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POSITION STATEMENT
I am interested in the new inequalities emerging in the post-industrial city as a result of the ongoing spatial re-organization of activities taking place in response to the spread of information and communication technologies. Commerce, manufacturing, office work, education and recreation in urban areas are increasingly supported and enabled by the evolving synergies among information, communication, and transportation technologies and networks. There is strong evidence that as conditions of access to work, services, shopping, etc. change in urban areas of the USA, the location of activities also changes. I am particularly interested in the direct and indirect implications of the rapid global spread of e-commerce, and the potential for jobs loss (or gain) in low-income urban communities. Clearly the issue of how e-commerce �touches ground� has strong spatial dimensions, defined around the changing role of distance in the physical world.
Finding out what the aggregate impact of e-commerce may be on the land use structure (in particular, retail structure) of urban areas, especially regarding the retail employment structure of vulnerable neighborhoods, requires data and methods not readily available. It appears that the issue must be investigated at both the macro- and micro-levels, since studies of job displacement alone could not possibly isolate the role of e-commerce from a host of other factors. Micro-level data are needed on both consumer and firm decisions, in particular regarding the trade-offs made between physical and virtual access for each of the different sub-tasks involved in either purchasing a product or making it available to the consumer. Once such data have been collected, simulation and/or optimization models need to be developed to work out the aggregate spatial implications of these partial and individual-level choices. Only then can the land-use issues be tackled. Clearly GISs will be used at that stage but some of the other software required (e.g., to model the hybrid physical / virtual spaces within which individual decisions are made) may need to be developed from scratch.
The �geography of the information society�, the broader context of my research, is a new area and �best practice� examples are still relatively few. A recent book edited by D. Janelle and D.C. Hodge (resulting from earlier NCGIA activities) contains a number of excellent papers, though few actually report on �practice�. Others have carried out empirical research on telecommuting and its implications for transportation for several years now. An increasing number of interdisciplinary workshops examine related issues. Interest in this area appears to be growing rapidly as we get deeper into the information age, and CSISS could have a major role to play in focusing social science research on issues of space, place and the information society.
Reference
D. J. Janelle and D.C. Hodge (2000) Information, place, and cyberspace: issues in accessibility. Spinger: Berlin.
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