Sanchez/Sassion remark on the new geographies of centrality and marginality and the 'wild cards' opening hemisphere-wide possibilities needs specificty with respect to who controls the discourse, the power to implement strategies, the ability to define descriptive theories and implement policies accordingly.
I would like theorists of the global economy to address how the 'subjects' in these new spaces of marginality might voice their own experiences, articulate their sense of marginality, display their own control over these new spaces and new technologies. It seems that the position of the marginal is as always being described and their spaces determined from outside their lived experience.
Without a voice they seem passively dominated by transnational corporations, international banks, and financial and information infrastructures. Indeed, might theorists of the global information society research how the transnationalization of financial markets has effected the local housing sector, for only one example, in the 'new spaces of marginality? How has the new global information society shaped educational policies in these new spaces --- policies that can dominate or liberate? Just how many free-thinking problem solvers and wild cowboy hackers, can the global system tolerate before educational policies are modified?

Is the resort to violence, mentioned by Sanchez/Sassen, as a power of resistance, a self-destructive gesture of last resort that is both romantic if envisioned as revolutionary, and conservative if judged as a potential threat that must be contained?
Is labor in the new geography of 'marginal spaces' reduced to sweatshop industries, back-office space workers, cleaning, maintenance and garbage labor? Is it so that the new information technologies will require a more highly skilled and better educated world labor force or instead is there a geneal down-skilling within the labor force of the 'marginal spaces' where wages in the global economy are pushed downwards in a competitive race to the bottom? Can this be called 'creative destruction'?

With respect to the question of "Whose city is it?" --- clearly members of the information society live in a global society whose borders are unfixable -- what Manuel Castells calls the space of flows. There are multi-allegiances formed within these 'new societies' but do members share loyalty to a specific city, or do they share an emerging culture and set of political values that have nothing to do with 'discrete' places, regions, nations? Then what is the city as a contested terrain, where self-destructive violence seems to reign unleashed in many marginal zones --- is it other than a matrix of secured enclaves of enclosure for members of the new global society juxtaposed against a background of local specific spaces of dreadful waste and devastation? And we might also address these issues of spatial fragmentation by considering postmodern theories that urge us to war against totalities and universalities and to consider local differences and cultural identities.
But what does 'locality' and 'identity' mean in an informationally, economically, and politically interdependent world in which actors with trans-nation, trans-urban loyalties seem to be on the rise [ orchestrating both legal and illegal operations]?

In response to Angotti, I would challenge his statement that the unequal social pattern is important regardless of what spatial form it takes. Instead spatial form veils the mechanisms of power, dominance and exclusion, that must be addressed. Rather than repeat, I would refer back to my response in intervention #2 where I discussed maps and spatial tactics.

As for Ingersoll's concerns that space and form are obsolete, doomed by the immateriality of the informational network or cyberspace --- might this be an ideology we too readily accept as those of us on the net walk away from concerns with material reality?

Torre's discussion of local groups non-involvement with historic preservation projects and the imposition of requirements for global tourism on local economies is important. As is Geoffrey Fox's account of different local groups use of information technologies to tell their own stories, oral cultures that can grasp the new technologies based primarily on image and sound. Obviously, there needs to be much more in the way of local self-expressions. Simultaneously we can not ignore how these new technologies manipulate representations, not ignore who has access to broadcast networks and their program content that often presents a romanticized view of cultures in their gardens of Eden.
I have in view an image from today's New York Times that shows a white boy watching a naked group of Bushman children at play in Kagga Kamma Game Park in South Africa. Evidently a group of 40 of the dwindling population of Bushmen have been 'rescued' from an impoverished existence and allowed to live in the Park and be on display as the star attraction in what the newspaper defined as an 'eco-tourism business'. They too wanted to live a life untainted by Western civilization ---but they were nearly routed out of existence instead. Paying $7 to view the Bushmen, the tourist is given a glimpse of the "bushmen babies' before meeting adults dressed in loincloths.
The Bushmen's leader believes that unless they are given title to some land where they can live as they want, their numbers will dwindles and they will disappear. Clearly I point to some gloomy aspects of the 'wired telecommunication savagery' for the future ---

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