Wpływ technologii i gospodarki informacyjnej na miasta - najważniejsze współczesne kierunki badań

The world is currently undergoing transformations with far-reaching consequences. One of the most important changes, which constitutes a background to the majority of contemporary events and activities, is moving from mass and mechanical industrial economy to a much more elastic one, based on information. In order to define this stage, the term revolution is often used. Since practically everything changes industrial organization, character of peoples' work, business models, city construction, family and social structure, as well as the way we think and communicate - we also talk about a new civilization. This new civilization is interchangeably called post-industrial, information, supersymbolic or the civilization of knowledge. Contrary to certain predictions, cities have been in the foreground of the information revolution, and that is why there has been a distinctive need to create new and coherent foundations concerning their planning and development. For the rules based on industrial order are becoming useless in this new situation, when space and time relationships are reconfigured, borders between public and private domains are weakened, and transient and accelerated urban life is losing the solid support that previously had been protected by stable physical and social structures. The objective of this article is to present the four dominant perspectives to city-telecommunications relations: - technological determinism; - the related approaches of futurism and utopianism; - a more critical or 'dystopian' approach which draws on urban political economy; and - the social construction of technology ('SCOT') approach. Neither of the presented approaches is perfect. They can be criticized on a variety of fronts. But analyzing and evaluating them may contribute to studies that create the integrated basis for new perceptions and understanding of cities, and in turn, to new strategies for their economic and spatial development which guarantees a high standard of living in cities.