Urban/settlement issues

• Selected Canadian cities
• Michael Batty's paper: The Computable City. - Interesting stuff!
• City of Bits - impact of telematics on urban form and culture.
• Beyond Sprawl: New Patterns of Growth to Fit the New California
• Real Estate Tax Policy for the Information Age
• City and Regional Planning
• Global Info-Links and the smart city
• Being a Planetary Villager
• The New Social Morphology of Cities
• Space Settlements: A Design Study
• The New Colonialism: Global Restructuring and the City
• The Metaindustrial Village
• An Urban Ethic of Europa
• Urban Ecosystems
• On-Line Planning Resources
• Community and Regional Planning on the Worldwide Web
• The Future of Edge City
• Beyond the Edge: The Dynamism of Postsuburban Regions
• Urban Forms
• 15 Ways to Fix the Suburbs
• Surfing the Internet for Real Estate Information - a wealth of categorized websites
• Settlement Geography of Eau Claire, Wisconsin
• Defining the Wroxeter Hinterland
• European Sustainable Cities - First Report
• Urban Futures
• Gentlemen Adventurers in the Information Age: Accessibility,Activity, and Urban Futures
• New Ways of Looking at Cities
• The City of Grande Prairie, Alberta, Canada Home Page - a small city prepares for the Information Age
• Man's Place in the Home: Telecommuting, Identity and Urban Space
• Telecities
• The Cities And Districts Pavilion
• Transportation, Land Use and Sustainability
• Living in The Electronic Village (Singapore)
• Sustainable City
• Geographic Aspects Of Urban Planning
• Melting Pots And Marketplaces
• Bruce Sterling on the Virtual City
• Cities: Our Common Future
• The Reemergence of the City-State
• Future Communities
• Changing Places: Population, Development and the Urban Future
• The Virtual Toronto Project Homepage
• Telematics for Urban and Rural Areas
• Information Technologies for Transportation Planning
• Livable Cities for the 21st Century: The Post Habitat II Agenda for the World Bank
• Microclimate Modification for Energy Conservation
• Urban Climate Modifications
• CLASSICS: The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• Impact of Technology on Real Estate Studied
• Growing Urban Air Pollution And Increasing Traffic Congestion Have Plagued The American Cities, Especially Southern California For The Past Few Decades.
• Welcome to ULI - The Urban Land Institute
• Eco-Village Book Table Of Contents
• Neutopia: Ecovillages, Feminist Architecture, Bucky Fuller's Ideas
• Spatial Technologies, Geographic Information, and the City
• Geography and the City of the Future
• Dancing Rabbit: An Ecovillage Community
• Ethnic Segregation
• The New Colonialism: Global Restructuring and the City
• Farming In The City: The Rise Of Urban Agriculture
• Space Settlement
• The Informational City
• Can Urban Growth be Contained?
• Themes in the Urban Spatial Study of Immigrants in Canada
• AIC'97 Annual Meeting, Rural Sustainability Symposium Abstracts
• The Rural Rebound Revisited, July 1995, American Demographics
• Do Suburbs Harm Cities?
• Cyburbia - The Planning and Architecture Internet Resource Center
• AeRie - Applied Rural Telecommunications
• Citistates - Citistate is the name Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson coined in 1993 to describe how metropolitan regions have begun to operate in the new, post-Cold War world economy.
  A citistate isn't defined by political boundaries. Instead, it's organic. A citistate is reality -- a labor market, a commute-shed, a broadcast area, the circulation area of the lead newspaper. A citistate is what the economy does.
  The world's lead citistates are its greatest metropolises -- New York, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, Los Angeles and their global "command and control" competitors, spread from Chicago to Singapore. But every metro area that's set apart geographically -- a Houston, a Denver, a Burlington, Vermont -- qualifies as a citistate too.
  Here's a definition for the lexicographers-- a nomination for 21st century dictionaries:

  Citi€state-- n. -- A region consisting of one or more historic central cities surrounded by cities and towns which have a shared identification, function as a single zone for trade, commerce and communication, and are characterized by social, economic and environmental interdependence. Hist. Similar to city states of antiquity (e.g. Athens, Rome, Carthage) or medieval times (e.g. the Hanseatic League), except that modern citistates engage in instant electronic communication and capital transfer, and are the chief recipients of world population growth.

  Citistates would have made little sense under the old paradigm of American thinking -- federal, state, local. But they emerge as the centerpiece of a new paradigm -- global, regional, and neighborhood. Citistates become the focus of how our world is now organizing itself.
  As economic actors, major U.S. citistates compete in size with major world nations. In gross product, the New York region ranks 13th among the world's top economies, just ahead of Australia, Argentina and Russia. The Los Angeles citistate is bigger than Korea, Chicago greater than Taiwan or Switzerland, Washington ahead of Hong Kong, while Minneapolis-St. Paul exceeds Israel. And according to figures compiled by Standard & Poor's DRI division for the U.S. Conference of Mayors and National Association of Counties, the U.S.'s 314 metro regions are clearly the economic drivers, providing 84 percent of new jobs, 95 percent of high-tech jobs, 88 percent of the country's income.
  Citistates' importance was enlarged through the 1990s by the rapid flowering of the Internet and the digital revolution. Both have accelerated economic expansion, triggering more global commerce. The challenge of the 21st century is to harness such forces, and civic will, for strategic regional planning. Because to compete in the emerging global economy, citistates have no choice: they must mobilize all their skills to protect their center cities, grow smarter, protect their air and water, achieve more social equity, train their workforces to excel in an increasingly competitive world marketplace.
• Borderlands
• TransAct--The Transportation Action Network
• Transportation and the Livable City
• Space Settlements:A Design Study
• Virtual Cities on the World-Wide Web
• How Telecommunications is Transforming Urban Spaces
• Fortress America: Gated Communities In The United States
• Growth Boundary Stifles Options For Farmland
• The Communications Revolution and Older Metropolitan Areas in the United States
• Telecommunications and the 'Death of Distance': Some Implications for Transport and Urban Areas
• Site Planning & New Urbanism
• The New Urbanism: The Other Side (with Links)
• Cyburbia - The Planning and Architecture Internet Resource Center
• The Seaside Institute
• Home From Nowhere - (The Atlantic)
• The Planning Center - Govt. - Livable Communities
• DEMOGRAPHIC BRIEFS: Wendell Cox Consultancy
• Florida Center: Transportation, Land Use and Sustainability
• Ideas/The Design Exchange/Ecovillage Network of the Americas
• The Change Project: Healthy Communities Articles
• Eveno: Geography and the City of the Future
• Impact of Technology on Real Estate Studied
• Communities and the Internet
• An Increase In The Use Of Underground Space As Shopping Malls, Carparks And Roads
• New York, Capital Of The Information Age
• Globalisation Of A Metropolis On The European Periphery
• An Urban Ethic of Europe
• Technopoles
• Urban Planning Topics
• Communities in Los Angeles
• Hack the City: The New Politics of Place
• Urban Dynamics
• Raymond Kam's Vancouver VR (QuickTime VR/QTVR)
• Space Shuttle: Medicine Factories in Space
• The State of the Nation's (US) Cities: A Comprehensive Database on American Cities and Suburbs
• The Information Economy: Is Your City Connected?
• What Is The Impact of INFOTECH On Commercial Real Estate?
• Human and Physical Geography Reports: Mississippi River Towns
• Agenda for a Long-Term Information Technology Policy for Private Homes and Neighbourhoods
• Newsweek.com: Business: The Hot New Tech Cities
• "Future Cities", "Sustainable Development" and "Full-Cost Accounting"
• History Channel - Tall Buildings
• WTB / World's Tallest Buildings - Marshall Gerometta's HOT 500
• High-Rise Buildings In The World
• Most Wired Cities in the U.S.
• David O'Sullivan Research in urban space, graphs and CA (Cellular Automata) - Index
• The Global Eco-village Network
• Contested Terrain (Community paper)
• The environment of the city or the urbanisation of nature
• Surfing the City: Literacy and the Posturban Cyberscape
• Graham Todd: Post-Fordism and Urban Development
• Globalization and Governance in Toronto
• Space-Time Properties of Urban Life and Urban Structure
• Man's Place in the Home: Telecommuting, Identity and Urban Space
• Space, Technology And The Edge City
• Urban Agglomeration, Social Fragmentation
• Why Cities Grow in Spite of Telematic Advances
• Centre for Urban Technology - Telecommunications and the City
• Points of View: Paying for Sprawl
• Growing Smart Legislative Guidebook
• Smart Cities: Integrating The Global Information Infrastructure Into Local Communities
• Shaping Our Communities: The Impacts of Information-Technology
• A New Sense of Place: INFOTECH's Impact on the Home
• Communities And Urban Planning
• Cyburbia - The Planning and Architecture Internet Resource Center
• BestPlaces.net - City info, data, stats
• Megacities 2000
• Historic Pittsburgh Project
• Congress for the New Urbanism
• Urban and Regional Regeneration Bulletin
• Dreaming and Designing and Developing at a Distance - The Growing Use of Computers and Virtual Teamwork in Architecture and Planning
• Planning and Cyberspace Links
• The Internet Backbone and the American Metropolis
• Population of the 100 Largest Cities and Other Urban Places In The United States: 1790 to 1990 - This paper presents decennial census population totals for the 100 largest cities and other urban places in the United States based on the 21 decennial censuses taken from 1790 to 1990. The paper represents the first time that the populations of the largest urban places at each census have been published in a single report and was prepared in response to numerous requests for this type of information.
• City Populations - the largest cities in the world - High-tech city population database. Gives official (census and estimate) population figures for thousands of cities, agglomerations, provinces and states around the world (although large parts of Africa and Central and Southeast Asia are not yet covered). Apart from listings (alphabetical and by size), there are interactive Java-based maps showing population sizes on mouseover action. Maps also pop up when clicking on the number of a city in the lists. There is a special listing of cities with over 1 million population (also available for downloading in Excel format). There is explanation available on how to use some of the more advanced map operations.
• Machine Space - This module contains an exercise in which students are asked to consider how much of a city's built environment is occupied by machine space and whether the amount of machine space is correlated with landuse or distance from the city center.
• Cities in the Telecommunications Age - book announcement.
• La place de la ville dans le discours des aménageurs du début des années 1920 à la fin des années 1960. - The role of the city in town and country planning discourse from the early 1920s to the late 1960s in France.
• Spatial Concentration and Mobility - Over the last years, the renewed interest in the study of urban issues, not least as they relate to ethnic, minority and migration concerns, is manifest in many ways. In the current literature, we now encounter primate cities, global cities, world cities, edge cities, informational cities, carceral cities, as well as, for example, hyper-ghettoes, fortified enclaves, and ethnic enclaves.
• More Poor Families Living in Very Poor Neighbourhoods, Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC) - Most Canadians are aware that poverty in the United States is increasingly concentrated in very poor, inner-city neighbourhoods in large urban centres. But do they realize that phenomenon has crept across the border?
• Special collection of ruminations on Manuel Castells' "space of flows"
• Regime Theory: Analysing The Change In Local Government - In order to identify and analyse the contextual changes and their impacts on urban governance, we need an approach which provides tools for understanding how the local aspects of development relate to contextual factors. That is, ultimately, about how decision-making, service provision, and every life at local level are matched with the most outstanding tendencies. The theory arsenal which meets these requirements can be named 'the urban political economy'. It includes such theories as regime theory, growth machine thesis, regulation theory, fiscal crisis theory, local state theory etc. What is common to all of these theories is the emphasis on contextual aspects in analysing the changes of and challenges to local governance and urban policy.
• Urban Design, Telecommunication and Travel Forecasting Conference: Table of Contents
• Habitat - A pot-pourri of websites covering a broad range of topics (technological, ecological, social, etc.) pertaining to settlement issues.
• Effect of Information Technology Innovations on Outer Metropolitan Regions - Current thought on the impact of information technology on society generally argues that it will, among other things, increasingly become a substitute for trip taking. There is also a school that argues that it is also emerging as a complement to transportation. This paper examines these arguments through a literature review with model development and numerical experimentation. The conclusion is that substitution effects will be sufficient to induce concentration of new growth in U.S. metropolitan regions far beyond the current "edge city" periphery.
• Y-Life:The 50 Most Wired Cities and Towns
• Global Cities21 - Sustainable development is a transformation process - the transformation of economies, institutions, infrastructure, natural and built environments, and human hearts and minds. Global Cities21 will explore how we foster this process of change at the local level. In sessions that promote exchange, dialogue, and ongoing informal interaction, participants will examine the tools and methods being employed by local governments worldwide in their movement toward sustainability. The International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) invites you to join with your peers from around the world to learn, to exchange, to plan, and to make personal and professional commitments for a sustainable twenty-first century.
• Communication and the Built Form: The changing Social Landscape - Decay and apprehension predominate and characterize much of modern urban life as shifting demographics, the ascendency of suburbanism and the quality of life deteriorates. The vital social lift once offered by an urban environment, one replete with busy streets, markets, parks, promenades, and squares, was long a defining characteristic of urban culture. This social life now competes with media technology which continues to shift interaction inward, away from less controllable public life. Street life, which once beckoned and called, has been swept away by our current preoccupation with the realities of crime, fear and risk. Those who are afraid to go out, sit alone in homes and rooms disconnected from the environment in which they are located. Others sit amid electronic connections and reach out through a complex communication network. They function with predictable and controllable options non-locations far removed from the physical requirements of the here and now. They substitute an emancipated disconnected world for one that once was. The mediated options are spectacular and varied, governed from inside, removed from potential physical risk.
• Positioning for the Future: Metropolitan Chicago's Place in the Information Economy - As the heartland of the Industrial economy, the Chicagoland Metropolitan region has traditionally relied on the agriculture, manufacturing, and financial service sectors for economic growth and development. However, Chicagoland's future economic growth will depend on its ability to attracting and retain technology firms to the region. Chicagoland is presented with a unique opportunity to reposition itself as an attractive investment destination for information economy firms.
• HUD USER - PD&R - An information source for housing and community development researchers and policymakers. HUD USER is the primary source for US federal government reports and information on housing policy and programs, building technology, economic development, urban planning, and other housing-related topics.
• ICLEI Home Page - The ICLEI site holds information on initiatives and projects of the council, mainly aimed at fostering sustainable cities. The most important is the Cities21 campaign "Assessing Mutual Progress Toward Sustainable Development". The full final report is available in PDF.
• "Public Interest" Show Archives: June 26-30, 2000.American cities in the 20th century. - Link to a Real Audio file with a 'Public Interest' radio interview broadcast 20000626 on the supposedly declining importance of cities.
• Virtual Cities on the World-Wide Web - There is currently a building "boom" on the World-Wide Web (WWW). New towns and cities are springing up in cyberspace, constructed with digital bricks and mortar. These new electronic cities are popularly known as virtual cities, digital cities or cyber-cities. Many thousands of people are using these virtual cities to carry out everyday activities like shopping, relaxing and meeting friends.
  Cities are geographic centres of people, activities and services. The urban form and layout of cities are familiar to most people. Consequently, the virtual city is being used as an interface metaphor to information and services on the WWW. Virtual cities provide an electronic hub of services, activities, information and people located at a single "place" on your computer screen, just like real cities are a focal point in geographic space.
  In this article we shall begin by discussing the nature of virtual cities, before examining ways of creating, on the Web, three-dimensional models of the buildings for virtual cities. We will conclude by looking at current research into creating "true" virtual cities with realistic built form, useful information content and, importantly, a sense of urban life.
• An Integrated Building Stock, Transport and Energy Model of a Medium-sized City - An integrated land use, building stock, transport and energy model has been built of the town of Swindon (Wilts) with its rural hinterland and adjacent villages. This model predicts the location of floorspace used by different activities, and simulates the associated traffic flows. It has been used to explore four contrasted scenarios for the growth of Swindon up to the year 2016. The modelling software is TRANUS, developed by Prof de la Barra of Modelistica. The Swindon model is supported by a comprehensive database of information about population, employment, building stock, land uses, public transport services and the traffic network.
• The Urban Transport Crisis in Europe and North America - Growing congestion and worsening air quality top political agendas throughout the developed world. Evoking less universal popular concern, motor vehicle intimidation of pedestrians and cyclists still arouses popular ire in many urban areas, as well. The two books reviewed here examine in different ways the nature of these growing transportation-related problems, public policy responses to them, and the consequences of those policies.
• Limiting urban futures - All planning can be considered as an attempt to restrict possible futures. Usually this is not stated explicitly. However, "futures scenarios" are explicit rejections of other possible futures. As the year 2000 approaches, many cities, regions and nations are preparing such scenarios. They have become fashionable again, as they were in the 1960s. Often a small number of alternative scenarios is presented. They indicate the range of futures considered acceptable. In urban futures scenarios, the range of acceptable future cities is made visible. "Acceptable", that is, to the people who prepared the scenarios. That is usually the city or regional government: sometimes, a private organisation funded by local elites. The Amsterdam study TVA is used here as an example of how such future studies limit urban futures.
• Urban Research Initiative: information technology and the future of urban environments - Active since January 1997, TELECOM-CITIES is an email listserv dedicated to exploring the impacts of new information and communications technologies on the growth and development of cities and metropolitan regions throughout the world.
• Society for American City and Regional Planning History
• The Geography of the New Economy: Strategic Cities
• The Changing Patterns Of Community - As we refocus our attention on community life, it is clear that, for many of us, much has been lost. Even in rural areas within the U.S., current community life is generally a fragmented shadow of what it used to be. In our knowledge of community, we have become as children - lacking in experience and out of touch with tradition. This can be a great handicap, but, paradoxically, we can also turn it into a great asset. It can become an asset if we realize that because we are not immersed in any strong traditions of community life, we are thereby freer to draw on the experience of many different cultural traditions. We can use our freedom from the immediate past to allow us to reconnect with a much larger past. We can stretch ourselves to be planetary in time, as well as outwardly in space and inwardly in spirit. At first glance this may seem little more than a naive hope, a brave face put on a bad situation, but the historical record suggests otherwise, Time and again, significant cultural innovations have come, not from the already strongly established cultures, but from the fresh starts.
• International Seminar on Urban Form Homepage - The International Seminar on Urban Form was inaugurated in 1994. It seeks to advance research and practice in fields concerned with the built environment. Its members are drawn from several disciplines, including architecture, geography, history, sociology and town planning. It promotes conferences, publishes a journal Urban Morphology and provides an international framework for communication between members.
• Emerging world cities in Pacific Asia - In the last two decades of the twentieth century, it has become more evident that the process of globalization has become part of our daily lives. Choosing between domestic and foreign products, living with foreign neighbours or looking for a job abroad, facing a floating exchange rate and concerning ourselves with the global debt crisis o European Union integration, all reflect aspects of the globalization process. The world economy has changed in fundamental ways, particularly in the past few years, such that its driving force, its cutting edge, and its operating modes are being rapidly restructured and reshaped. A new international division of labour, with an accent on globally integrated production and the transnational corporation, has dawned. The multinational corporation, which rose rapidly during the 1970s, has now become common in every corner of the world. Global factories, global manufacturing production, and global financial networks and producer services have given new substance to global dimensions of economic production processes and the way in which countries and cities can contribute to them. Indeed, world cities, following the original proposition by Friedmann and Wolff, have spawned a spate of provocative and original studies. At a recent meeting to review the status of research in world cities, it was declared that the world city hypothesis had become a paradigm, after noting the intellectual force that the idea appeared to have generated.
• Knowledge Value: The New Niche for Cities? - Yet despite all the hype associated with rural Lone Eagles and the development of the hinterland cities, some developments associated with the telecosm and the entrepreneurial "new economy" suggest that historic urban locations may have a far more viable long-term role than suggested by Gilder and others. The very telecommunications technology that allows for an investment banker to work from Park City, Utah also enables an urban entrepreneur in New York¹s Chelsea District or Santa Monica, California the opportunity to work from home as well without necessitating an unpleasant subway ride or a miserable commute along Southern California¹s freeways.
• New York.com: A Political Economy of the "Informational" City - This paper examines the political economy of place, specifically the convergence of communication media and new technology in the transformation of New York City. The research reported here is part of larger project that addresses the political economy of post industrial spaces. It currently also includes the Multimedia Super Corridor in the region around Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, the high technology district anchored in Ottawa, Canada's Silicon Valley North, and what some have called a model of alternative successful development based in Italy's Emilia Romagna region or "The Third Italy." This research draws theoretical inspiration from my book The Political Economy of Communication: Rethinking and Renewal (Mosco, 1996) which aims to de-center the media by viewing systems of communication as integral to fundamental economic, political, social, and cultural processes in society. It draws specifically from the book's treatment of spatialization or the process of transforming space with communication. The paper starts with a brief overview of the political economy perspective, addresses its interest in media concentration and convergence, and proceeds to examine spatial convergence and its consequences in New York City.
• Cities In Competition: Articulating The Gains From Integration - This paper reviews the interaction of competition between cities - territorial competition - and the process of European integration. By 'territorial competition' is meant a process through which groups, acting on behalf of a regional or sub-regional economy (typically that of a city-region), seek to promote it as a location for economic activity either implicitly or explicitly in competition with other areas. This competitive activity is often addressed to the attraction of mobile investment, sometimes with discrimination between more and less desirable activities. But it may equally be concerned with enhancing the share of existing local businesses in the markets they serve and generating new businesses and markets. Territorial competition may use national programmes or European Structural Funds but, in contrast to traditional regional policy, it is bottom-up in motivation and is concerned with economic efficiency (conceived purely locally) not with spatial equity.
• Globalization and the Rise of City-Regions - A world-wide mosaic of large city-regions seems to be over-riding (though is not effacing entirely) an earlier core-periphery system of spatial organization. The economic dynamics of these city-regions are analyzed with particular emphasis on the ways in which they tend to generate increasing-returns effects and competitive advantages for local producers. The managerial tasks that these city-regions face raise many new issues about local economic development policy and institution building in the interests of social order. These issues lead on to further questions about democracy and citizenship in the new global mosaic of city-regions as well as in the new world system as a whole.
• World Gazetteer: population figures for cities, towns and places - Basic population data for countries of the world. Covers all nations and first level administrative divisions. Data go back some 5-30 years, but are mostly only available for census years. Navigation is very clear, figures up to date, but the pages have no systematic reference to data sources and area definitions.
• The Location Of Multinational Firms In The European Urban System - The progress of political and economic integration among European countries is inducing the progressive emergence of a European urban system. National urban systems are restructuring and adapting themselves to this new international and economic context. The location of the largest multinational firms is taken as revealing a major step in the process of the integration of European cities into supra-national networks. A survey of the location of 3000 establishments belonging to the 300 largest European firms provides interesting results about the factors making European cities attractive for such activities. It may be inferred from these results that they confirm a new trend called 'metropolisation', which is reinforcing the top of the national urban hierarchies, as demonstrated in other studies.
• Space-time Contraction and the Dynamics of Urban Systems - An attempt is made to identify the dynamics of urban systems during the historical process of their evolution. An illustration is made with the case of European cities between 1200 and 1990, using harmonised historical data bases. Simple maps show first a general expansion in cities number and size over time, reflecting the ability of the system to continuously adapt its structure over time. A second trend is an increased hierarchisation in city size, which may be related to the continuous improvement in the speed and capacity of transportation means. Because of this space-time contraction, large cities short-circuit small towns, and inequalities in city size are widening. A third trend leading to a spatial reorganisation, emerges from maps of the urban population potentials. Among all possible mathematical equations and parameters values which could describe the intensity and the spatial range of interactions between cities, we choose those which give rather stable results and which are compatible with the analysis of urban historians, as De Vries, Braudel, Bairoch, Hohenberg and Lees, for the centuries preceding industrial revolution, by using evaluations of distances in terms of time and cost. Urban systems dynamics is better approached with reference to this relative space than on usual topographic maps.
• Cities, Cells, and Complexity: Developing A Research Agenda For Urban Geocomputation - Cellular automata are widely employed in urban geocomputation and have been applied to urban systems simulation with a recent fervour. Despite the popularity of these models, however, researchers have been slow to heed the doubts and disclaimers expressed in the early days of their application to urban phenomena. This is, in part, a response to advances in the field. However, many of these concerns remain as appropriate today as they did in the 1980s, and have not been addressed largely because the study of cellular urban modelling, and the broader field of urban geocomputation, lacks a defined research agenda. This paper addresses an apparent imbalance in the field and re-evaluates the research agenda of urban geocomputation, in particular cellular-based modelling of urban systems, pre-emptively suggesting future avenues for exploration and considering the challenges that might lie ahead.
• Cities on Ice: Permafrost and Urban Land Use - As development pressures increase in arctic and subarctic areas, planning approaches and techniques needed to mitigate the environmental impacts of development are not yet fully developed. One exception to the lack of systematic attention may be the City of Fairbanks. Within the Borough of Fairbanks, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (a federal agency) reviews all development applications for their soil suitability implications. They take a site level appraisal of the soil conditions and will reject applications for land uses that clearly are inappropriate for the environment. This kind of planning effort represents the beginning of a shift of focus from designing more and more elaborate engineering fixes to make any site buildable to dealing with the impacts of development within larger environmental systems.
• Urban Forms, Urban Processes, and Urban Policies: Toward a new conceptual framework - It is a general consensus among social scientists that a technological revolution of historic proportion is dramatically transforming all the fundamental dimensions of human society. Technological impacts on the spatial forms and dynamics of cities all over the world can serve as the quintessential example for this technological revolution. Yet the recent literature is full of conflicting arguments and untested speculations about the effects of these technologies on urban societies. Although similar conference and projects have been conducted before, I believe that the proposed Baltimore conference is timely and much needed as some broader theoretical issues have not been thoroughly discussed and some of the technological advances were not anticipated. The following are some of my research notes prepared for the Baltimore conference. My primary intention here is to present an outline for a new conceptual framework and discuss a preliminary research agenda related to the three conference themes. The new conceptual framework proposed here is a synthesis of existing theoretical frameworks with a very strong flavor of theoretical pluralism. It is just a rough outline at this moment. Hopefully, I can further elaborate this framework based upon the feedback from the participants of this conference. Empirical evidence from my on-going research on Texas cities will be provided at the conference.
• The Exploratory of the Past and Future City - Although 'the city' has probably been the most significant vehicle in shaping Britain over the last two millennia, there is no single facility which tells its story - there is no 'City Overview'. Elements of particular periods or places come to life through attractions such as Jorvik or Beamish or the Oxford Story but there is nowhere which attempts to address the comprehensive genesis of cities or the complexity of stories attached to that development. In consequence, visitors only see the key elements, the castles and cathedrals, but never the whole picture and therefore, so much of Britain's urban heritage is neglected. While there are a number of futuristic museums (e.g., La Villette in Paris, Evolon in Eindhoven, Boston Computer Museum) these tend to be science/technology/industry focused looking more at processes or particular fields rather than at the future of cities and their citizens. A 'City Exploratory' looking at future cities through the use of IT would offer real opportunities to capitalise on the popularity of both technology and 'futures' while providing an important educational resource and a means of engaging tomorrow's citizens in the technology of the next millennium.
• GaWC: Globalization and World Cities - World cities are a key physical manifestation of contemporary globalization. Our site is dedicated to investigating this modern phenomenon.
• Towards the Virtual City: VR & Internet GIS for Urban Planning - The emergence of affordable virtual reality and Internet GIS is providing the fundamental infrastructure to begin building virtual cities which can provide an interactive simulation and analysis environment for planning real urban places. The virtual city on the Internet will provide planners with a computer environment to interface with the myriad of complex physical and social data needed to plan and manage cities, along with necessary tools to explore and analyse that data in meaningful and intuitive ways.
• Urban and Municipal GIS Applications in Developing Countries - the Problems and the Potential - This paper provides an overview of issues and considerations for implementing a GIS to support urban and municipal planning in developing countries, supported by descriptions of project experience. Topics include data availability and access, organizational and institutional issues, staffing and training, hardware and software selection and support. Project experience includes a rapid land use assessment application in four cities in the Philippines, and a municipal planning project in San Pedro Sula, Honduras.
• An integrated information system for urban land-use management - Research involving a number of local authority urban planning departments in the Republic of South Africa has shown that various individual information systems are being developed to support planning and decision-making. However, the benefits of these systems are only marginal due to the high cost of database development and maintenance. The lack of integration and co-ordination preclude the possibilities of data sharing to cut costs. The research has shown that the majority of the functions are dependent on the same basic data and that an integrated information system can enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the various application systems. Through integration, it was possible to design a dynamic database for urban land-use management. This paper focuses on the results of the research and includes a model of a typical integrated information system for urban land-use management as well as a methodology to develop such an integrated information system.
• Urban and Regional Information Systems Association - URISA is non-profit association of professionals using information technology to solve problems in planning, public works, the environment, emergency services, utilities and throughout state and local governments. URISA is also the premier organization for the use and integration of spatial information technology to improve the quality of life in urban and regional environments. Through its international, national and local chapter operations, URISA serves nearly 7,000 professionals worldwide.
• Bits of Cities: Utopian Visions and Social Power in Placed-Based and Electronic Communities - In the 19th century, when industrial cities spewed smoke and ash over cramped city dwellings, middle class visionaries dreamed of green country towns within easy commute to city businesses. Working class visionaries dreamed of a communal social order that would reward them fairly for their labor and shelter them in old age. In the 1960's, when suburban life was widely (even if inaccurately) portrayed as dull sameness, middle class utopians dreamed of a place where they could discover their own identities, get back to nature and live in peace with like-minded others. In the late 20th century, when information-enhanced corporate competiveness in a globalized economy threatens to increase the gap between rich and poor and obliterate the middle class, and when place-based community life is eroding -- some visionaries advance utopian dreams of a new world - Cyberspace - where people can organize on-line systems to support democracy, empower work and enrich human relationships. This paper examines the social assumptions of these visions -- and the nature of social power that they embody. We draw upon a rich history of California utopian community experiments to provide an experiential base for better understanding the possibilities of social life in Cyberspace.
• Maryville Praised on Vision 2020 use of citizen planning - Citizen-oriented planning also frequently results in entirely new priorities for the community. The decisions will affect travel patterns, accessibility, the character of streets, where services should be located, and the quality of neighborhoods.
• Divercity: Strategies for the development of urban space - Divercity is a town planning strategy which considers city as an open system and which presents a planning tool that, by way of general accessibility and constant actualisation, attempts to cope with today's requirements of the city and town planning. In essence, divercity describes town planning as an open source project and looks at the opportunities and consequences for the participants in a town planning process. The particular aspect that has been dealt with up to now is the aspect of co-operative development despite abandoning town planning sovereignty and possible strategies for planning and action in dealing with an open, process-orientated planning method. As a consequence of our work on open source we have now created this web-site which allows us to open the project and research, i.e. to make it available to a broader circle of people. This decision required that the project text be made available and accessible. This text may now be amended and/or commented on. Any amendments, i.e. any additional paragraphs or articles with the purpose of amending/completing the current text, may be sent to us using a specific form and will then appear in the following update of the text. Any comments on the project directly related to the text will be flagged in the text and made available and any other comments in the project archive.
• Project Future: Vision-Based Community Development - Ask a group of people about the 21st century and the response will typically be a pause accompanied by blank stares. Most people live in a nitty-gritty world of immediate decisions and actions with little time or ability to look far ahead. When concerned citizens bring this perspective to improving their community, they want to see immediate problems solved. But, a focus on the nitty-gritty mold isn't enough to address many long-term community issues.
• Collective Design - Normally the responsibility and authority over product development is strictly the affair of the management of the business. There are, nevertheless, some special cases where the responsibilities can be shared with the future users of the product. Such cases are e.g. a housing neighborhood which is going to undergo a major renovation, or an organized group of families which are intending to build a group of houses. Such cases require special design methods of collective design (self-design).
• Land Evaluation Home Page - This page is designed as a source of information for anyone who needs to do or understand land evaluation. We have tried to collect and present as much information as possible relevant to land evaluation.
• Driven to Spend: The Impact of Sprawl on Household Transportation Expenses - Transportation is a big expense for America¹s families, and it is getting bigger. This study finds that a major factor driving up transportation costs is sprawling development. Sprawl makes driving the only practical form of transportation, and owning several cars per family is expensive, particularly for the poor. New research presented here shows that personal transportation costs are highest in sprawling places pursuing a highway oriented transportation strategy. Less sprawling places that offer an array of transportation choices cost families less, and the difference can be thousands of dollars each year. Better transportation and growth polices could help families spend less on transportation and direct more money to investments that build wealth, such as home ownership.
• World Cities and Territorial States under Conditions of Contemporary Globalization - This is largely an empirical paper which uses a unique set of office geography data to describe inter-city relations across the world. After identifying a set of 55 world cities these patterns are related to states in a preliminary analyses of city-state connections. Particular emphasis is placed upon identifying trans-state processes and regional city hierarchies. This empirical reporting is sandwiched between a theoretical and practical introduction and conclusion. Using Braudel's conceptualization of capitalism as a world of monopolies, world city formation is introduced as a particular geographical knowledge nexus for creating new monopoly products. In the concluding section, the future of globalization is linked to the possibilities for world city network knowledge monopolies.
• A Global Alliance established to build Wireless Information Community solutions worldwide - A group of leading software and telecommunications vendors announced today a global alliance to build Wireless Information Society solutions worldwide. The alliance unifies the core competencies of various players and takes advantage of future technology roadmaps of such forerunning companies as IBM, Digia, Sonera and Symbian in order to establish a working sample of 3rd generation wireless value-chains. A pilot project for the alliance will be the Helsinki Wireless Virtual Village, part of a 1 billion dollar development project located at Helsinki, (Finland), the Wireless Capital of the World. The nature of today's announcement is a technological partnership and it does not include any financial investments from the partners.
• "The New Geography" by Joel Kotkin - From one of America's most credible and visionary forecasters the first look at how the digital revolution is changing where and how we live and work in the bricks-and-mortar world. Historically unprecedented forces are at work buffeting cities, suburbs, and towns across the country. In The New Geography, internationally renowned economic and social-trend forecaster Joel Kotkin takes their first full measure. Kotkin focuses on the digital revolution's surprising impact on cities: their traditional role as the centers of creativity and the crossroads for trade and culture is becoming ever more essential in a globalized information-age economy. But there will be big winners and big losers among them, and Kotkin explains which cities are best equipped to thrive and which are fated to decline. He also identifies new species of communities: Nerdistans - high-end, self-contained, office park-oriented suburbs, built to be attractive to a certain class of techie, and Valhallas, wealthy rural enclaves for information-age plutocrats.
• The Internet and the rise of the new network cities, 1969 - 1999 - The recent rapid growth of the Internet has avoided scrutiny from urban planners as little information is available from which to assess its impacts on cities and regions. As a result, explanations of the relationship between telecommunications and urban growth are overly simplistic, forecasting either the centralization of decisionmaking in so-called 'global' cities or wholesale urban dissolution. Based on two measurements of Internet geography -- domain name registrations and backbone networks -- this study finds that access to advanced communications technologies have broadly diffused across a wide group of medium-sized and large-sized metropolitan areas. Finally, the implications of these findings suggest a need to rethink global cities and a practical need to address the growing divide between network cities and the rest of the urban world.
• Constructing the Future in Planning - The future is a long recognized focus of the urban planning profession but it has been neglected of late, particularly by academics. This article reviews concepts, theories and tools useful for strengthening a future focus in planning. Core analytical concepts include distinctions between projections, forecasts and plans, and continuities of past, present and future. Ethical issues center on the tension between an activist shaping of the future and the manipulation of forecasts to support desired plans. Emphasizing representation of the future as an essential means for gaining agreement, the article surveys the practices of visioning, scenario-building and persuasive storytelling. The conclusion outlines a reinvigorated approach to planning the future that draws upon theories presented.
• Urban Research Initiative : information technology and the future of urban environments - Cities have played an important role in the process of globalization as centers for information exchange. Urban scholars note a handful of dominant financial services centers - so-called "global cities" - have dominated international telecommunications networks. Yet these and others have failed to understand how new telecommunications technologies, particularly the Internet, are enabling a far broader diffusion of international inter-urban connectivity - a far more complex global web than in earlier eras. This article presents evidence on the Internet backbone that traditionally dominant urban hubs for international communications - London, New York, and Tokyo - are increasingly being supplemented by other hubs within their regions. The global structure of the Internet reflects a shift of a network of network cities. To cope with this challenge, urban planners are urged to address three issues: dependency on other cities and urban areas, accessibility to global Internet backbone networks, and proficiency with communications technology.
• Urban Networks in the Baltic - VASAB (Visions and Strategies Around the Baltic Sea) 2010 is the common spatial planning project for the states in the Baltic Sea region. The first report "Towards a Framework for Spatial Development in the Baltic Sea Region" was finished in 1994. It is the result of common work of a group of Focal Points representing ministries responsible for spatial planning in the participating countries/regions in the BSR. Report describes goals for spatial development in the Baltic Sea region, strategies how to achieve these, and first common actions to start implementation. Second report "From Vision to Action" was completed in 1996.
  The purpose of the VASAB project is:
  • support the development of networks for co-operation in the Baltic Sea Region
  • provide a practical forum for the transfer of competence to the countries in transition to democratic market economies
  • improve the level of information in BSR countries on current trends and problems in other countries of the region
  • assess important infrastructure projects to receive international financial contributions
  • promote spatial planning in the participating countries and regions.
• New Community Networks: Wired For Change - In an era of declining communities, grassroots activists all over the world are building community networks designed to reinvigorate communities by encouraging dialogue and providing a forum for voices that too often go unheard. Via new computer neworking technology, new communites can now connect electronically to pursue activities such as community and public health projects, long-distance learning, performances, and "virtual spaces." Community networks are computer systems that are designed for community use. They are not "on-ramps" to the "information superhighway." Community networks are generally free to use, although some systems charge small fees. Something of a community movement now exists, with nearly 300 systems in operation, hundreds more in the planning, and over 500,000 users!
• Economic TeleDevelopment Forum - Links - Numerous links pertaining to teledevelopment and wired communities.
• E-topian Visions: The World As Intelligent Environment - Lean, green cities that work smarter, not harder. Urban areas characterized by dwellings in which we both live and work. Twenty-four- hour neighborhoods and electronically mediated meeting places. Decentralized production, marketing, and distribution systems. Electronically summoned and delivered services. Cities as silicon- and software-saturated places that are smart and responsive.
  This is how William J. Mitchell, Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, sees the future in e-topia, published this fall by the MIT Press. E-topia is a follow-on to Mitchell's City of Bits, published by the MIT Press in 1995. In both books, Mitchell pursues his theme of how urban areas will be affected by the global digital network, and what that implies for our future daily lives.
• Socio-spatial differentiation in post-communist Prague - The paper analyses processes, which transform the socio-spatial pattern of post-communist Prague and describes major changes in the city's social geography. The starting point is a brief introduction to the socio-spatial pattern of a socialist city and the discussion of methods and concepts of investigation of processes of socio-spatial change in contemporary Prague. Growing income inequalities and transformations in housing system are discussed as the main underlying causes of growing socio-spatial disparities. In the section devoted to the mechanism of socio-spatial differentiation, attention is focused on the role of social mobility, migration, housing renovation and new housing construction.The conclusions summarise major changes in the social geography of post-communist Prague and discuss implications of central and local government policies for the growth in socio-spatial disparities.
• Carfree Cities
• Movers and Shakers: How immigrants are reviving neighborhoods given up for dead - For decades the industrial area just east of downtown Los Angeles was an economic wreck, a 15-square-block area inhabited largely by pre­World War II derelict buildings. Yet now the area comes to life every morning, full of talk of toys in various South China dialects, in Vietnamese, in Korean, in Farsi, in Spanish, and in the myriad other commercial languages of the central city. The district now known as Toytown represents a remarkable turnaround of the kind of archaic industrial area that has fallen into disuse all across the country. A combination of largely immigrant entrepreneurship and the fostering of a specialized commercial district has created a bustling marketplace that employs over 4,000 people, boasts revenues estimated at roughly $500 million a year, and controls the distribution of roughly 60 percent of the $12 billion in toys sold to American retailers.
• Urban Climate - An urban climatologist studies the climate in and around cities. Urban areas are both affected by weather and climate, and exert an influence on the local scale weather and climate. The climate in and around cities and other built up areas is altered in part due to modifications humans make to the surface of the Earth during urbanization. The surface is typically rougher and often drier in cities, as naturally vegetated surfaces are replaced by buildings and paved streets. Buildings along streets form urban street "canyons" that cause the urban surface to take on a distinctly three-dimensional character. These changes affect the absorption of solar radiation, the surface temperature, evaporation rates, storage of heat and the turbulence and wind climates of cities and can drastically alter the conditions of the near-surface atmosphere. Human activities in cities also produce emissions of heat, water vapour and pollutants that directly impact the temperature, humidity, visibility and air quality in the atmosphere above cities. On slightly larger scales, urbanization can also lead to changes in precipitation above and downwind of urban areas. In fact, urbanization alters just about every element of climate and weather in the atmosphere above the city, and sometimes downwind of the city.
• New York.com: A Political Economy of the "Informational" City - THIS PAPER examines the political economy of place, specifically the convergence of communication media and new technology in the transformation of New York City. The research reported here is part of larger project that addresses the political economy of post industrial spaces. It currently also includes the Multimedia Super Corridor in the region around Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, the high technology district anchored in Ottawa, Canada's Silicon Valley North, and what some have called a model of alternative successful development based in Italy's Emilia Romagna region or "The Third Italy." This research draws theoretical inspiration from my book The Political Economy of Communication: Rethinking and Renewal (Mosco, 1996) which aims to de-center the media by viewing systems of communication as integral to fundamental economic, political, social, and cultural processes in society. It draws specifically from the book's treatment of spatialization or the process of transforming space with communication. The paper starts with a brief overview of the political economy perspective, addresses its interest in media concentration and convergence, and proceeds to examine spatial convergence and its consequences in New York City.
• World cities emergence in post-socialist transitional economies - Geographers traditionally deal with the two types of spaces: commercial cities and nation-states. As Peter Taylor points out, networks of cities and mosaics of states depict two very different ways of imagining the spatial organisation of the modern world. Beyond geography, Charles Tilly has interpreted cities as representing capitalism competing with states, which represent coercion. And the relations between cities and states never were stable and balanced in human history. At the first stage these relations were characterised by antagonism: state formation was a centralisation of power at the expense of other power centres, including cities. Later, their relations have been characterised by mutuality: cities became integral to the creation of "national economies" and their prosperity depended upon the states they were located in. But now we witness the return to antagonism: under conditions of contemporary globalisation, the old mutualities seem to be breaking down, as the most important opportunities for cities may not and often do not lie within their own state's territory.
• An Entrepreneurial City in Action: Hong Kong's Emerging Strategies in and for (Inter-)Urban Competition - There is widespread interest among policy-makers and observers alike in the entrepreneurial city. It is less obvious what exactly being an entrepreneurial city involves. To help resolve this conundrum our paper first provides a Schumpeterian analysis of the entrepreneurial city and then illustrates it with the Hong Kong case. We first offer a three-part definition of the entrepreneurial city in capitalist societies. This relates urban entrepreneurship to changing forms of competitiveness, changing strategies to promote inter-urban competitiveness in both the economic and extra-economic fields, and entrepreneurial discourses, narratives, and self-images. Schumpeter identified five ways in which entrepreneurs innovate in normal economic activities; our analysis identifies parallels in urban entrepreneurialism. We then critically consider how far such an analysis is valid given the differences between the types of actor involved and the objects of their innovation ­ answering affirmatively in both respects and suggesting the conditions in which cities can be described as strategic actors ith entrepreneurial ambitions. This theoretical analysis is further refined and justified from recent developments in Hong Kong and East Asia. Conventionally regarded as a paradigm case of laissez-faire and officially described in the decades before 1997 as practising 'positive non-intervention', Hong Kong actually has a long history of urban entrepreneurship based on public-private partnerships. But its strategies have been modified as the economic and political environments have changed. Our contribution is particularly concerned with the recent period, when Hong Kong's entrepreneurial city strategies have been developed against the ackground of an emerging cross-border regional space (Greater China) and its favourable insertion into the global circuits of capital. In this context we introduce the concept of 'glurbanization' as one form of the more general phenomenon of 'glocalization' and show how it can be used to illuminate current entrepreneurial city strategies in East Asia.
• From the observations to the construction of a urban dynamics simulation model: an inductive approach - Through this paper, we chose to present a modelling concept the aim of which is the simulation of the intra-urban location dynamics. This concept includes some characteristics which relate it to the synergetic models as well as to the micro-simulation ones. In the first part of this paper, we describe and examine the modelling concept to focus in a second part on a more detailed presentation of one aspect of the model concerning the measure of the attractiveness of the neighbourhoods of a town.
• "Bawdies" in the City: The Sexual Regulation of Urban Space - Bodies, like cities, are not easily contained. The boundaries that are socially constructed for the purpose of establishing order continually shift, reflecting a transitional process that produces both pleasure and anxiety, often simultaneously. This paper will examine the ways in which the tensions between such pleasure and anxiety are navigated among citizens in urban spaces. The case of the Toronto dominatrix, Terri-Jean Bedford, demonstrates the social response to disorderly bodies -- particularly female bodies -- that resist de-sexualization and normalization according to normative constructions of subjectivity within the dominant discourses of bodies and cities. As a review of the case and personal interviews with Bedford make clear, the resistance to illusions of order within the psychosocial dynamic that locates the corporeality of subjects in a particular spatial and temporal setting challenges notions of the implementation of bounded spaces and the unruly bodies that inhabit them.
• Space-Time Properties of Urban Life and Urban Structure: Discontinuities Distortions, and Distance - This paper reviews space-time properties of urban structure with regard to developments in transportation and communications. Space-adjusting technologies, in combination with the timing of land uses and activities, are shown to impart discontinuities in the topology of urban regional structure. Such discontinuities influence the formation of parallel, but different, activity patterns in the daily lives of representative urban subpopulations and contribute to continually changing density patterns of human occupance at different times of the day. Examples of these phenomena are illustrated for North American cities. The importance of being able to visualize rapid changes in these patterns is presented as an important challenge for applications in Geographic Information Science. The ability to identify these patterns has important practical significance regarding planning issues and has implications for the development of sound academic understanding of relationships between urban social and spatial structures.
• Urban Design, Telecommunication and Travel Forecasting Conference Keynote Address - When I was asked to come here to give this keynote speech, I asked: Why are we having a conference on urban design and telecommunication? The first question to answer is why urban design and telecommunication are in the same conference, so I will address that first. I will then ask what do we know, and the what do we know questions will be in very general terms, because later you are going to hear from the real experts, the people who have done most of the research. I will ask: What do we know about urban design, what do we know about telecommunication? Then I am going on to ask the question about large-scale implementation, because if anything is going to happen, things have to be implemented on a wider scale than we are seeing today. Finally I will talk about the larger context of economic and social issues.
• Daily Mobility And Adequacy Of The Urban Transportation Network A GIS Application - The subject of this paper is to define with precision which population groups are served by an urban transport network. The study takes into consideration the spatial and social aspects. Inequalities regarding the access to the network have been observed based on the distance to the centre and the social and professional statutes of the households.
• Has Cyberspace Made Actual Place Obsolete? - Rather than replacing the need for actual space in which to interact, online technology is evolving as a force that complements the places in which people work, study and socialize, according to Digital Places: Building Our City of Bits, a new publication from the Urban Land Institute.
• Informational City Limits: Mapping Cities in the Infostructure of the World Wide Web - For the past several years, scholars from various disciplines have been converging on a central task: calling forth the invisible global city. It now seems commonplace to think of a new urban community that connects world metropolises and somehow binds them together. Moreover, that global internetworking is facilitating this process is often unquestioned. The study in this paper attempts to describe the relationship of the structures of the World Wide Web to this global city. The aim is not only to determine whether hypertext structures support the perspective of a global city, but to better define the character of that city by exploring the infrastructure which supports it.
• Introduction to Urban Geography - Cities are centers of human economic activity--what John Rennie Short calls "crucibles of economic change". But the purpose of cities goes beyond economics, and cities are also centers of culture, of social power (and inequality), and of meaning. Therefore, despite covering just a fraction of the earth's surface and being home to only about half of humanity, cities serve as the metaphorical linchpins or keystones of human geographies.
• Community-Based Strategies for Change - Community-based change is fast becoming the key to America's future. More and more, local communities across the country are mobilizing their own resources in sustainable and creative ways to meet the needs of their members. From affordable housing and neighborhood enterprises to recreation and recycling, communities are finding that the best way to seek change is to organize.
• Why do rural-urban linkages matter? - The physical boundaries of urban built-up areas often do not coincide with their administrative boundaries. The areas surrounding urban centers generally have an important role in providing food for urban consumers, with proximity lowering the costs of transport and storage. It is difficult to make generalizations on the nature of peri-urban areas, which depends on the combination of a number of factors including the economic and infrastructural base of the urban center, the region and the nation; the historical, social and cultural characteristics of the area, and its ecological and geographical features. Peri-urban areas around one center are also not necessarily homogenous: high-and middle-income residential developments may dominate one section, while others may host industrial estates and others provide cheap accommodation to low-income migrants in informal settlements.
• Life in the Real-Time City - While in the past five years the Internet and World Wide Web have received a great deal of attention from the media and scholars alike, other telecommunications technologies have rapidly diffused in this period as well. Mobile telephones have been rapidly accepted throughout the urban world, particularly in countries with far lower levels of Internet use. While mobile telephones are sold as a technology that helps conquer constraints of location and geography, it is increasingly apparent that the time-management capabilities of this new tool are equally important. As a result, the widespread use of these devices is quickening the pace of urban life and at an aggregate level, resulting in a dramatic increase in the metabolism of urban systems. This quickening metabolism is directly tied to the widespread formation of new decentralized information networks facilitated by this new technology. As a result, new paradigms for understanding the city and city planning in a decentralized context are discussed.
• Visual Communication in Urban Planning and Urban Design - This Case Study documents the current status of visual communication in urban design and planning. Visual communication is examined through discussion of standalone and network media, specifically concentrating on visualisation on the World Wide Web (WWW).
  First, we examine the use of Solid and Geometric Modelling for visualising urban planning and urban design. This report documents and compares examples of the use of Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) and proprietary WWW based Virtual Reality modelling software. Examples include the modelling of Bath and Glasgow using both VRML 1.0 and 2.0. The use of Virtual Worlds and their role in visualising urban form within multi-user environments is reviewed. The use of Virtual Worlds is developed into a study of the possibilities and limitations of Virtual Internet Design Arena's (ViDA's), an initiative undertaken at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London. The use of Virtual Worlds and their development towards ViDA's is seen as one of the most important developments in visual communication for urban planning and urban design since the development plan.
  Secondly, the role of photorealistic media in the process of communicating plans is examined. The process of creating photorealistic media is documented, and examples of the Virtual Streetscape and Wired Whitehall Virtual Urban Interface System are provided. The conclusion is that, although the use of photo-realistic media on the WWW provides a way to visually communicate planning information, its use is limited. The merging of photorealistic media and solid geometric modelling in the creation of Augmented Reality is reviewed. Augmented Reality is seen to provide an important step forward in the ability quickly and easily to visualise urban planning and urban design information.
  Third, the role of visual communication of planning data through GIS is examined in terms of desktop, three dimensional, and Internet based GIS. The evolution to Internet GIS is seen as a critical component in the development of virtual cities that will allow urban planners and urban designers to visualise and model the complexity of the built environment in networked virtual reality.
  Finally, a viewpoint is put forward of the Virtual City, linking Internet GIS with photorealistic multi-user Virtual Worlds. At present there are constraints on how far virtual cities can be developed, but a view is provided on how these networked virtual worlds are developing to aid visual communication in urban planning and urban design.
• Urban Design in the Postmodern Context - Why is urban design becoming more important? When did the term "urban design" start to be commonly used and when did "urban design" as distinct from planning? Despite its popularity in educational and professional literature, urban design is still a misleading term, used by wide variety of groups in different circumstances. Emergence of urban design is no more. Actually a postmodern phenomenon. It is distinguished from urban planning about thirty years ago and became a very effective tool for professionals who manage the cities. In the postmodern reflex designing of cities in terms of its environmental quality and the integrity with their users' needs are the most common issues. Therefore there has been much debate recently about the future role of urban design in making better places. This paper will focus on three important circumstances. Firstly the rise of urban design will be described. Then the role of urban design will be discussed in the postmodern context. Secondly scope of the urban design, and the debate between urban design and urban planning will be discussed correspondence with postmodernism. Finally the future of urban design will be considered in light of current debates and themes on postmodern urbanism.
• Geography and the City of the future - For the disciplines of the social sciences concerned with information and communication techniques, the considerable emphasis put on these topics by contemporary debates opens a series of opportunities but also induces one to be most watchful. If it is admitted that on such subjects, geography borrows from many other social science disciplines by insisting upon space problematics, it is advisable to proceed to a synthesis of the various disciplinary approaches. The topic which concerns us here is that of the socio-spatial effects of the Information and Communication Techniques -ICT-. The confrontation of this transdisciplinary journey with urban geography will provide an analytic scope of the ICT effects present and expected in a given space. Two research themes run across this scope of analysis: the one related to the matter of the hold of technique over Society to which that related to the "communication society" belatedly adds itself.
• Office Sprawl: The Evolving Geography of Business
• Geography and the City of the Future - For the disciplines of the social sciences concerned with information and communication techniques, the considerable emphasis put on these topics by contemporary debates opens a series of opportunities but also induces one to be most watchful. If it is admitted that on such subjects, geography borrows from many other social science disciplines by insisting upon space problematics, it is advisable to proceed to a synthesis of the various disciplinary approaches.The topic which concerns us here is that of the socio-spatial effects of the Information and Communication Techniques -ICT-. The confrontation of this transdisciplinary journey with urban geography will provide an analytic scope of the ICT effects present and expected in a given space. Two research themes run across this scope of analysis: the one related to the matter of the hold of technique over Society to which that related to the "communication society" belatedly adds itself.
• The Settlement System Model - Space and culture interact and affect each other. Cultural values determine spatial organization which in turn displays cultural values (but not necessarily the organizing values) that are absorbed by its observers. The settlement system model accounts for this by breaking up the space within and around a settlement (a settlement is seen here as being only the main built living spaces of a community) into settings (areas that contain cultural actions) which can be studied using approaches designed explicitly for each setting (houses, fields, etc.). The information bearing aspects of space is the key behind understanding the importance of the settlement system model. Archaeologists have addressed this property of space primarily through studies of gardens, houses and occasionally urban centers, but the occupants of a settlement system move through many different types of settings through the day and absorb cultural information from all of them. These settings must, therefore, be adequately described and connected to each other. As the interconnections of settings within a settlement system are being identified, the limits of the system must be defined as well. In the process of defining these limits, the core areas of a settlement system will become apparent, typically they are the settlement itself, the houses that make up the settlement, and the fields that surround it.
• Rethinking Today's Cities: Designing Tomorrow's Urban Centers - Since the creation of the first cities some ten thousand years ago, urbanization has increased vertiginously and, in some of its larger manifestations such as the very large cities we call megacities--currently defined by the U.N. as having more than ten million inhabitants--it has become particularly important in the developing world. Even if there are ambiguities as to what exactly constitutes a city or an urban area, urbanization is a new and seemingly uncontrollable phenomenon on this planet. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, only some five percent of the world population lived in urban areas. Today, that figure is some forty percent and is projected to grow to sixty percent in the next twenty years. In the United States, those figures are even higher. Projecting into the year 2030, all of the world's population growth will be in urban areas. Over the next thirty years these areas will see an increase from 2.9 billion to 4.9 billion people, mostly concentrated in developing nations. The largest population growth will occur in Asia, but Africa will have the higher rate of growth. The number of cities with five million inhabitants will increase from forty-one to fifty-nine and the number of cities with ten million people will climb from nineteen to twenty-three.
• Suitability of Distributed Mobile Wireless Networking for Urban Traffic Congestion Mitigation - A suitability study is performed into the use of distributed mobile wireless networking for the purposes of urban traffic congestion mitigation. The technologies of global positioning system (GPS), wireless networking, and mobile ad-hoc networking (MANET) protocols are surveyed for potential usability and applicability in a peer-to-peer highway vehicle network. Analysis of traffic statistics for the Boston, MA metropolitan area reveal the parameters required to build an initial network. The estimated parameters are a two percent level of penetration (50,000 vehicles), two Megabit per second usable data bandwidth, one half mile average transmission range, two hundred dollars cost per device, and fifteen million dollar total system cost for five years of operation. Using a hop-count routing algorithm, the network would support collection of area-wide vehicle positions for automated highway traffic sampling and fleet tracking on congested roadways.
  Following this first stage system are presented two more application scenarios according to increasing levels of penetration and increased reliability of the network. The medium-term application is the provision of mobile Internet access to allow consumer and business services. The long-term application is the ability to perform automated transactions. Envisioned in this long-term scenario is the ability to do area-wide road pricing to reduce congestion levels and influence land-use decisions.
  Technology options and design choices for privacy protection are discussed including voluntary participation, incentivized participation, blackout zones, aggregation of data, non-identifiable data, and anonymous routing protocols. Centralized toll tables and transactions are shown to reduce privacy but increase convenience as opposed to distributed toll tables and in-vehicle transactions. Insitutional implemention through Federal ITS funding of a State-run public-private partnership is suggested to maximize mutual benefit. Given these options for handling the issues, the staging presented, and the flexibility, coverage, and application benefits of the system, the conclusion is that such a network would be suitable for mitigation of urban traffic congestion.
• Where are the Web Factories? : information technology and the future of urban environments - The Internet has been considered the great equalizer for business, allowing distant locals to compete with large metropolitan regions. Recent research points to a different geography, where domains and connectivity cluster predominantly in large urban areas. The question remains are new businesses of the Internet economy doing the same or avoiding metropolitan areas. This paper will examine the head and branch locations of the top forty e-business integration firms in the U.S. The analysis of the distribution of these locations will provide insight to what regions most benefit from the Internet Economy. Further the data should provide a useful comparison to metropolitan trends for domain and connectivity agglomeration.
• World City Network Formation in a Space of Flows - Globalization is, as Michael Storper has recently pointed out, inherently geographical in nature; it represents a rescaling of the locations of human activities. This is reflected in recent textbooks on globalization which are attempting to consolidate a decade of multifarious research on the topic. In these texts geography appears right up front as space-time compression, the mechanism which is presented as the enabling foundation of globalization. Globalization begins, therefore, as a shrinking geography but thereafter the geography tends to be conspicuous by its absence. There are discussions about 'uneven globalization' which point to the relative paucity of the impact of the new technologies in poorer countries but there is relatively little concern for the particular spatial structures underpinning globalization. The shrinking geography seems curiously devoid of new geographies. But can large-scale rescaling really leave old geographies intact and largely unaffected?
• Smart Communities - The World Foundation for Smart Communities is a nonprofit educational organization founded to promote the concept and facilitate the implementation of "smart communities" -- communities using information technology as a catalyst for transforming life and work to meet the challenge of the new millennium.
• Virtual Cities?! - Telematics and Spatial Development - The short title of the lecture in the conference programme "virtual city" may be vague, inexpressive or confusing for the audience. To confuse you a bit more I added a question mark. Just to complete confusion an exclamation mark should be useful. But you can see: there is doubt in a concept like the virtual city and the wish to work out a concept of has strong connections to daily life and the material cities we live in. What I like to talk about today is:
  • the invisibility of telematics in our urban environments and
  • the importance ­ or better lack of importance ­ of telematics in the official planning documents and procedures,
  • the development of the virtual and material city and its interweaving,
  • possible consequences for industrial, commercial and residential areas in our cities,
  • projects of German cities to promote telematic applications and
  • the need for municipal actions to build an integrated local information and communication technology policy as part of a modern urban development model.
• Role Of The City In The 21st Century - If you look at a city like New York, Tokyo or Hong Kong ... you see that the headquarters of an increasing number of firms are clustered together there. At first, that logic doesn't make sense in the context of a world increasingly connected digitally. However, what these firms need is ... to be located near a specialized network of financial, accounting, management consulting, design and other such firms. These kinds of support services form an incredibly dynamic sector. And that is where the city -- in the contemporary era -- recovers a production function that it lost in terms of large-scale manufacturing.
• Ground Zero - The Geographic Center of the Financial World - Lower Manhattan is ... the geographic center of the financial world. The geography of business in New York City has been radically altered since the terrorist attacks. Over 15 million square feet of prime office space has been lost representing approximately 5 percent of all office space in Manhattan. Businesses are currently evaluating their timetable for return to the financial district, if at all.
• Telecommunications, Infrastructure, and the Environment - The effect of information and telecommunications technologies on the performance and flexibility of other infrastructure (e.g., transportation, energy, water treatment, and delivery) will be evaluated in the context of prevailing environmental and infrastructure policy and legislation. We will assess how the use of information and telecommunications technology improves the flexibility and performance of infrastructure (including meeting environmental standards) compared to more traditional forms that do not make use of such technologies. After assessing the impact of information and telecommunications technology on infrastructure, we will attempt to identify ways that information and telecommunications technology tends to lessen or exaggerate infrastructure's influence on urban form.
• Urban Research Initiative - The economic future of our cities will be defined by their capacity to generate, process, and distribute information. With the emergence of the Internet, the diffusion of personal computers and the advent of telecommunications deregulation, cities face unprecedented requirements to compete as centers of economic activity, culture, and civic activity Urban Researchers must understand and explain the way in which information and telecommunications technologies are transforming the cities and metropolitan areas where people live and work. This project will establish a new conceptual framework in which to study and analyze these patterns of urban change.
• Spatial Dynamics Analysis - Spatial Dynamics Analysis is a systematic methodology for the examination of spatial trends of urban expansion. The analysis is applied on the city of Linz, Austria. It uses data of population change of communities in the case study area.
• Facing urban complexity: towards cognitive modelling. Part 1. Modelling as a cognitive mediator - Over the last twenty years, complexity issues have been a central theme of enquiry for the modelling field. Whereas contributing to both a critical revisiting of the existing methods and opening new ways of reasoning, the effectiveness (and sense) of modelling activity was rarely questioned. Acknowledgment of complexity however has been a fruitful spur new and more sophisticated methods in order to improve understanding and advance geographical sciences. However its contribution to tackle urban problems in everyday life has been rather poor and mainly limited to rhetorical claims about the potentialities of the new approach. We argue that although complexity has put the classical modelling activity in serious distress, it is disclosing new potentialities, which are still largely unnoticed. These are primarily related to what the authors has called the structural cognitive shift, which involves both the contents and role of modelling activity.
  This paper is a first part of a work aimed to illustrate the main features of this shift and discuss its main consequences on the modelling activity. We contend that a most relevant aspect of novelty lies in the new role of modelling as a cognitive mediator, i.e. as a kind of interface between the various components of a modelling process and the external environment to which a model application belongs.
• Transarchitectures: Visions of Digital Communities - As a vast global sprawl of spaces and activities, with rooms, homes, addresses, pathways, highways, and an eclectic mix of red-light districts, administrative zones, banking quarters, cafés, shops and malls, the net invites this comparison with urban space. But are such representations of the city on the net actually working as the city works? Or are they the digital equivalent of architectural models, idealized scapes which resemble the city, but share none of its real functions and activities? Given that the city's ability to juggle complex interactions of many different kinds, scales, and orders of activity - software, hardware, and wetware - has been one of its defining characteristics, it is not even clear that a purely digital zone could ever be considered a city in anything more than the most metaphorical of senses. What exactly would a soft city be? The phrase is always suggestive, but what is often its sweeping use tends to distract from what are actually very real and informative links between urban and virtual space.
• Smart Communities - In the United States, the Clinton Administration pursued a vigorous National Information Initiative, or NII, one of whose early goals was to link every school and every school child to the Internet by the year 2000. Many communities in the United States -- and indeed worldwide -- have undertaken similar initiatives. Stockholm, Seattle, and Sacramento, for instance, have constructed large-scale public-access networks that residents can use to obtain information about government activities, community events, and critical social services like disaster preparedness, child abuse prevention, and literacy education. The university town of Blacksburg, Virginia, has transformed itself into an electronic village, in which the majority of the town's businesses and residents are connected to the local data network. And cities like San Diego, as part of its "City of the Future" project, are building even more sophisticated electronic infrastructures that, one day soon, will allow a wide variety of local government, business, and institutional transactions.
• In Defense of Cities - Dan Gillmor, in his San Jose Mercury News column of last Saturday, makes the case that in light of the attack on New York City, "...the logic of decentralization has never been more clear." He notes that the Internet's decentralized architecture performed well during and after the attack. He goes on to call for a similar Internet-style decentralization of populations away from cities, predicting that the attacks should or will precipitate a migration away from cities into more decentralized patterns of living.
• The Future of the City - Looking at the Future of the City requires that we take account of where we have been, where we are, and where we want to be. There is nothing automatic or arbitrary about this process, unless we choose it to be so.
• RUT | Radical Urban Theory - Contributions to Radical Urban Theory, a Web-only journal, are welcome. I can't offer any payment (this is strictly a labor of love), but you can rest assured your work will get exposure, as Radical Urban Theory does receive a comfortable number of visitors.
• Life in the Real-Time City: Mobile Telephones and Urban Metabolism - While in the past five years the Internet and World Wide Web have received a great deal of attention from the media and scholars alike, other telecommunications technologies have rapidly diffused in this period as well. Mobile telephones have been rapidly accepted throughout the urban world, particularly in countries with far lower levels of Internet use. While mobile telephones are sold as a technology that helps conquer constraints of location and geography, it is increasingly apparent that the time-management capabilities of this new tool are equally important. As a result, the widespread use of these devices is quickening of the pace of urban life and at an aggregate level, resulting in a dramatic increase in the metabolism of urban systems. This quickening metabolism is directly tied to the widespread formation of new decentralized information networks facilitated by this new technology. As a result, new paradigms for understanding the city and city planning in a decentralized context are discussed.
• The City of News - City of News is a dynamically growing urban landscape of information. It is an immersive, interactive, web browser that takes advantage of people's strength remembering the surrounding three-dimensional spatial layout Starting from a chosen "home page", where home is finally associated with a physical space, our browser fetches and displays URLs so as to form skyscrapers and alleys of text and images through which the user can "fly". The City is organized in urban quarters (districts) that provide territorial regrouping of urban activities. Similarly to some major contemporary cities there is a financial district, an entertainment district, and a shopping district. In addition to these areas we have created other functional groupings by creating a mapping between modern newspaper layout and city planning. Hence the name "City of News" for this designwork. There are therefore sports, books, advertising, science, and opinion districts. One could think of these districts as urban quarters associated to the different conceptual areas of one of the many currently available search engines on the WWW.
• List of websites related to Urban Geography
• Wired / Unwired: The Urban Geography of Digital Networks - This dissertation examines the development of digital network infrastructure in the world's great cities at the turn of the 21st century. Drawing upon the concept of cities as information systems and techniques of communications geography, it analyzes how the physical components of digital networks were deployed in major urban areas during the 1990s. It finds that historical processes and pre-existing differences between places shaped the evolution of this infrastructure at multiple spatial scales; global, metropolitan, and neighborhood. As a result, rather than bringing about the "death of distance", digital network infrastructure actually reinforced many of the pre-existing differences between connected and disconnected places. With the telecom bust of 2000-2002, these differences were likely to persist for a decade or more.
  Yet just as the development of wired digital network infrastructure slowed, wireless technologies emerged as a more flexible, intuitive, and efficient form of connecting users to networks in everyday urban settings. As a result, an untethered model for digital networks emerged which combined the capacity and security of wired networks over long distances with the flexibility and mobility of wireless networks over short distances. This new hybrid infrastructure provided the technology needed to begin widespread experimentation with the creation of digitally mediated spaces, such as New York City's Bryant Park Wireless Network.
• Restructuring the City: Thoughts on Urban Patterns in the Information Society - The question is simple and profound. How will the flow of information restructure Nordic cities? If the question is simple, the path to an answer is complex. The structure of information is based on the interaction of flows rather than of places. Human action is connected to places as well as to the information that flows through them. Thus it is that cities and their relationships will inevitably be redefined in the information age. How will the flow of information restructure cities such as Oslo and Stockholm, Helsinki and Copenhagen? We will the flow of information restructure small cities such as Haugesund and Joensuu? How will information affect the rural areas, crossroads and hamlets of the Nordic nations, where so many people live.
  The emerging knowledge economy raises intriguing questions about the future of the Nordic cities, poses challenges and opportunities to large cities and small, to the villages and rural places between them. Considering answers to the broad question requires a consideration of information, information technology, knowledge management, and information science as well as architecture, urban planning, urbanology, sociology, public policy planning, political science, education policy, pedagogical methodology and nearly every other theoretical discipline and practical application field that helps us to determine how we live and work.
• Montreal: The Future of the Past - Historians, genealogists, geographers, and demographers have experimented in a variety of ways with GISs without, up to now, paying much attention to scale, optimal accuracy, or system development. A research network focused on Montreal's heritage is looking to lift the veils through a GEOIDE network project aimed at sharing geodatabases in historical dynamics referred to as Montréal, l'avenir du passé (MAP). The result: geomatics is now involved in historical research!
  A cohort comprising university professors, doctoral students, and partners that include planning authorities, museums, libraries and research centers is working to develop a geographic information system that is accurate enough to locate buildings, user-friendly enough to enable use by beginners, and powerful enough to stimulate experts.
• World City Network Formation in a Space of Flows - Globalization is, as Michael Storper has recently pointed out, inherently geographical in nature; it represents a rescaling of the locations of human activities. This is reflected in recent textbooks on globalization which are attempting to consolidate a decade of multifarious research on the topic. In these texts geography appears right up front as space-time compression, the mechanism which is presented as the enabling foundation of globalization. Globalization begins, therefore, as a shrinking geography but thereafter the geography tends to be conspicuous by its absence. There are discussions about 'uneven globalization' which point to the relative paucity of the impact of the new technologies in poorer countries but there is relatively little concern for the particular spatial structures underpinning globalization. The shrinking geography seems curiously devoid of new geographies. But can large-scale rescaling really leave old geographies in tact and largely unaffected?
  The place where we might expect to find discussion of new geographies under conditions of globalization is where erosion of state powers are discussed. However states are typically contrasted with transnational corporations and their institutional advantages and disadvantages compared. Such comparisons continue to take as their starting point the world divided into sovereign states; the spatial mosaic of state territories is the taken-for- granted geographical framework for study. Such embedded statism undermines our abilities to fully appreciate that spatial rescaling involves upheavals in spatial organisation of human activities (Taylor, 1997a). It is not that states are disappearing or even necessarily becoming less important, rather the point is that we can no longer assume that states are going to continue to be the prime geographical scale where command and power, and where identity and loyalty, routinely operate. Diverting our attention from states as institutions to the role of states as key providers of the spatial organisation of the modern world enables us to ask questions about alternative geographies of organisation; instead of institutional comparison to corporations we can make geographical comparisons with world cities.
  This project will delineate the world city network as a new spatial organisation. Although relatively neglected in the general globalization literature, world city research has developed to provide a concrete face to globalization, to emphasise where and how globalization takes place in contrast to what Short and Kimhave recently dubbed the 'stratospheric level' of abstraction which is so commonly found in writings on this topic. This project on networks is necessary, however, because the world city literature itself neglects inter-city relations. For a complex mix of reasons, both theoretical and empirical, which will be explained in the next section, world city researchers have focused upon case studies of particular cities and comparative studies of limited numbers of cities at the expense of studying the network of world cities as a whole. Hence, for something as basic as the hierarchy of world cities, researchers have to fall back on the speculations of Friedmann first enunciated before globalization was an issue and based upon very limited empirical evidence. Inter-city relations are a massive lacuna in world city research: this research project aims to produce the first comprehensive and quantitatively rigorous description and analysis of the contemporary world city network.
• Mapping the evolution of 'food deserts' in a Canadian city: Supermarket accessibility in London, Ontario, 1961-2005 - A growing body of research suggests that the suburbanization of food retailers in North America and the United Kingdom in recent decades has contributed to the emergence of urban 'food deserts', or disadvantaged areas of cities with relatively poor access to healthy and affordable food. This paper explores the evolution of food deserts in a mid-sized Canadian city (London, Ontario) by using a geographic information system (GIS) to map the precise locations of supermarkets in 1961 and 2005; multiple techniques of network analysis were used to assess changing levels of supermarket access in relation to neighbourhood location, socioeconomic characteristics, and access to public transit.
  The findings indicate that residents of inner-city neighbourhoods of low socioeconomic status have the poorest access to supermarkets. Furthermore, spatial inequalities in access to supermarkets have increased over time, particularly in the inner-city neighbourhoods of Central and East London, where distinct urban food deserts now exist.
  Contrary to recent findings in larger Canadian cities, we conclude that urban food deserts exist in London, Ontario. Policies aimed at improving public health must also recognize the spatial, as well as socioeconomic, inequities with respect to access to healthy and affordable food. Additional research is necessary to better understand how supermarket access influences dietary behaviours and related health outcomes. The complete article is available as a provisional PDF.

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