Policy-Oriented City Networks in Cyberspace

Abstract

Whereas the academic debate on global networks used to be dominated by a focus on economic and financial flows, partially on strategies of technological or infrastructural integration, much less attention used to be dedicated to local/global articulations emerging around a wide variety of sociopolitical issues such as the fight against poverty, the strengthening of human rights or protection of the environment. In this chapter the authors endeavor to point out the limitations of traditional approaches in capturing the complexity and diversity of the emerging city networks and use the methodology of web sphere analysis to map and analyze new articulations of sociopolitical governance between different cities in the context of environmental policy as it is carried out in Curitiba, Brazil. The study is based on the mapping of Internet hyperlink connections and shows how a virtual transnational public space with the potential to support environmental governance processes in cities is emerging.