A revolution in communications is underway in this country. It involves the widespread acceptance and use of a variety of communications technologies, including FAX, e-mail, computer bulletin boards, cellular telephones, and voice mail, but most especially it features the explosive growth of the Internet's World Wide Web. Vice President Al Gore has promised that the revolution "forever will change the way we live, learn, work and communicate" (Diamond 1996). The purpose of this paper is to see what effects the communication revolution may have on some of our older metropolitan areas.
The paper begins with historical background on the development of
older metropolitan areas. Why do they exist? How may changes in spatial
structure that have occurred in the second half of the twentieth century be understood
using the concept of "friction of distance"? We then examine impacts of the
communication revolution on the spatial behavior of two important players in
metropolitan areas: households and businesses. The paper concludes with some
observations about two areas of concern: the increased spatial separation of
haves and have-nots, and the greater isolation of people from one another. Both
are possible consequences of the communication revolution.
Historical Development and the Friction of Distance
There are advantages to having people and various activities located in proximity to one another. Government services including police and fire protection, water and sewer service, etc., may be provided relatively economically because of the economies of scale that derive from larger numbers. Infrastructure, including perhaps an international airport, port facilities, highways, museums, concert halls, and a major sports stadium can be shared by many. Businesses benefit from proximity to bankers, lawyers, courts, accountants, repair persons, suppliers, customers, workers, and competitors. Businesses have access to information and the stimulation of interaction with others. Metropolitan areas have schools and universities, specialized medical care, stores and shops, good restaurants, opera and theater companies, and much more all located nearby.
A concept called "friction of distance" helps us to interpret what is meant by "proximity" at a given time. Distance is often something to be overcome. To interact over distance costs time and money. In the first half of this century movement within metropolitan areas often involved the use of public transportation. By today's standards metropolitan areas were relatively compact, extending outward in a star-shaped outline that followed streetcar lines and commuter railways (Adams 1970). Much of the metropolitan population and most of the jobs and services were found in the "central city," the political entity that gave its name to the area which also included suburbs.
Widespread automobile ownership, cheap gasoline, and the construction of Interstate highways in the second half of the twentieth century helped to drastically change the friction of distance. The region that functions as a metropolitan area on a daily basis now stretches beyond not only the central city but also many of its suburbs, and reaches far into the surrounding countryside. Distance may be measured in time rather than geographic distance, and what functions as a metropolitan area may have a radius of one-and-a-half hours or more. The consequence of reduced friction of distance has been termed "space-time convergence" (Janelle 1995).
Outlying areas may no longer even look like a city. Instead there is the now-familiar sprawl of farms, shopping centers, strips of businesses along highways, tract housing, garden apartments, mobile home parks, luxury housing developments, office parks, strip mines, trucking firms, small towns, edge cities, and recreational areas. People have fled the perceived crime, pollution, poor schools, and higher taxes of the old central city. In outlying areas residents have demonstrated a desire to live near others similar to themselves. They prefer the control afforded by a private automobile, the safety of a planned shopping center, the privacy of a backyard, and the comfort of cocooning at home with a home entertainment center. Public transportation and public housing have been resisted (Schneider 1992).
What of the virtual city that may lie ahead? One thing is for sure, the friction of distance will be further reduced by the communication revolution. Microsoft's Bill Gates makes the following observations.
...the new network was dubbed the "information superhighway."
The highway metaphor isn't quite right, though. The phrase
suggests landscape and geography, a distance between
points, and embodies the implication that you have to
travel to get from one place to another. In fact, one of
the most remarkable aspects of this new communications
technology is that it will eliminate distance. It won't
matter if someone you're contacting is in the next room
or on another continent, because this highly mediated
network will be unconstrained by miles and kilometers
(Gates 1995, 60).
If history is a guide, every time that the friction of distance changes appreciably
there are significant changes in the spatial structure of our metropolitan areas.
Perhaps by considering implications of the communication revolution for
households and businesses we can anticipate some of the likely results.
Home is an important location for much household activity. A survey by the Metropolitan Washington COG (Levinson and Kumar 1995) showed that in a 24-hour period, an average of 14.75 hours would be spent at home. Home is also the origin or destination for the vast majority of travel. The national personal transportation survey (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1995b, 1031) indicates trip purposes by annual vehicle miles traveled: 1) work (5,853 miles), 2) social and recreational (4,060 miles), 3) family or personal business (3,014 miles), and shopping (1,743 miles). The communication revolution may make all four types of travel less necessary and increase the time spent at home. This could free many households in a metropolitan area from the need for close physical proximity to work places, social and recreational activities, family or personal business, and shopping.
It is increasingly possible to telecommute to work from home using communication technologies such as e-mail, computer bulletin boards, home pages on the World Wide Web, FAX, and voice mail. The American Information User Survey found that full- and part-time telecommuters work an average of 39.6 hours a month at home, and that there were 9.1 million of these telecommuters in 1994, a number that was up 20 percent over a year earlier (Resisting the call to telecommute 1995).
Some social and recreational needs are being met in the home by new technologies. It is possible for games and other simulations to involve participants who are widely dispersed geographically, yet fully able to interact electronically via the Internet. One popular role-playing game is known as a multi-user dungeon; games can go on for many hours or even days. Someday players may be able to experience a particularly realistic form of virtual reality while playing from their home. Virtual communities whose members may be located worldwide have arisen around discussions of narrowly-defined interests (Rheingold 1993; Fernback and Thompson 1995). These virtual communities are held together using real-time chat rooms provided by commercial on-line services, Internet Relay Chat, e-mail, and postings on the World Wide Web. A few geographically-based communities have also been wired and cabled together to allow for access to the Internet; they include Blacksburg, VA, Telluride, CO, Glasgow, KY, Taos, NM, and Palo Alto, CA (Diamond 1996).
Much family and personal business can already be conducted from home. Home banking, bill paying, and/or investing are supported by Bank of Boston, Chase Manhattan, Crestar, First Interstate Bank, First National Bank of Chicago, Home Savings of America, Mellon Bank, Smith Barney, American Express, and others (Banks close, PCs open 1995).
Home schooling may especially benefit from the availability of high-quality educational exercises, data bases, image libraries, and other materials that are increasingly appearing on the World Wide Web (Crum 1996). Distance learning, where courses are offered by accredited colleges and other educational institutions, may become more popular in the future. There are two variations. In one, called synchronous instruction, students and instructors meet at the same time, probably using teleconferencing. The other, termed asynchronous instruction, relies more on computer e-mail and educational materials on the World Wide Web.
Finally, as 800 numbers combined with catalogs and home
shopping television already do, the World Wide Web may soon provide
shoppers with a non-physical space for retailing. Issues involving the
secure transfer of funds and credit card information over the Internet
should be resolved in the future, making virtual shopping more attractive.
On-line catalogs, searches using keywords and other specifications, and
attractive graphics will appeal to many including some who presently shop
from catalogs. In Blacksburg, VA, 150 businesses already have materials
available in that town's on-line mall (Diamond 1996).
The Communication Revolution and Businesses
In the second half of the twentieth century the economies of older metropolitan areas have been changing. No longer is manufacturing as important as it once was. Now, increasingly, service jobs constitute the bulk of a metropolitan area's economic base. Much of the post- industrial economy is information intensive, and its locational requirements may be profoundly affected by the communication revolution. Perhaps the communication revolution is already partially responsible for a national downtown vacancy rate of 16.7 percent. In Baltimore it is 25 percent (Hampson 1995). In New York the Financial District reportedly "is losing its main source of income, the business of business" (Stern 1995).
Many businesses will continue to have offices at prestigious addresses in the central business districts. There, top managers and professionals will continue to hold face-to-face meetings with one another, their suppliers and customers. They can keep an eye on the competition and learn of new developments. Even there, through teleconferencing, they will be able to include their counterparts from around the world in conversations and discussions.
However, the communication revolution has made it possible for these downtown headquarters offices to be smaller. It is less expensive for "back-office" jobs to be relocated in sites some distance away. The back-office employees do the more routine jobs such as billing, personnel record-keeping, data base management, etc. They can stay in contact with the more expensive and visible downtown offices using FAX, e-mail, voice mail, teleconferencing, and sometimes the delivery of mail by courier. Citicorp has moved some of its more routine work to South Dakota. Sears vacated its landmark headquarters in downtown Chicago and moved to the suburbs (Hampson 1995).
There is another reason why less office space is needed. Employees who telecommute from home and only come into the office occasionally do not have to have permanent space assigned to them. Instead, they can be "hoteled," which means that they occupy any space that happens to be vacant at a given time.
Much retailing, as noted earlier, may one day be able to move onto the World Wide Web to advertise, provide information to potential customers, take orders, and provide customer service. Already many people shop using 800 numbers without ever leaving home. Virtual retailing does not require expensive sales floors that are located in highly visible and accessible locations. Prices could also be reduced if an increased volume of sales resulted in economies of scale.
A great many services--everything from computer programming
to financial planning to publishing--should find that
locational requirements have
been made more "footloose" by the communication revolution.
The central
cities of older metropolitan areas will not be the choice for some.
The Future
The communication revolution is still in its early stages. Although there are an estimated 34 million home computers in this country, fewer than 19 percent of Americans have modem- equipped computers (Rosenthal 1995), and only 6 percent of the general public has either Internet or on-line access (Purdum 1996). But the numbers are increasing rapidly. For example, a year- end survey by Electronic Information Report in 1995 found that subscriptions to U.S. on-line services surged 64.4% from a year earlier to nearly 15 million "as consumers rushed to sign on to the Internet" (Public getting on-line 1996).
A recent book has what may prove to be a prophetic title: City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn (Mitchell 1995). "Bits" can refer to two things. On the one hand they are the binary ones and zeros that are fundamental to much of the technology used in the communication revolution. On the other hand, "bits" could just as easily refer to people and activities that are functioning like a metropolitan area but, freed from the constraints of location, are scattered across the surface of the earth. Mitchell sees a future in which "[c]omputer networks become as fundamental to urban life as street systems. Memory and screen space become valuable, sought- after sorts of real estate. Much of the economic, social, political, and cultural action shifts into cyberspace." (Mitchell 1995, 107) Will metropolitan areas in the future become increasingly "virtual," in other words exist in essence or effect though not in actual fact? (American heritage dictionary 1992)
In such a world one concern is that people will not interact as frequently with others on a face-to-face basis, and that when they do interact it will be with people who are very much like themselves. Mitchell cautions, "as networks and information appliances deliver expanding ranges of services, there will be fewer occasions to go out." (Mitchell 1995, 100)
Will there be have-nots who are left behind in both a technological and a geographic sense? "The poor could be left with the obsolete and decaying urban remnants and isolated rural settlements that the more privileged no longer need." (Mitchell 1995, 171) A 1994 survey showed that 36 percent of white children had access to a computer at home, but the figure was only 13 percent for African-American children and 12 percent for Hispanic children. Further, among those Americans who were 18 years old and over and had family incomes of $75,000 or more, 62 percent had a computer in the household (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1995a). A 1994 survey by American Demographics magazine showed that the average income of households with access to the Internet was $67,000, placing them in the wealthiest one-fifth (Samuelson 1995). More encouraging are efforts being made to make the communications revolution available to a wide spectrum of the population through public libraries and schools.
Whatever the future of older metropolitan areas in this country, it is likely that they will be profoundly affected by the communication revolution that is only now beginning.
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