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Journal of Planning Literature

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Ivonne Audirac Journal of Planning Literature 2002; 17; 212 DOI: 10.1177/088541202762475955 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jpl.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/17/2/212

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10.1177/088541202237336 IT and Urban Form


Journal of Planning Literature

Information Technology and Urban Form

Ivonne Audirac

This article explores the link between information technology (IT) and urban form. It does this by examining recent literature pertaining to two urban theorizing traditions: the deconcentration and economic-restructuring schools. Whereas in the deconcentration school, ITurban form relationships are the newest stage in a sequence of technological innovations in transportation and communications posing new challenges to the geography of accessibility, in the restructuring school, these relationships are theorized as pervasive sociotechnical change transforming the organization of production, institutions, and everyday life. Despite their paradigmatic differences, both schools explore urban decentralization and/or centralization questions and identify urban dispersing effects related to synergies between IT and the automobile society. The author uses a Dutch and a U.S. case to illustrate the challenges that informational or New Economy development pose to urban and regional planning.

eyond the futuristic hype of the information age literature of the 1980s (Martin 1978; Toffler 1981; Naisbitt 1982), which nurtured a flurry of both Disneyan and Orwellian predictions about the city of tomorrow, and the more recent hoopla surrounding the New Economy of the late 1990s (Cairncross 1997), the scholarly literature dealing with the social and spatial implications of information technology (IT) is vast and varied. It spans disciplines as diverse in substance and scale as the macro approaches of regional science and world systems theories at the confluence of geography, economics, sociology, and political science and the micro

approaches of organizational science and innovation management that focus on organizational behavior within and between firms. At the dawn of the new millennium, scholarly concern with the sociotechnical transformations of the last 20 years is not only a reflection of the times but also a manifestation of many a disciplines intellectual struggles to come to grips with the much heralded break with industrial society (Urry 2000). The emphasis of this article is on cities. It explores how and with what consequences IT is implicated in urban form. It seeks to provide answers to the questions: how are IT-sociospatial effects theorized and researched, and with what planning implications? These questions are examined through the lenses of two theorizing traditions: the deconcentration and economic restructuring schools. Answers to these questions are important to the planning profession because the management of urban form has been a key concern in urban and regional planning. This article on IT and urban form is circumscribed to a selective review of the 1990s and 2000 literature on the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. This literature, however, bears the imprint of the intellectual legacy of the 1970s and 1980s, a time of strong epistemological splits in the social sciences along behaviorist/structuralist and positivist/agency structure and postmodern discourses, which often correIVONNE AUDIRAC is an associate professor of urban and regional planning at Florida State University. Her research interests include residential preferences and urban form, growth management, and the social and technological forces shaping the postindustrial metropolitan fringe in both the United States and developing countries. Journal of Planning Literature, Vol. 17, No. 2 (November 2002). DOI: 10.1177/088541202237336 Copyright 2002 by Sage Publications

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IT and Urban Form lated with the Anglo-American/Continental European intellectual divisions that flourished during the cold war. However, the rampant spread of capitalism throughout most of the world in the postcold war era and the rise of the discourse on globalization and telecommunications have ushered in an intellectual rapprochement of sorts, which would have been unthinkable ten years ago. For instance, Manuel Castells (2000, 8-9) in reconceptualizing the role of technology in social structure, questions the Marxian model and his own previous work, which confined technology to the process of production. He acknowledges a larger role for technology in framing human experience beyond the realm of production (e.g., human reproductive technology and family relations and sexuality; military technology and power relations) and calls for an integration of technology on its own ground, as a specific layer of the social structure, following an old tradition in human ecology [emphasis added]. Similarly, Saskia Sassen (2000, 144) sees as a fin-de-sicle irony the need to return to the old questions of the early Chicago School of Urban Sociology in order to recover the centrality of place in urban sociology, at a time when dominant forces such as globalization and telecommunications seem to signal that place and the details of the local no longer matter (p. 144). Alternatively, in a recent research workshop, geographic information scientists, exploring conceptual and measurement issues of physical and virtual accessibility in the information age, also pondered the political economy of access to information technologies (Janelle and Hodge 1998). Neither Sassen and Castells nor geographic information scientists urge for the blurring of former intellectual divisions or for a new reconciliation of theory. Rather, these statements illustrate how theoretical grappling with new time-space-society issues spawned by the current technical revolution may be transforming the boundaries of previously entrenched theorizing traditions. Nonetheless, their views are still the exception rather than the rule, and the 1990s literature concerning IT and urban form remains influenced by its intellectual roots, speculative, and divided between the deconcentration and economic-restructuring schools (Frey 1993; Clark and Kuijpers-Linde 1994). The deconcentration school carries on the human ecology tradition in urban sociology and neoclassic economic approaches of locational and land use theories, as well as insights obtained from the geography of transportation research. In explaining the structure and growth of cities, this literature conceptualizes technology as a form of organizational adaptation to environmental and resource constraints and the outward spread of cities as the result of innovations in transportation and telecommunications, which free society from place and distance constraints.

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The restructuring school, on the other hand, devotes a great deal of attention to the political economy of cities and regions. It emphasizes economic and spatial restructuring resulting from (1) technological change reshaping and being reshaped by the (capitalist) mode of production and (2) the role of urban political regimes and the entrepreneurial state in shaping the conditions for economic growth (capital accumulation) and urban expansion. Deconcentration scholarship occasionally acknowledges the theoretical contributions of the restructuring school but claims to stand on a firmer empirical basis. Restructuring analysis, on the other hand, offers more global and perspicacious theoretical insights, often innovatively synthesized from a diverse array of empirical findings, including those of deconcentration research. This article does not proffer suggestions for bridging this theoretical-methodological divide. Instead, it briefly examines the theoretical underpinnings of these two camps as they pertain to IT and urban-form relationships and reviews works that have attempted to provide answers to the question of how IT influences the form of cities and regions (see Table 1). It examines a Dutch and an American case, illustrating emerging sociospatial trends and land use planning issues associated with the New (space) Economy and identifies a key research issue confronting these two traditions. Although both the deconcentration and restructuring schools recognize the importance of technological change and identify the tension between decentralizing and centralizing forces shaping urban form, they differ in the way they theorize IT and telecommunications, and the level of causality they are willing to assign to consumer choice (deconcentration tradition) vis--vis other factors such as state, corporate, and institutional agents (restructuring tradition). Hence, their scale of analysis and theorizing is different, with deconcentration works focusing on explaining and predicting intrametropolitan urban-form effects, through the use of spatial interaction and discrete choice models, while urban economic restructuring research emphasizes policy analysis and cross-national and regional comparisons via descriptive case studies. Two caveats need to be stated up front. First, this work does neither assess the predictive or explanatory power nor the empirical validity of any of the two schools. Their theoretical propositions and methodological approaches are vastly different, and a comparative analysis of supporting evidence, although important and perhaps necessary from a planning perspective, would not only be premature given the paucity of empirical research concerning IT and urban form but also unfruitful given the epistemological and paradigmatic differences between the two schools. Sec-

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Journal of Planning Literature


Urban Form in the Information Age: Deconcentration and Restructuring Schools Deconcentration School Restructuring School Post-Fordist City (Occelli, 2000) Informational city (Castells, 1989) Global city (Sassen 1991) Network city (Clark and Kuijpers-Linde 1994) Metropolitan, regional, global Multimodal and digital connectivity (Hepworth and Ducatel 1992) Space of flows versus space of places (Castells 1996b) Synergistic relations between urban place and electronic spaces (Graham and Marvin 1996) Case studies Comparative studies of cities using aggregate data Dual city: social polarization Casualization of labor; flex-timers Socioeconomic stratification Uneven development Physical and electronic ghettos Regime of regulation (Occelli 2000, Lauria 1997) Entrepreneurial city, growth machines Interjurisdictional bidding wars for global capital. Congested cities: IT synergies with automobile society and just-in-time production result in travel demand that overwhelms transportation infrastructure. Dominance of space of flows over space of places (1) Polycentric and intensely extra-networked by land, air, water, and digital means to global and regional urban systems; (2) deeply digitally and multimodally intra-networked, albeit all the more socioeconomically segregated, physically overextended, and stuck in traffic

TABLE 1.

City and region conceptualized

Postindustrial city (Berry 1973; Hall 1997) E-topia: smart city (Mitchell 2000) Aerotropolis (Kasarda 2000)

Scale Urban/digital space

Metropolitan and intrametropolitan Geography of accessibility and opportunity (Janelle and Hodge 2000) Hybrid space (combination of physical and virtual space) Internet-backbone space (Moss and Townsend 2000) Spatial interaction models (aggregate data, urban scale) Probability choice models (individual behavior) Digital divide Spatial mismatch Spatial segregation

Research traditions

Social equity issues

Political economy

Perverse public subsidies

Planning challenges

Congested cities: fragmentation of activity in hybrid space and information technology (IT) synergies with automobile society result in travel demand that overwhelms transportation infrastructure

Information-age landscapes

Sprawling polycentric: (1) High in mobility, low in accessibility, spatially mismatched; (2) connected/disconnected from Internet backbone (network of a few metropolitan cities)

ond, the review is unavoidably selective, given the breath of the subject matter. Except for a few important entries that help elucidate urban-form effects, it does not delve directly into the geography of high-tech industrial districts and innovation milieus (Hall and Markusen 1985; Castells and Hall 1994; Castells 1989; Markusen et al. 1986; Malecki 1985). This scholarship, which documents the genesis, evolution, and future of silicon landscapes, is extensive and falls outside the scope of this study.

TWO VIEWS OF THE SOCIOSPATIAL IMPLICATIONS OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

This remarkable coming together of technologies that we label IT has allowed us to move beyond efficiency gains in routine manual tasks to achieve new levels of productivity (Greenspan 2000, 1). The rise of the New Economy trumpeted by Wall Street and cautiously celebrated by the Federal Reserves Chairman Allan Greenspan (2000) is materially located in cities. The marriage between telecommu-

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IT and Urban Form nications and computing along with the infrastructural networks for digital transmission of data, voice, image, and videocollectively known as information and telecommunications technologies (IT)is increasingly gaining relevance as a new dimension of cities. This dimension is partly physical and partly invisible (Janelle and Hodge 1998; Graham and Marvin 1996) and is forcing a reconceptualization of traditional urban models of city form and growth. The emerging models emphasize the new role of cities as electronic communications hubs in a variety of real-time global digital networks and as expansive network cities resulting from the synergistic interaction of urban policy, new information technologies, and fast multimodal transportation infrastructures (Castells 1989; Batten 1995; Gillespie 1992; Graham 1994). These transformations posit a new kind of city that Peter Hall (1997) describes as
globalized (connected to other cities in global networks); tertiarized and even quaternarized (dependent almost entirely for economic existence on advanced services); informationalized (using information as a raw material); and polycentric (dispersing residences and decentralizing employment into multiple centers or edge cities. (P. 311)

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tion. . . . Second, it is a world in which cities deconcentrate and spread to become complex systems of cities linked together by flow of people and information; and in which the different constituents are likewise involved in a process of shedding old activities while they gain new ones. (P. 316)

The Deconcentration School The deconcentration school, with a strong foothold in human ecology and neoclassic economics, generally conceptualizes IT as an extension of communication and transportation innovations: a form of organizational adaptation that affects the locational decisions of firms and households by dissolving the importance of distance and permitting footloose economic activity to relocate to lower-cost exurban, rural, and offshore areas. Amos Hawley (1986), the father of modern human ecology, saw centrifugal and centripetal forces simultaneously affecting urban structure. On one hand, instant communications reduce the cost of travel stimulating the outward growth of cities as firms and households opt for peripheral locations. On the other hand, control and coordination of new peripheral operations increase the need for agglomeration of specialized managerial functions at strategic sites. More than two decades ago, Brian Berry (1973), in an endorsement of Bells (1973) postindustrial society, wrote about the end of industrial concentrative urbanization and the rise of a postindustrial economy in which modern transportation and communication technology had permitted each generation to live farther apart and business to be transacted over increasingly distant locations. The time-reducing and space-spanning capabilities of new electronic technologies had not only dissolved the coreoriented city of the industrial era but also spawned a multinodal urban structure with declining overall densities and commuting sheds expanding more than one hundred miles into the exurban periphery. Berry (1973) also speculated that increasing localism would be the end result of the postindustrial, electronically wired society. A decade later, studies by Stanback and Noyelle (1983), Noyelle (1985), Stanback (1991), and a bevy of research by Berry and other geographers (Berry and Kim 1993) and transportation planners (Cervero 1989; Giuliano and Small 1991) confirmed (1) increased polycentric urbanization resulting from the shift from manufacturing to an information-based economy, (2) the concomitant decentralization of office and commercial employment, and (3) the combined effects of communications technology and widespread automobility in fostering the suburbanization of traffic congestion. De Sola Pool (1980, 1977) traced back this dual complicity between communications and mobility to the

Whereas early-twentieth-century Chicago epitomized the industrial city of Park and Burgesss (1925) concentric ring model and Jean Gottmans (1961) American megalopolitan eastern seaboard anticipated the vital role of telecommunications in networking cities and regions, new models are struggling to capture the new urban reality, which renders classic urban models and their underlying theories increasingly anachronistic. Thus, modern-day Los Angeles is the quintessential model of the expansive polycentric postmodern city (Scott and Soja 1996); Randstad, Holland of the network city (Batten 1995; Clark and Kuijpers-Linde 1994); and New York, London, and Tokyo of the global city (Sassen 1991). The new space of flows is the term coined by Castells (1996b, 1989) to conceptualize the technological infrastructure linking the information age city1 to other noncontiguous and globally dispersed cities via digital, satellite, and transportation systems. These networks constitute the urban structure of the new global informational economy. From a similar perspective, Hall (1997) declares that the
urban world of the 1990s is a profoundly different world. . . . First, it is a world in which cities compete in a global economy, seeking constantly to redefine their economic roles as old functions are lost and new functions are sought to take their place . . . the new functions involve the creation and exchange and use of informa-

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Journal of Planning Literature tempered by the least flexible element of transportation networks, namely, airports. In fact, John Kasarda (2000) names aerotropolis the new urban form of the New Economy resulting from the combined effects of airports, international just-in-time and supply-chain transactions, and the growth of domestic and global e-commerce. Characterized by emerging corridors, clusters and spines of airport-induced businesses extending as much as 15 miles from major airports, the new urban form is based on low density, wide lanes, and fast movements fulfilling the demand for fast and agile processing and distribution of time-sensitive production and goods (p. 3). Deconcentration research also acknowledges the importance of policy and planning in shaping technological and urban-form outcomes, but generally as an external factor left in the hands of government and policy makersoften themselves the research clients. The 1995 Office of Technology Assessments (OTA) report titled The Technological Reshaping of Metropolitan America, commissioned by Congress and considered an authoritative investigation of information technologys3 effect on American cities, further confirms Hawleys thesis of peripheral dispersion with strategic reconcentration. OTA recognizes that technological and urban-form synergies are both centrifugal and centripetal but calls attention to transportation logistics and public subsidies in tilting the balance over centrifugal aggregate effects. For instance, in the warehousing and goods distribution and customer service sectors, firms take advantage of IT to consolidate nerve center functions in a few cities, which coordinate and reroute operations to a variety of dispersed cities. Likewise, firms located in a few cities are able to coordinate their spatially dispersed labor forces through IT systems (see also Peitchinis 1992). Although many routine manufacturing and service functions are regionally and internationally decentralizing, others, such as hightech production (e.g., silicon valleys) and advanced producer services (e.g., corporate accounting, financial, and legal services), which depend on face-to-face interaction and high-skilled professional and technical labor pools, are less likely to decentralize. Nonetheless, OTA and other studies (Coffey 2000) also acknowledge that as IT infrastructures spread throughout the urban hierarchy, many of these economic activities are deconcentrating to edge cities and to second-tier metropolitan areas, which have fewer large-city transaction costs and diseconomies such as crime, traffic congestion, long commutes, and environmental pollution (Coffey and Bailly 1992; see also Markusen et al. 1999).
FREIGHT DISTRIBUTION AND LOGISTICS

1960sa time when the United States experienced an almost universal spread of telephones and cars.
TELECOMMUTING AND URBAN FORM

Research on telecommuting, originally thought of as a substitute for commuting trips, is a classic example of the presumed positive effects of technological change. Theoretically, firms reduce office space costs, whereas telecommuters have more freedom of choice in residential location. Depending on the density and frequency of office-trip substitution, telecommuting can contribute to the lowering of traffic congestion and ultimately to fewer carbon emissions. However, a 1996 Federal Highway Administration (FHA)/Federal Transit Administration (FTA) conference on telecommuting (Day 1997) and a host of work assessing the potential for telecommuting to reduce motor vehicle travel seem to agree that the overall effect of telecommuting is no more than 1 percent of total household personal vehicle miles traveled (VMT) (Salomon 1986; Mokhtarian et al. 1995; Handy and Mokhtarian 1995). In estimating the impacts of telecommuting on travel, Mokhtarian (1998) concludes that 6.1 percent of the workforce may be currently telecommuting, with 1.5 percent doing so on any given day, eliminating at most 1 percent of total household vehicle-miles traveled (p. 215). More important, the system-wide implication of the synergies between IT and urban form point to further deconcentration and to an overall increase in travel, as telecommuters2 and other teleworkers may choose exurban locations and make additional car trips rather than substitution trips (Salomon 1986; Niles 1994). This travel stimulation effect, Mokhtarian (1998) asserts, will likely cause the telecommuting overall travel impacts to remain relatively flat into the future, even if the amount of telecommuting increases considerably (p. 215). In general, the forecasting of telecommuting travel substitute effects has been plagued with methodological difficulties and overestimation bias (Mokhtarian et al. 1995; Salomon 1998). Salomon (1998) attributes this problem to the technological determinism of traditional forecasting models and suggests that given the broad social and institutional factors that influence telecommuting, choice theory models involving mobility and life-style issues should yield more valid results.
PERIPHERAL DISPERSION WITH STRATEGIC RECONCENTRATION

Deconcentration studies do not, as their critics often argue, posit that the increased technological ability to reduce the friction of distance results in the absolute dissolution of proximity. For them, the locational flexibility afforded by information technologies remains

In the wholesale trade and distribution industry, containerization, cross-docking,4 electronic data inter-

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IT and Urban Form change (EDI)5 systems, bar-coding, and just-in-time (JIT)6 processes, collectively known as the logistics revolution, have allowed firms to integrate production and distribution functions into centrally distributed systems, where proximity to industry and population is less important than easy access to transportation and IT infrastructures. Easy accessibility to the interstate highway, air cargo facilities, double-stack rail services, marine intermodal terminals, and state-of-the-art IT infrastructures is the competitive edge that cities, aspiring to become global distribution hubs, increasingly promote. Many of these cities are not large metropolitan cities like Chicago or New York but smaller ones like Sioux Falls, South Dakota, or Beaverton, Oregon (a Portland suburb). Thus, new consolidated warehousing and distribution centers increasingly relocate to the metropolitan/rural fringe where land is also cheaper. Although OTA and other works (Czerniak et al. 2000) single out this development as important in shaping urban form, there is still a gap in research and understanding of how new freight logistics has contributed to both suburban traffic congestion and deconcentration of economic activity. For instance, a study of highways and decentralization in the Chicago metropolitan area (Urban Transportation Center 1998) reports a 1973-93 VMT increase of 49.5 million per day. Of this increase, about 75 percent is due to growth in the size of the labor force and significant surges in external traffic and trucking growth. Although external traffic and trucking growth account for 40 percent of the areas VMT increase, in explaining decentralization, the study alludes to increasing numbers of wealthier households and expanded demand for land but makes no reference to complementarities between highways, land use, and new transformations in the freight-transport and distribution system.
IT ACCESSIBILITY AND OPPORTUNITY ISSUES

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tual space, calls from geographic information scientists abound for a reconceptualization and a new operational definition of accessibility in hybrid space at both individual and aggregate scales (Janelle and Hodge 2000). IT is affecting spatial relations in many ways. For instance, the Internet and instant, mobile, and personal telecommunications are increasingly decoupling places (physical space) from functions (activities) as activities are becoming increasingly personalized rather than place-based, so that where you are is less and less a reliable indication of what you may be doing (Couclelis and Getis 1998, 15). Thus, the new geography of opportunity viewed as the intersection between physical and digital (virtual) accessibility to jobs poses fundamental equity questions regarding the social costs and benefits of IT and urban-form interactions. Spatial mismatch between jobs and job seekers severely affects central cities and old suburbs, and the problem intensifies as routine operations move to the periphery, whereas complex, high-skill ones remain at the core. Shens (1999) spatial-interaction modeling of urban location, transportation, and telecommunications capabilities in metropolitan Boston finds that in an auto-dominated urban form, geographic location is of decreased significance in defining spatial relationships, whereas travel mode is critical. The opportunity benefits derived from the interaction between telecommunications capabilities and travel mode accrue to those who have automobiles and computers. Thus, unless public policy deliberately mitigates it, the wealthier suburban communities will tend to be better off, whereas the transit-dependent, disadvantaged groups of the central cities will be made worse off (Shen 1999). However, Hanson (1998) cautions that
even if everyone had equal access to IT, the Internet, and various spatial technologies, inequality and inequity of access would still arise from peoples embeddedness in networks of social relations, which are to a great extent rooted in place. (P. 47)

The most direct impact of IT on urban form relates to the concept of accessibility. However, accessibility is a manifold construct connoting different meanings associated with overcoming distance; time; and costs to jobs, goods, services, or amenities dispersed in urban space. In a predigital world, accessibility was generally predicated on physical distance and mobility the means to overcome it. However, in a digital world, accessibility in urban space combines with virtual accessibility, in what is now being called hybrid space (Couclelis and Getis 2000; L. Scott 2000). A consequence of physical and virtual space complementarity is that the correspondence between physical and functional space, a cornerstone of traditional socioeconomic geography, can no longer be taken for granted in the information age. Since physical distance is inconsequential in vir-

Social and cultural capital, inherently intensive in faceto-face interaction, spatially anchors the information that people trust and act upon. Hence, not only computers and cars shape the geography of opportunity, but also the networks of social relations, which help or hinder access to decent jobs. Research is needed to determine how IT synergies with place-based social processes influence the accessibility of employment.
THE DIGITAL DIVIDE AND URBAN EXPANSION

Although the universal provision and maintenance of transportation infrastructures has been largely a public responsibility, IT and telecommunications infra-

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Journal of Planning Literature formulations from the French regulation school (see Amin 1994) to flexible specialization la Storper and Scott (1992) and Allen Scott (1988), and informationalism/network society (Castells 1996b, 1989, 1985). These perspectives emphasize a fundamental change in the organization of production brought about by a sociotechnical paradigm based on microelectronics and IT, the increasing political-economic importance of multinational corporations vis--vis weakened nation-states, and the role that global capital and the international division of labor play in the rapid and flexible geographic relocation of capital and production in a world economy. Their scale of analysis is typically global/regional, and often their intent is to examine how the new sociotechnical and economic paradigm often illustrated by advances in telecommunications, JIT production based on advanced freight logistics, and flexible specialization, combined with a national-tolocal devolution of regulatory functionsrepresents a new political-economic model of lean production spreading to all major sectors of economic activity. Although there is general agreement with this view, not all restructuring scholars subscribe to it. Those influenced by the French regulation school eschew it as overly technologically deterministic, preferring instead to emphasize how emerging trends in the global economy respond to social innovations (organizational and institutional) inscribed in the productive and political practices of cities and regions (Elam 1990; Lauria 1997). Post-Fordist theorists emphasize the emergence of agglomerated, craft-oriented industrial districts, emblematic of a shift from mass production (Fordist) to flexible specialization (post-Fordist) abetted by IT, and identify the Third Italy, Baden-Wurttemberg, and Bavaria, and parts of Japan, which concentrate varietybased manufacturing firms as paradigmatic regions (Pollard and Storper 1996). Informational society theorists liken the telecommunications and information revolution to an organizational revolution touching every aspect of society (Castells 1996b). Finally, global city theorists assert that a world economy has existed for several centuries but that it has been reconstituted repeatedly over timethe most recent transformation assisted by telecommunications and IT (Sassen 1994, 1991)with important global and local morphological implications.
GLOBAL CITIES AND THE SPACE OF FLOWS

structures are privately provided and biased toward the largest cities with the highest concentration of highend users. Ametropolitan network of seven cities7 dominates the Internet backbone capacity, which links each city and region with each other rather than with the rest of the urban hierarchy (Moss and Townsend 2000). This condition, antithetical to universal access, preoccupies restructuring authors who liken it to new forms of capital accumulation and uneven development, whereas deconcentration scholars are chiefly concerned with the growing digital divide between haves and havenots and between access disparities involving central cities, suburban, and rural areas. Although the latest national survey shows that the urban-rural digital divide has narrowed, it has nevertheless remained constant and slightly wider along socioeconomic, ethnic, and disability characteristics of the population (U.S. Department of Commerce 2000). This raises concerns for potential new forms of dissociation with place as
a large part of urban structure may be explained not by the accessibility needs of individuals but by their distancing needs, as they strive to avoid the vicinity of less desirable groups, land uses, or environments. While these centrifugal tendencies have always been present, the technological and organizational possibilities of the information age may greatly amplify these phenomena. (Couclelis and Getis 1998, 15)

Finally, popular among planners is the assessment that the combined effects of the IT revolution and public subsidies for highways and housing favor outer suburban and exurban development worsening, the centralcity-suburban digital divide, traffic congestion, and many other ills associated with urban sprawl. However, the magnitude of public subsidies to outer urban expansion or the impact of their elimination on metropolitan growth patterns is currently unknown (OTA 1995, 120). Research is needed to address this gap, but also to ascertain the potential of antisprawl measures that raise accessibility costs to IT and transportation infrastructures, such as congestion pricing and locationspecific taxes (on telecommunications, cable, etc.) (OTA 1 9 9 5 ) , t o i n t e r a c t w i t h I T- i n f l u e n c e d u r b a n deconcentration trends, such as the ability to further disperse jobs throughout the urban hierarchy and abroad. The Restructuring School Regional restructuring explanations of the impacts of IT on urban form draw from a variety of traditions, which include world systems theory (Timberlake 1985), world city formation (Friedmann and Wolff 1982; Friedmann 1995; Sassen 1991), the various post-Fordist

The new information-based economy has simultaneously facilitated the dispersal of manufacturing sites throughout the world and the agglomeration of central financial and advanced producer service functions in relatively few cities (Sassen 1998, 1994). These global cities do not only concentrate advanced financial and

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IT and Urban Form producer services (i.e., intellectual-capital industries) but also advanced digital infrastructures that facilitate their status as command and control centers of the global economy (Sassen 1994). Since the international financial system generates such a massive load of information, power goes to those who are able to offer the most convincing interpretations of the moment (Thrift 1996, 1481), and global cities concentrate the talent and technological capabilities to efficiently accomplish it. Despite wide acceptance, this perspective has met with opposition contesting the global city status of New York from both sides of the deconcentration-restructuring divide. Markusen and Gwisada (1993) reject the manufacturing-dispersing and control-agglomerating roles that Sassen attributes to IT. High-tech and advanced producer services, they assert, still depend on close geographic and organizational linkages with manufacturing. Hence, New Yorks declining manufacturing base negates its global city status. Pollard and Storper (1996) from a post-Fordist perspective, reach a similar conclusion arguing that New Yorks intellectual-capital sector is important, but not sufficient to carry the burden of the regional economys employment needs (p. 15). Although the global-city controversy is far from settled, global-city and informational theorists posit global urban status to be fluid and dependent on the global networks of firms organized by multinational corporations according to specific advantages offered by the international division of labor. Thus, rather than depending on domestic manufacturing linkages, global cities rely on multinational corporations international dispersal of plants. This raises demand for higher order producer services, and consequently New York, London, and Tokyo have coalesced into a global financial and advanced producer network by and large independent from their respective national economies (Sassen 1995, 1994). Global cities are core nodes of a new informational/ global economy, for the first time organized on a 24hour, real-time, planetary scale and whose global financial networks are the nerve center of informational capitalism (Castells 1998, 343). In addition to financial flows, intellectual-capital services flow through the global informational network (space of flows), where cities with adequate digital infrastructures, among other factors, are able to tap into and properly position themselves to attract desired shares of global capital. Analogous to railroads in the industrial era, digital (informational) networks are key New Economy development elements of cities with concomitant urban morphological effects. Whereas deconcentration analysis conceives of IT effects on urban form as basically a spatial interaction phenomenon mediated by the joint effects of transportation and telecommunications,

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restructuring scholars conceptualize IT effects as fundamentally inscribed in a new capitalist spatial organization of production, with both global and local dimensions, intricately linked to the flows of physical materials, information, and people. Understanding IT effects on urban form requires understanding these flows and the fixity or flexibility of ground, air, water, and digital infrastructures (Feldman 1997).
DIGITAL CONNECTIVITY, MOBILITY, AND DIFFUSED URBAN PATTERNS

New information-based organizational transformations have resulted in the dual emergence on one hand of flexible firms, shrinking and expanding in response to market and technological change, and on the other hand, of flex workers (growth of the self-employed and casual labor force) adapting to employment conditions through lifelong training, multiple job holding, and/or more flexible home-work contracts (Castells 1998, 1996a, 1996b, 1989). Compared to a former industrial era of mass production, unionized labor, and universal access to public infrastructures, new pro-market deregulation regimes and the aforementioned organizational transformations have made urban and regional development increasingly uneven. At the regional level, fierce intercity competition for shares of global capital and high-tech jobs have resulted in pro-business beggar thy neighbor economic policies that privilege IT (intelligent) infrastructure investments and those cities cherry picked by multinational corporations (Graham and Marvin 1996). In the European context, cities have sought to enhance their international competitiveness by forming networks of cities around increased mobility, IT-based logistics, and intelligent road systems (Dumford and Kafkalas 1992; Hepworth and Ducatel 1992). As their deconcentration counterparts do, regional restructuring authors recognize the synergies between physical and digital infrastructures occurring at the metropolitan level and arrive at similar conclusions.8 One is that the deployment of new technologies has helped intensify the decentralizing and reconcentrating tendencies of highly polycentric urban structures. Edge cities, for instance, are a manifestation of a new type of urban concentrated activity at the periphery of cities that is digitally networked to traditional central business districts and other extralocal urban centers (Sassen 1994). Second, the rise in self-employed, part-time, and flextime workforces (Castells 1996a, 1989; Henry and Massey 1995; Giuliano 1998), combined with the diffusion of mobile telephony and the emergence of mobile offices, deepens the demand for road and air mobility. Third, teleservices, online shopping, and JIT freight logistics, which make use of global positioning satellite

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Journal of Planning Literature have-nots, and accentuates dual city trends (Castells 1989, Giuliano 1998). In addition, as mentioned before, more travel, greater traffic congestion, and rapidly expanding urbanization seem to be a generalized outcome of the interaction between IT and automobiledominated urban forms. Mitchell (2000) and Graham and Marvin (2000) foreshadow further mobility/traffic gridlock impacts resulting from the following:
1. Greater efficiencies in the use, organization, and management of transportation networks, which may reduce the cost of all modes of travel. 2. Cheaper and wider accessibility to IT-based communications that expands the perceptual space of individuals and organizations, which in turn generates more need for physical travel. The more electronic communications expose us to faraway people and places, the greater our need to travel to those places for face-to-face interaction (e.g., meeting with clients, friends) or for recreation, at the same time that we need more physical travel to support the new flows of goods we demand and consume. 3. The deployment of IT-based equipment in automobiles (e.g., computers, cell phones, and smart guiding systems, etc.) that convert dead time into live working or recreational time, overcoming the travel impediments associated with traffic congestion.

(GPS), EDI, the Internet, and other intelligent routing and tracking technology for home and door-to-door delivery, have greatly increased the demand for freight mobility. Hence, one of the distinguishable traits of the informational/network society is the rise in demand for swift intermodalism (air, sea, truck, and rail cargo), fast mobility, and digital connectivity (Castells 1996a; Graham and Marvin 1996). The fourth conclusion is that the discernible effects of these transformations include new surges in ex-urban expansion in the form of increasingly dispersed and footloose working sites, networking sites, and residences outwardly pushed in part by increased traffic gridlock resulting from more freight and automobile travel. Finally, a fifth conclusion is that despite the potential, yet marginal substitution effects of telecommuting, overall inter- and intracity diffused patterns of traffic flows together with rising levels of traffic congestion and overburdened facility capacity seem to be a manifest effect of the new information economy on urban form (Hepworth and Ducatel 1992; Graham and Marvin 1996). In sum, as the transition from industrial to informational increasingly connotes the socioeconomic transformations associated with global capitalism, the form of the informational metropolis emerges as (1) polycentric and intensely extranetworked by land, air, water, and digital means to global and regional urban systems and (2) deeply digitally and multimodally intranetworked, albeit all the more socioeconomically segregated, physically overextended, and stuck in trafficconditions emblematic of Castells dominance of the space of flows over the space of places. IT Synergies with the Automobile Society Many in the deconcentration camp favor intelligent transportation systems (e.g., IT-based traffic management and real-time pay-per-travel road and parking innovations) designed to alleviate traffic congestion, smooth traffic flows, and promote more efficient use of existing capacity. However, current research shows that these innovations have met with user resistance and potential negative side effects such as the shifting of traffic to other parts of the road network (Nijkamp et al. 1996). This has led restructuring analysts to predict that these palliative measures may provoke further polarization between haves and have-nots together with more exurbanization of businesses and households escaping the increased traffic congestion that may result from toll-adverse slow-moving traffic (Hepworth and Ducatel 1992). Thus, at the metropolitan level, whether seen from a deconcentration or restructuring perspective, the spatial digital divide exacerbates the uneven distribution of opportunity between central cities and suburbs, between haves and

The corollary of ITurban-form interaction, Graham and Marvin (2000) assert, is that although some degree of travel substitution may be occurring, the overall growth of electronic and physical mobility simply overwhelms the contribution of substitution (p. 76). Thus, one of the greatest ironies of the information age is that the larger the opportunity for IT substitution for travel, the larger the demand for travel and consequently traffic gridlock; cramped airplanes and airports are the synergistic outcome of IT and the automobile society. Thus, the European-style compact city, which enhances accessibility over automobility and can reputedly contribute to alleviate many of the environmental and socioeconomic costs attributed to American urban sprawl, is increasingly defied by the information age (Couclelis and Getis 2000; Mitchell 2000). It must be recognized that despite this generalized agreement, some of these observations remain largely suggestive vis--vis the paucity of available research. Both deconcentration and restructuring authors agree t h a t t h e u l t i m a t e f o r m o f t h e p o s t - F o rd i s t , postindustrial, informational, or information-age city is anybodys guess. This is partly a consequence of (1) the conceptual and empirical challenges posed by the com-

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IT and Urban Form plexity of the spatial-temporal relations associated with physical and virtual space interaction, (2) the newness and unpredictability of IT innovations, and (3) the ability of society to shape and be shaped by IT-based processes (Occelli 2000; Castells 1996b). At the international and regional levels, nonetheless, the following examples illustrate some of these informed guesses, which pose important challenges to even the most advanced and effective systems of land use planning.

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CHALLENGES TO TRANSPORTATION AND LAND USE PLANNING

Randstad and Green Hart, the Dutch Case of Competition for Global Functions Clark and Kuijpers-Linde (1994) show that expanding polycentric urban forms, whether in Southern California, or in Randstad, Holland, result from new market forces that favor the automobile over alternative modes of travel. In both metropolitan regions, despite the availability of public transit, long-distance commuting, swelling numbers of cars, and auto trips have contributed to increased congestion. This is a restructuring phenomenon that challenges road-pricing policies and other land use planning intervention even in the Netherlands, where the system of land use planning has been one of the most advanced and successful in controlling urban form. Hajer and Zonneveld (2000) go a step further and argue that the Dutch system of land use planning, structured around the principles of city-core proximity, compact city development, and the strict separation of urban from rural agricultural land use (i.e., Randstad and Green Hart9) is being undercut by three factors of the emerging informational/network society. First, at the national level, the Department of Economic Affairs has invested heavily in transportation and telecommunications infrastructure with the intent of making the Netherlands the logistics and distribution hub of Europecentered around Shiphol airport and the port of Rotterdam. Today, more than 50 percent of American and Japanese distribution centers in Europe are located in the Netherlands. Second, firms are opting for places that are optimal in terms of connectivity, rather than proximity. Even agriculture is being affected by the restructuring effects of transport logistics, whereby proximity to market is no longer a high priority, and by high-tech agricultural production that is less extensive and more efficient in the use of land. Third, new patterns of space consumption by households, which prefer more spacious apartments and single family homes, has not only increased the numbers of people living outside the urban designated regions but also signaled a trend toward consumption of high-

amenity places. Although the metropolitan centers of Dutch cities remain vibrant nodes, individuals increasingly prefer to partake in different urban networks and live at greater distances from urban centers. This tendency has been abetted by more flexible work contracts and the rise of two-income households, which have made residential space less permanent and more mobile. Hajer and Zonneveld (2000) contend that the Dutch system of land use planning has recently lost the support of the housing and agriculture constituencies. The new pro-market regimes, poised on ensuring a friendly business climate to attract international business, can no longer guarantee that new housing projects will be built at the densities and on the sites defined by the planning authorities. The aforementioned spatial restructuring effects and the fading power of the agricultural sector, which traditionally kept other land uses out of agricultural lands and supported the strict separation of town and country, are promoting a more dispersed pattern of settlement. Furthermore, piecemeal development, albeit prohibited in land use plans, is taking place in the green belt area (Hajer and Zonneveld 2000, 349). Neither the new ministry of urban affairs, recently created to address these problems, nor numerous transportation plans designed to deal with increasing congestion have been effective, and
skeptics are fast losing faith in pledges and plans by successive governments that somehow never reach implementation. There has been endless talk about road pricing, for example. And measures such as car pooling, busonly lanes, and higher road taxes and parking fees have had little effect. (Fuller 2001)

Plano, Texas: Edge City in Exurban Archipelagoes of Smart Growth In the United States, a recent study by Beyers (2000) shows that among New Economy enterprises, information processing and expert decision service firms predominate. Beyerss research shows that the need for face-to-face interaction with clients remains high among these firms, whereas the intensity and volume of air, courier, and various forms of electronic interaction have dramatically increased, suggesting high complementarities with travel and urban form. Beyers alleges that the evolving geography of the New Economy is shared by urban and rural communities and is not dominated by global cities. The New Economy firms are exercising a higher freedom of location than their Old Economy counterparts, and those choosing an urban location do so on the basis of convenient access to airports and highways, whereas those choosing exurban and rural locales do so for quality-of-life reasons (Beyers 2000, 171).

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Journal of Planning Literature tures. From a deconcentration perspective, Plano and other communities of the platinum corridor11 in the DallasFort Worth metropolitan edge are attractive exurban places for corporations and households relocating to amenity-rich, low-tax, technologically wired locales. From a Smart Growth point of view (Rosan n.d.), Plano is a successful player in a game in which to win; cities need the right sorts of local attractions to retain the talentin particular pleasant and stimulating local environments, high-quality educational and medical services, and sufficiently flexible transportation infrastructures and building stocks to accommodate rapidly reconfiguring patterns of activity (Mitchell 2000, 111). The new breed of knowledge workers prefers metropolitan regions where amenities and activities are easy to get to and available on a JIT basis. The places valued by knowledge workers, who look for solace from long working hours, fast pace, and tight deadlines, are those that offer amenities accessible on demand that mix effortlessly with work, that are not necessarily big-ticket events like professional sports or high-culture attractions, and that are progressive and demographically diverse (Florida 2000, 5). Thus, Plano is taking advantage of its location in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) trade region via intermodal regional accessibility and digital connectivity and providing generous fiscal incentives for logistics-based manufacturing. Planos Legacy is an example of the Smart Growth planning philosophy of building communities that work smarter, not harder. Conceived as a premier business relocation hub and designed to attract high-tech elite workers, it is an information-age live-work district engineered to guarantee its corporate residents a distinctive architectural presence and spatial seclusion, but above all, security from any information-age eventuality. Legacy (2000) prominently advertises secure data communications via an impregnable fortress of network redundancy including a fiber-optic network large enough to encircle the world five times. To elite workers, it offers luxurious living and exciting shopping and entertainment within easy walking distance via the first town center to be built within an existing business development [designed by] world-renowned new urbanist Andres Duany (Legacy 2000). In sum, Legacy and Plano, Texas typify the linking of the New Economy to the livable community (Henton and Walesh 1998) arduously promoted by the Smart Growth movement. Similar to Legacy, New Economy towns, launched by the National Town Builders Associations in partnerships with corporate, government, and media leaders, are the latest Smart Growth community initiative developed to satisfy the demand for the quality of life absent in postcold war suburbia. Rather than driving

Many local governments in the periphery of large metropolitan areas are taking advantage of this trend and are capitalizing on their large-city proximity and digital and multimodal connectivity in order to compete for large and small New Economy firms and information-age-reconfigured Old Economy firms. For instance, the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area is one of the largest freight inland ports in the United States. According to the North Central Texas Council of Governments (2002), the region has one of the most extensive surface and air transportation networks in the world, providing extensive trade opportunities for the more than 600 motor/trucking carriers and almost 100 freight forwarders that operate out of the area (p. 1). The region also ranked in the second top tier of cities with the highest number of knowledge workers per million (Florida 2000) and is part of the metropolitan network dominating national Internet backbone capacity (Moss and Townsend 2000). The city of Plano, located 25 miles north of Dallas, advertises its regional intermodal accessibility (airport, rail, highway, and light rail system),10 intelligent transportation system (ITS)-monitored freeways, and global digital connectivity, as well as its strategic time zone location. Moreover, in characteristic American postsuburban fashion (Teaford 1997), Plano pursues aggressive probusiness policies, such as tax abatement incentives and free port tax exemptions on goods in transit, supportive of JIT production. Planos phenomenal growthfrom 3,965 persons in 1960 to 72,33 in 1980, and from 127,885 in 1990 to 231,650 in 2000is the result of the areas entrepreneurial spirit and entrenched cut-throat competition among its neighboring communities (i.e., Farmers Branch, Richardson, Carrollton, Addison, and McKinney), all vying for position as preferred corporate magnets in the Dallas metropolitan fringe. To date, Plano is home to a large number of New Economy firms of all sizesfrom the small 50- to 99employee subsidiary or original e-com firm, to the large 1,000+ employee high-tech firm designing and manufacturing IT equipment and systems. Plano claims to be a major destination for headquarters relocation and operations consolidation. One such corporate destination is Planos Legacy, a 2,665-acre cluster of corporate campuses nestling a 150-acre new-urbanist town center. This master-planned community concentrates 32,000 employees and is the world headquarters of EDSa systems integration and consulting company, reputedly a leader in the global information services industryas well as of Old Economy firms such as JC Penney, Dr. Pepper/7-UP, and Frito Lay. Plano, TexasDallasFort Worths edge city par excellenceillustrates the urban-form effects foreshadowed in the deconcentration and restructuring litera-

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IT and Urban Form to the mall, New Economy towns are walkable, transitaccessible, and supportive of teleworking relationships between work and home. However, the public scene of main street and town centers that New Economy towns offer deeply depends on the same corporate partners and franchises found at the mall, albeit downsized to a main street boutique format. The Kinkos, Starbucks, Mail Boxes Etc., the Gap, Banana Republic, and other chains of franchised restaurants and entertainment presumably have become the foundation of work life for New Economy workers, either operating from home, telework centers, or offices. From a restructuring perspective, Plano, Texas, typifies Sassens (1994) notion of edge cities as a new physical form of digitally networked urban centers. These urban forms are the product of urban telecommunication planning dominated by pro-growth, pro-business regimes, whereby the planning responsibilities of local (e.g., Plano and Collin County) and regional governments (e.g., North Texas Council of Governments) are disproportionately devoted to satisfying the new connectivity and mobility demands of businesses and knowledge workers, as well as the management of the traffic externalities resulting in part from the interplay of IT and transportation infrastructures.12 Likewise, Legacy is a new built form responding to the needs of corporations and IT elite workers, who manage the new space economy and benefit most directly from it. In addition to being control centers of geographically distributed value networks, these new built forms are a new style of affluent, 24-hour work-live neighborhoods13 intended to attract and retain the mobile hightech talent, who in due course will want to cluster together at vibrant and attractive locations (Mitchell 2000, 78). However, as restructuring authors often point out, the much touted vibrancy of these locales also depends on low-wage, service flex workers from nearby digitally deprived communities (Sassen 2000, 1991; Castells 1996b; Graham and Marvin 1996), who not only provide custodial services to businesses but are also the labor mainstay of the copy centers; coffee houses; franchise retail, entertainment, and other amenities valued by the high end of the information societys hourglass occupational and income distribution.
CONCLUSION

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deconcentration standpoint, IT is the newest wave of technological change posing new conceptual challenges to the geography of accessibility. Although both centralizing and decentralizing tendencies coexist, the latter dominates urban-form aggregate effects as a result of IT and transportation synergies, and perverse public subsidies for sprawl. From a restructuring perspective, IT is part of a more profound and pervasive sociotechnical change transforming the organization of production, institutions, and everyday life. For many in this camp, urban-form effects are for the most part spearheaded by global and local business decisions nurtured by the entrepreneurial state. Hence, urban planning in the informational era, whether in the Netherlands or the United States, is becoming an intricate hodgepodge of special interest zones and publicprivate governance initiatives that are tending to replace systematic, metropolitan wide public planning with a cheerful acceptance of regions as an archipelago of enclaves (Graham and Marvin 2000, 93). On the other hand, some deconcentrationist think tanks and planners who equate IT and telecommunications with the force for sprawl believe that the ultimate metropolitan form will depend on how regional planning bodies face up to the challenges and are willing to articulate telecommunications and IT in their regional plans. For them, IT can be leveraged to foster the aforementioned market-driven corporate reconfiguration of the metropolitan fringe or shrewdly harnessed to nurture a variety of alternative regional visions, ranging from e-cities in rural regions (Kentucky Science and Technology Council 1999) to sustainable cities and regional stewardship (Niles 1999; Henton et al. 2000). Whether or not, as some in the restructuring camp would surmise, these visions, sprouting throughout the country, represent no more than the newest growth coalitions nestled within the same capitalist regime of accumulation, comparative research is needed from both theoretical and research traditions to ascertain how American strong systems of metropolitan governance and regional planning, such as Portlands Metro or Minneapolis-St. Pauls Metropolitan Council, have fared relative to European cities and their more laissezfaire domestic counterparts at taming the informationalizing metropolitan region.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The challenges to land use planning and policy devised to control metropolitan form are numerous. The prospects of ever containing the expanding information-age metropolis appear increasingly dim, whereas the sociospatial inequalities of the digital d i v i d e re m a i n e x a c e r b a t e d . Vi e w e d f ro m a

The author wishes to recognize the assistance of Jennifer Fitzgerald in literature collection. She also wishes to thank the Journal of Planning Literatures anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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sources of power, and dual fiber. . . . The tech companies, in turn, are bringing in 24-hour service firms and restaurants. (Perez 2000) REFERENCES Amin, Ash. 1994. Post-Fordism. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Batten, David F. 1995. Network cities: Creative urban agglomerations for the 21st century. Urban Studies 32, 2: 313-27. . 1973. The coming of post-industrial society. New York: Basic Books. . 1973. The human consequences of urbanization. London: Macmillan. Berry, Brian J. L., and H. Kim. 1993. Challenges to the monocentric model. Geographical Analysis 25, 1: 1-4. Beyers, William B. 2000. Cyberspace or human space: Wither cities in the age of telecommunications? In Cities in the telecommunication age, James O. Wheeler, Yuko Aoyama, and Barney Warf, eds. New York: Routledge. Cairncross, Frances. 1997. The death of distance: How the communications revolution will change our lives. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Castells, Manuel. 2000. Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society. British Journal of Sociology 51, 1: 5-24. . 1998. End of millennium. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. . 1996a. Megacities and the end of urban civilization (The past is too small to inhabit). New Perspectives Quarterly 13, 3: 12-15. . 1996b. The rise of the network society. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. . 1989. The informational city. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. . 1985. High technology, space, and society. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Castells, Manuel, and Peter Hall. 1994. Technopoles of the world. The making of twenty-first-century industrial complexes. London and New York: Routledge. Cervero, Robert. 1989. Americas suburban centers. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Clark, William A. V., and Marianne Kuijpers-Linde. 1994. Commuting in restructuring urban regions. Urban Studies 31, 3: 465-83. Coffey, William J. 2000. The geographies of producer services. Urban Geography 21, 2: 170-83. Coffey, William J., and Antoine S. Bailly. 1992. Producer services and systems of flexible production. Urban Studies 29, 6: 857-68. Couclelis, Helen, and Arthur Getis. 2000. Conceptualizing and measuring accessibility in physical and virtual spaces. Information, place, and cyberspace, Donald Janelle and David Hodge, eds. New York: Springer. . 1998. Conceptualizing and measuring accessibility in physical (geographical) and virtual worlds (space). In Measuring and representing accessibility in the information age, research conference report, Donald Janelle and David Hodge, eds., 11-16. Specialist meeting of Project Varenius Geographies of the Information Society, November 19-22, 1998, Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove, CA. Czerniak, Robert J. C., Janice S. Lahsene, and Arun Chatterjee. 2000. Urban freight movement: What form will it take? Transportation in the new millennium. Transportation Research Boardpaper: A1B07: Committee on urban goods movement . Retrieved from http://www. nationalacademies.org/trb/publications/millennium/00139.pdf. Day, Lisa G. 1997. Proceedings of the urban design, telecommuting and travel forecasting conference, October 27-30 1996, Williamsburg, VA. Prepared for the U.S. Department of Transportation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

1. The informational city in Castells work represents the way in which cities are restructuring under information-age capitalism (e.g., New Economy). Although the restructuring is not technologically determined, information technology is a catalyst for profound economic, social, and spatial transformations that are different from those associated with an industrial era. 2. Teleworkers make up a broader class of workers, including telecommuters, the home-based self-employed, and mobile workers (e.g., taxi drivers, real estate agents, pizza delivery workers). 3. The report categorized information technologies into three broad classes: (1) those that transform information into electronic form (e.g., fax, video, phones, computers, optical scanners, and bar code readers; (2) switching and routing technologies (Internet, e-mail, call-forwarding systems, local and wide area network (WAN) wireless communications and computing; and (3) transmission (fiber optics, digital switching systems, and satellites) (Office of Technology Assessment 1995, 15-16). 4. Distribution centers where goods are sorted and reorganized for shipment according to the destinations demand. 5. A computerized system that integrates manufacturers, shippers, and customers into a supply chain, whereby demand is communicated in real time to all parties, speeding up reaction time and cutting down costs. 6. Just-in-time systems expedite delivery of goods and minimize inventories. 7. San Franciscos Bay area, Washington, D.C., Chicago, New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Atlanta (Moss and Townsend 2000). 8. It must be noted that much of the empirical work that informs these authors theorizing and observations about transportation and IT synergies, particularly regarding telecommuting research, was carried out in the United States (see Mokhtarian et al. 1995; Niles 1994). 9. Randstad is the ring of cities that are the heartland of the Dutch economy encompassing Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht. Green Hart is a green belt zone in the center of the Randstad, protected from urbanization. However, intensive farming uses most of the land and an ever-expanding network of roads and railroads criss-cross this landscape. 10. By 2004, the North Central LRT Corridor Extension, which runs parallel to Highway 75 and terminates at the East Plano Transit Center, will link Plano to Dallas. 11. The Platinum Corridor is the name given by the Dallas real estate industry to a 13.7-mile stretch of the Tollway running from the LBJ Freeway past State Highway 121 (Garrison 1997). 12. Dallas, Texas, faces an ever-increasing traffic congestion problem due primarily to the enormous growth of the Dallas area suburbs. With lack of room and resources to accommodate the traffic, DalTrans has resorted to intelligent transportation systems to inform the traveler of road conditions (http://dfwtraffic.dot.state.tx.us/ dalstrat.htm). According to the Texas Transportation Institute, Dallas / Fort Worth ranked 12th in the nation with over 102 million hours lost, annually, due to congestion. . . . These delays cost the regions drivers 162 million gallons of fuel per year while stuck in traffic, or $1.7 billion, which works out to $975 per driver. (www.traffic.com 2000) 13. The Dallas Business Journal described the growth of Fortune 500 companies in the area as follows: The labor pool is out there, and the dot-coms are attracted to the newer buildings that offer dual feed, which provide two

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