors concerned.
The processes that interest us are also inseparable from a particular financial context. An element which triggers the quest for innovation is often a context of crisis, in the case of big cities, particularly a financial crisis, called"fiscal stress" by the Americans. The stakes of innovation will then be to implement new forms of management, to increase productivity, to generate external money savings.
Technique and communication and information techniques are a material for a geography of the future. The involvement of geographers and, beyond, of social sciences in the prospective reflections correspond to a will of scientists to take part in public action. But this involvement cannot be put into practice on the question of the socio-spatial effects of the communication and information techniques before the issues and the scientific methods are precised. "Adviser to the Prince" the geographer is thus concerned by the issue of power.Precisely, this question is at the heart of the socio-spatial problems of the communication and information techniques in the city.The questioning about the power or the powers can feed on the reflection of philosophers, political analysts, but also anthropologists, sociologists, historians. The nature of power allows to apprehend the way a society regulates itself. The issue of"Urban Powers" must also be confronted with the theses of "without", "against"or"all" State, from the crisis of the Welfare State to the models of administrative Decentralization, from the return to"urban republics", to the "tribal era "indeed even to "Barbarism", from "Modernity" to"post-Modernity".
1Abraham A.Moles and André Noiray, La pensée technique, In La philosophie, Encyclopédie, les idées, les oeuvres, les hommes, p 498.
2Raymond Aron, Les désillusions du Progrès, Agora, Calmann-Lévy, 1969.
3Michel Seiris, La technique, Coll.Les grandes questions de la philosophie, PUF,1994, p.333.
4as indicated by the pluridisciplinary vocation of the "Frankfurt school", "Does the "Frankfurt school" find its place in sociology or in philosophy?" asks Madeleine Grawitz.
5Serge Tchakhotine, Le viol des foules par la propagande politique, Gallimard, 1939, réédition 1992.
6Ludwig von Bertalanfy, Théorie générale des systèmes, Paris, Dunod,1973, p. 236
7Abraham A.Moles et André Noiray, La pensée technique, In La philosophie, Encyclopédie, les idées, les oeuvres, les hommes, p. 498.
8Robert Ferras, Ville paraître, être à part, Coll. Géographiques, Ed. Reclus, 1990, p. 24
9 Jérôme Monnet, La ville et son double. La parabole de Mexico, Coll. Essais et Recherches,Ed. Nathan, 1993, p. 12.
10 Gérard Claisse,Télémythes, mémoire d'habilitation à diriger des recherches,1995,cf Introduction ;
11 Pierre Musso, dir.,Communiquer Demain, DATAR-Edition de l'Aube, Paris, 1994.
12 Emmanuel Eveno et Alain Lefebvre, coord., Territoires,Sociétés, Communication, n° 35 Sciences de la Société, Presses Universitaires du Mirail, avril-mai 1995, cf Introduction.
13 For Harold A.Innis, in"Empire and Communications,Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1950",the notion of Empire refers to a state of control of the communication techniques, the decline of the Empire being found in the incapability to control technical innovation in the field of communication.
14 James Beniger, The Control Revolution : Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1986
15 Cf Bruno Aurelle, Les télécommunications, Coll. repères, Ed. La Découverte, 1986, p. 86
16 Gérard Théry, Les autoroutes de l'information, Collection des rapports officiels / Rapport au Premier Ministre, La documentation française, Paris, 1994.
17 Elie Cohen, Le Colbertisme High Tech. Economie des Telecom et du Grand projet, Ed. Pluriel, Coll. Enquête, 1992, Ed. Hachette. ..It should be noted however that the figure of the expert/instructor is hardly evoked by the author.
18 Télécommunications et développement, Dossier constitué par Victor-Yves Ghebali, Problèmes politiques et sociaux, n° 576, 22 janvier 1988, p.1
19 Henri Mendras etMichel Forsé, Le changement social.Tendances et paradigmes, A.Colin, Col. U/Sociologie, 1983
20 E.T.Hall, La dimension cachée, Ed. du Seuil, Coll. Point, 1976(1966 Ed. originales)
21 On the american T.V.screen, one can see his neighbor removing the hairs from his legs, the local biker cooking a spicy vegetable tart or his own children remaking the world by playing the electric guitar. This is called "public access channels" "community medias", in Telerama n° 2340. november 16 1994.
22 Cf Gabriel Dupuy, Urbanisme et Technique. Chronique d'un mariage de raison, Centre de recherche d'urbanisme, Paris, 1978 .
23 Paul Claval, La logique des villes, Litec, 1981, p.53.
24 Abraham A.Moles, "La cité câblée.Une nouvelle qualité de vie?",in Cités câbles, conversations, communications, Les Annales de la recherche urbaine, n° 34, Dunod, juin-juillet 1987, p.82.
25 Jean Gottman, The coming of transactional city, University of Maryland, Institute for Urban Studies, 1983
26 Kenneth E.Corey, "Planning-process lessons from Singapore : towards information-age urban planning", Pre-acts of the international symposium : new industrialization, new urbanization : Cities and technopolis, organized by CIEU-CNRS Toulouse-Le Mirail University, september 1987.
27 Richard Piorunski, "Télétopia. La ville et les systèmes d'information au Japon", In la maîtrise de la ville, Paris, éditions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1994, p.439.
28 Pierre Merlin, Trente ans de recherche urbaine. Les apports de la géographie, In Les Annales de la Recherche Urbaine, N°64, octobre 1994.
29 Allan Pred, City-systems in advanced economies, London, Hutchinson, 1977
30 Gunnar Törnquist, Systems of cities and information flows, Lund, C.W.K., Gleerup, 1977.
31 Paul Claval, La géographie au temps de la chute des murs. Essais et études, Ed. L'Harmattan, 1993, p.124
32 Manuel Castells, The informational city.Information technology, Economic restructuring and the Urban-Regional process, Blackwell ed., 1989. Flows,networks and identities. A comparative theory of the informational society, Blackwell ed, to be published in 1995.
33 Louis-Jean Calvet, Les voix dans la ville.Introduction à la sociolinguistique urbaine, Coll. essais Payot, Ed. Payot et Rivages,1994
34 Guy Achard, La communication à Rome, Petite Bibliothèque Payot, Ed. Payot et Rivages, 1994
35 To go deeper into this notion see last"QSJ" written by Henry Bakis"Les réseaux et leurs enjeux sociaux" .
36 Lucien Sfez, Critique de la communication, Ed. du Seuil, 1988, p.23.
37 Stephen D.Graham, Electronic Infrastructues and the City : Some Emerging Municipal Policy Roles in the UK, Urban studies, vol. 29, June 1992, pp.755-781.
38 Haroun Jamous and Pierre Grémion, "L'ordinateur au pouvoir. Essai sur les projets de rationalisation du gouvernement et des hommes", Coll. Sociologie, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1978.
39 Cf.Erik P.Hoffman, "Technology, values, and political power in the Soviet Union :Do computers matter?", In Technology and communist culture, edited by Frederic J.Fleron, pp. 397-436, New-York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977.
40 Michel Maffesoli; "La technologie du Pouvoir et le pouvoir de la technologie", In Décision et pouvoir, colloque dirigé par Lucien Sfez, Ed.10/18, 1979.
41 On this point, Cf.Philippe Breton, L'utopie de la communication, La découverte, 1992.
42 Erik Neveu, Une société de communication, Coll.Clefs /Politique, Ed. Montchrestien,1994
43 Ph. Dard and alii, La ville,symbolique en souffrance, Centre d'études psychosociologiques, rapport de fin de contrat au Ministère de l'Equipement, 1975, p.67
44 CNIL,Dix ans d'Informatique et Libertés, Economica, 1988, p.9.
45 Op cit, p.121
46 Op. cit.
47 On these questions, Cf E.Eveno, ed, Utopies et Pouvoirs Urbains dans le monde, ouvrage collectif, Série"Villes et Territoires", n°10, Presses Universitaires du Mirail, à paraître en janvier 1996.
48 Gilbert Hottois, La mutation technicienne, In Penser la ville, Pierre Ansay et René Schonbrodt ed. AAM Editions, Bruxelles, 1989, p.370.
49 Frederick Pohl, Les annales de la cité 1, Ed.Denoèl, Coll. Présence du futur,1987 (ed.originale, 1984), p.35.
50 G.Pallez, L'informatique communale, Rapport officiel, La Documentation française, Paris 1980.
51 G.Saumade, L'informatisation des collectivités locales, Rapport officiel, La Documentation française, Paris 1986.
52 Atoll, Informatique, Nouvelles technologies et gestion locale, La Documentation française, 1992.
53 C.Panchetti, La nouvelle informatique communale. Micro-informatique, Bureautique, Télématique, Ed.Berger /Levrault, Paris, 1983.
54 H.Robert, Les enjeux de l'informatique communale, Ed.Sorman, Paris, 1987.
55 D.Drouet et D.Lorrain, Les processus d'innovation technologique dans la gestion urbaine, rapport au Plan Urbain, juillet,1991, quoted in G.Dupuy : L'informatisation des villes, Q.S.J., P.U.F.1992.
56 Jean Frayssinet,L'informatique au service d'une grande ville : l'exemple de Marseille, Rapport sur l'informatique et le management d'une grande ville, 1975.
57 Jean Bouinot, Stratégies de développement de systèmes d'information pour le management communal, ibidem.
58 OCDE, Systèmes d'information pour la gestion des villes, Paris, 1993, p.7
59 Jean-François Auby, Les services publics locaux, PUF,Coll. QSJ, 1982, pp. 31_32.