Considering sustainability in its economic, environmental and social contexts, the contributors take stock of previous research on large technical systems and discuss their sustainability from three main perspectives: uses, cities, and rules and institutions.

Part 1. Networks and the Development of Cities. Chapter 2. Gig@City: The Rise of Technological Networks in Daily Life. Chapter 3. "Internetting" Downtown San Francisco: Digital Space Meets Urban Place. Chapter 4. Urban Space and the Development of Networks: A Discussion of the "Splintering Urbanism" Thesis. Part 2. Risks, Crises and the Dependence of Cities Upon Networks. Chapter 5. Social Implications of Infrastructure Network Interactions. Chapter 6. When Networks are Destabilized: User Innovation and the Uk Fuel Crisis. Part 3. Constructing and Deconstructing the Internet. Chapter 7. Internet: The Social Construction of a "Network Ideology". Chapter 8. The Diffusion of Information And Communication Technologies in Lower-Income Groups: Cabinas De Internet In Lima, Peru. Chapter 9. Living in a Network Society: The Imperative to Connect. Part 4. Networks and Sustainable Access to Water. Chapter 10. Conflicts and the Rise of Users' Participation in the Buenos Aires Water Supply Concession, 1993-2003. Chapter 11. Reforming the Municipal Water Supply Service in Delhi:Institutional and Organizational Issues. Chapter 12. Not too Much but Not too Little: The Sustainability of Urban Water Services in New York, Paris, and New Delhi. Part 5. Networks as Institutions. Chapter 13. Networks and the Subversion Of Choice: An Institutionalist Manifesto