Anthony Townsend, urban planner and wifi visionary, has published his doctoral thesis, and it's great. It covers the changes within and between cities, as a result of wired, and wireless communications infrastructure. From the intro:

In contrast to most chronicles of the digital network revolution, however, this dissertation does not emphasize the distance-shrinking opportunities of digital networks. Quite the contrary, it argues that the construction of this new digital network infrastructure has actually reinforced existing geographic differences in connectivity at multiple spatial scales – global, metropolitan, and neighborhood.

and, later

From this perspective, much of 20th century urban history could be rewritten in terms of changes in communications technology. For instance, the telephone was just as instrumental to the emergence of the postwar megalopolis as the automobile. It allowed factories to decentralize to cheap land at the metropolitan fringe while also permitting skyscrapers to centralize decision-making operations in urban business districts. Without the telephone, skyscrapers would require so many elevators for messengers they would be impractical.

The first four chapters have to do with the engineering and economics behind the buildout of the internet, and its relation to "global cities" -- for those mainly interested in social dynamics and wirelessness, start at Chapter 6, "The Untethered City":

In cities, it was also clear that the urban environment generated an enormous amount of information that needed to be anticipated, reacted to, and incorporated into everyday decision-making. Information about constantly changing traffic, weather, and economic conditions could be better transmitted through mobile phones and other wireless digital media. Traditionally, cities had functioned on a daily cycle of information flow with mass media like newspapers, third spaces like bars and cafes, and family conversations at the dinner table as the primary means of information exchange. With ubiquitous untethered communications, however, this old cycle was dramatically speeded up. As the information cycle sped up, there was a corresponding increase in the rate of urban metabolism – the pace at which urban economic and social life consumed information and materiel. In effect, instead of the synchronous daily rhythm of the industrial city coordinated by standardized time, untethered communications were leading to a city coordinated on the fly in real-time.

At 174 pages, exhortations to read the whole thing will probably go unheeded, but Townsend has the felicitous combination -- he has something to say, and he can write. If you care about the impact of wirelessness on social life or cities or both, get the paper and at least read Chapter 6.