Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

Despite stereotypes that cyberspace spells the ‘end of geography’ and promises universal, democratic entree to the electronic highways of the world economy, access to the Internet is highly unevenly distributed both socially and spatially. In this paper I examine the geopolitics of Internet access and its implications. I open by situating electronic communications within contemporary social theory, emphasizing cyberspace as a contested terrain of competing discourses. Second, international discrepancies in access are illustrated, dramatizing the ways in which the Internet enhances the advantages enjoyed by a global elite consisting largely of white, male professionals. Third, I turn to discrepancies in Internet access within the United States, including class, racial, gender, and spatial disparities. I seek to demonstrate that geography still matters; the Internet creates and reflects a distinct spatial structure interlaced with, and often reinforcing, existing relations of wealth and power.

In this paper I will examine individual access to information on the Internet through a cognitive-behavioral perspective. I argue that the objective structure of information resources in cyberspace is not helpful for understanding the experience of individual accessibility in cyberspace. Instead, cyberspatial cognition is crucial in constituting the effective cyber-environment and shaping human cyberspatial behavior. I propose a behavioral model of cyber-accessibility and examine how notions underlying conventional accessibility measures such as impedance and opportunity set can be extended for measuring individual cyber-accessibility. I argue that theories about spatial learning, cognitive mapping, and decision-making behavior are helpful for understanding individual cyberspatial behavior. This suggests that behavioral theories and models may provide a theoretical foundation for cybergeography.

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 decision-making 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.

Cyberspace is often portrayed as a seamless expanse, with browsers of the web rarely made aware of the geographic location of a page. For all its professed aspatiality, however, analysis of the organization of cyberspace offers continuing proof of the presence of geographically determined influences. Beyond the core domain names suffixes (.com, .gov, .net, and .org) domains usually carry geographic identification (.uk, .au, .jp, and so on). As desirable domains are registered, organizations and individuals seek web locations in new areas to claim high visibility on the Internet. After examining the regulation, legal jurisdiction, and geography of domain name registration, in this paper I analyze the experience of six countries that have commercially attractive top-level domain names: American Samoa, Moldova, Nuie, Tonga, Turkmenistan, and Tuvalu. These domains illustrate how geographic issues can emerge in the practice of electronic interaction and identity.

In this paper we examine what appear to be the ‘rules’ of geometrical composition underlying the design of plan in eight well-known houses by Peter Eisenman. The effect of these compositional rules, tied to the design process of ‘decomposition’ described by Eisenman, in the generation of spatial layout in these houses is then analysed by using space syntax analysis. In particular, the effects of this design process in structuring the relationships, if any, between everyday living and ‘private’ household functions, that is, bedrooms, and the interface between inhabitants and visitors are examined. This is done in order to understand better the relationship, if any, between Eisenman's stated aims in his own theoretical writings about the design of these houses and the architectural object itself.

In the present study we address the question of how persons or families occupy specific locations according to an attractiveness function between persons and flats. We suggest a mathematically formulated model in order to find optimal distributions of persons over flats. The model maximizes the global attractiveness of the ensemble and accounts for various conflicting situations. Its solutions show that, depending on initial conditions, both optimal as well as suboptimal configurations can be reached. An interpretation of the approach in terms of mental maps is offered.

An isovist, or viewshed, is the area in a spatial environment directly visible from a location within the space. Here we show how a set of isovists can be used to generate a graph of mutual visibility between locations. We demonstrate that this graph can also be constructed without reference to isovists and that we are in fact invoking the more general concept of a visibility graph. Using the visibility graph, we can extend both isovist and current graph-based analyses of architectural space to form a new methodology for the investigation of configurational relationships. The measurement of local and global characteristics of the graph, for each vertex or for the system as a whole, is of interest from an architectural perspective, allowing us to describe a configuration with reference to accessibility and visibility, to compare from location to location within a system, and to compare systems with different geometries. Finally we show that visibility graph properties may be closely related to manifestations of spatial perception, such as way-finding, movement, and space use.

The space that can be seen from any vantage point is called an isovist and the set of such spaces forms a visual field whose extent defines different isovist fields based on different geometric properties. I suggest that our perceptions of moving within such fields might be related to these geometric properties. I begin with a formal representation of isovists and their fields, introducing simple geometric measures based on distance, area, perimeter, compactness, and convexity. I suggest a feasible computational scheme for measuring such fields, and illustrate how we can visualize their spatial and statistical properties by using maps and frequency distributions. I argue that the classification of fields based on these measures must be a prerequisite to the proper analysis of architectural and urban morphologies. To this end, I present two hypothetical examples based on simple geometries and three real examples based on London's Tate Gallery, Regent Street, and the centre of the English town of Wolverhampton. Although such morphologies can often be understood in terms of basic geometrical elements such as corridors, streets, rooms, and squares, isovist analysis suggests that visual fields have their own form which results from the interaction of geometry and movement. To illustrate how such analysis can be used, I outline methods of partitioning space, covering it with a small number of relatively independent isovists, and perceiving space by recording properties of the isovist fields associated with paths through that space.

A special kind of shape algebra is defined for concurrent computations with shapes and their boundaries, together with related shape grammars. Some new types of shape grammar are defined and classified.