Lively debate has surrounded the emergence of geographic information systems (gis) as a formidable presence in both intellectual and applied geographic circles. Earlier discourses that polarized gis into two mutually exclusive camps — neutral, objective tool vs. positivist, theoretically corrupt weapon — have more recently been tempered through the infusion of conceptual vantage points such as feminist theory and theories of science as socially constructed practice. The widening array of uses to which gis is now put, including everything from missile sitings and gerrymandering to movements for social and environmental justice, make it even more imperative to situate gis inquiry within broader frameworks that can encompass the richly contradictory cultural, political, and economic landscapes of technology. In this paper, I home in on a case study of a local, fledgling public participation gis (ppgis) effort in order to understand gis as part of the longer trajectory of people's struggles with and against the machine within industrial capitalism. Specifically, I draw from utopian studies to propose that gis can be seen as a contemporary manifestation of the utopian impulse, where technology is both the problem and, when inserted into more emancipatory social settings, the potential cure. The loosely organized collection of people working locally to use gis, in small and often disconnected ways, to interfere in the fabric of industrial (and post-industrial) capitalism in fact represents a utopian undertaking to confront geographically specific problems and create the "better life in the better place."

Soon after Disneyland opened in 1955, architects and planners began to adapt elements of the Disneyland model to urban design projects. Few recent attempts to revitalize the core of central cities and almost no major suburban and outer city mall have escaped the Disney imprint. The Disney Company began offering its own urban planning and design services to cities. In Seattle, Disney consultants were engaged over a period of three decades in efforts to shape and reshape the city's civic center. This paper examines the protracted debate that occurred over the design and redesign of the civic center and the ultimate rejection of the Disney. Company plan. The author examines the values embedded in the Disney model and how these were identified and contested through community action.

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Planning's vision of life in the 21st century tends to be more-of-the-same or the adoption, often implicit, of a market-based information society in which telecommunications advances will restructure time and space in ways that are beneficial in the long run. The future of the future, however, deserves more attention in urban planning. Utopian constructs have largely been abandoned and traditional methods of projection and modeling are poor techniques for anticipating qualitative and nonlinear change. An exploration of cyberpunk writings, a genre of science fiction, offers the opportunity to critically examine and assess the hegemonic model of the information society as well as more dystopian pictures of how evolving social, economic, cultural, and technological patterns could combine in the next century. Attending to the urban dimensions of these fictional works and discourses about them can contribute to more realistic and ethical planning scenarios of the future.

Contemporary interpretations of the city decry what Fredric Jameson calls "a mutation in built space itself," a postmodern urban fabric in which the traditional economic and political foundations of city life are overwhelmed by the cultural, and the city is reduced to a gigantic shopping mall or theme park, its residents powerless to do anything but consume. The focus on cultural processes as fundamental to the character of today's cities leads to an intriguing point of intersection between urban and cultural geography; it also calls into question the soundness of formulations of cultural practice that underlie many "postmodern" interpretations. This paper argues that recent work in cultural geography, with both its rich engagement with culture theory and its enthusiasm for empirical study of everyday life, can shed new light on our understanding of the city. A brief tour of the quintessential expression of the "postmodern" city, Disneyland, demonstrates that contemporary urban landscapes are complicated and contradictory sites that hegemonically embed both dominant cultural and economic relations and creative resistance to them. 545