Telecommunications and urban design Representing Jersey City

Much of the life of cities is the interaction of deeply embedded structures—of buildings, infrastructures and social relations—with the flows of people, commodities and ideas. The growth in recent decades of intense telecommunications has added a dimension which calls for new understandings, as Stephen Graham has argued (City 5:3), of the social exclusion and displacement which can follow. In this paper Scott Page and Brian Phillips construct a close analysis of the physical and telecoms networks which unite and predominantly fracture Jersey City, part of the sprawling metropolitan area of New York. The authors propose new ways of representing the co-existence of visible and invisible networks and of understanding their significance for the development of the city. Their purpose is to inform new approaches to urban design in which the city, seen through new lenses, can be further transformed. Radical shifts in technology are cre-ating complex new urban geog-raphies, posing new challenges for cultures, economies and urban centres. Paul Virilio asks whether reliance on real-time digital interfaces could lead us to