Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

At current growth rates, the number of wireless subscribers will surpass that of fixed telephones in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. This fundamental shift in telecommunications has led many to believe that wireless technologies will break the ‘tyranny of geography’, help close the digital divide between core and periphery locations, and allow firms to be more footloose. This paper will examine the spatial distribution of wireless infrastructure in the United States to determine if the core–periphery relationship of cities is altered by wireless technologies. To do so the analysis will compare wireless infrastructure with Internet infrastructure and telephone switch infrastructure with a focus on data infrastructure in all three categories. The infrastructure datasets will be then compared with population distributions to determine their impacts on a spatial digital divide. The results of the study will provide a snapshot of the geography of wireless technologies, a comparison with other terrestrial communications, and insight into the policy of infrastructure delivery.

There has been much hype and speculation in the media and in academe on the vitality and future of the ‘Internet economy’. In this paper the author uses case studies from Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States to assess the strengths and weaknesses of online grocery retailers, from national chain stores pursuing a ‘bricks and clicks' strategy to ‘pure-play’ startups. He argues that delivering groceries via the Internet to customer doorsteps requires ways of solving space and time that are markedly different from previous trends in food retail logistics. He holds that solving problems of space management creates problems in the management of time and vice versa. In particular, ‘e-tailers’ struggle with fulfilment costs and logistics, and have attempted to manage customers' time and locations to reduce these costs. Store-based operations may be best suited for short-term profitability (or loss minimisation), whereas warehouse-based fulfilment may hold future promise of greater efficiency and flexibility. The author suggests that online organic home delivery may be the most successful type of online food retailer, for its size, given greater customer commitment and problems with store-based supply of organic food.

Despite globalization and alleged technological convergence, there remains great variation in the form, manner, and speed of technological adoption and adaptation across societies. In this paper I examine conceptual problems of the information society by considering the differential impacts of technology on production and consumption, and analyzing how sociospatial factors, such as urban form, consumer preference, and cultural attributes shape the patterns of technological adoption in the information age. Examples are drawn from the United States and Japan, to showcase distinctive trajectories of technological adoption by their respective consumers. In particular, practices in Japan's retail sector in participating E-commerce, and the present popularity of wireless web via cellular telephone access are examined to understand better the process of technological progress and consumption.

For those who have online access, the Internet significantly reduces the cost and time of transferring information over distance. This paper explores the potential of the Internet to improve people's employment opportunities by increasing their access to job information beyond that provided via their grounded social networks. Information circulating through grounded social networks is biased socially and geographically toward the life experiences of network members. The tendency for those members to have similar life experiences dampens the variability in the information exchanged in such networks. What is the potential for the Internet to expand people's access to information about jobs and employers' information about workers? We report on a pilot study undertaken in Worcester, Massachusetts, that examined employers' use of Internet recruiting for employees. The results of this qualitative study indicate that these employers use the Internet strategically to enhance the volume of applications when the labor market is tight and to segment the applicant pool when the market loosens and the number of resumes is overwhelming. As a result, we conclude that many grounded social relations that have been integral to the hiring process are resilient to the Internet; pre-Internet geographies shape Internet geographies, and grounded social relations continue to define access to information about job opportunities even online.

Online gambling offers valuable insights into the relationship between real and virtual places. Gambling in most countries is highly regulated, with its geography reflecting the licensing of gambling to specific activities and locations. The ability to use the Internet challenges the legal foundation for gambling by offering access in an efficient and private way from distant locations. The heaviest concentration of gambling websites is found in North America and the Caribbean, with the leading locations for gambling-domain-name registrations being the United States, Canada, Antigua and Barbuda, Costa Rica, the United Kingdom, and St Kitts and Nevis. In this paper I explore the location and operation of Internet-gambling websites, with emphasis on the legal and economic geography of this activity.

This paper develops a case study of the Internet adult industry in order to study the ways in which electronic commerce interacts with geography. Digital products, low barriers to entry, cost differentials, and sensitivity to regulation have created a pervasive and complex geography of models, webmasters, and consumers around the globe. With a series of specially developed datasets on the location of content production, websites, and hosting it is shown that the online adult industry offers people and places outside major metropolitan areas opportunities to become active purveyors of this type of electronic commerce. The roles of these actors, however, are not simply determined by a spaceless logic of cyber-interaction but by histories and economies of the physical places they inhabit. In short, the ‘space of flows’ cannot be understood without reference to the ‘space of places’ to which it connects. This geography also provides a valuable counterpoint to mainstream electronic commerce and highlights the ability of socially marginal and underground interests to use the Internet to form and connect in global networks.

This paper presents an analysis of the degree to which the population of Britain has become more or less geographically polarised as compared with 1991 and earlier censuses. We use the Key Statistics for local authorities from the 2001 Census, released on 13 February 2003 by the census authorities. All of the variables from the 26 Key Statistics tables which can be compared over time with the 1991 Census are examined. The analysis is then extended for a subset of variables that were similarly measured in 1971 and 1981. We conclude that for key aspects of life in Britain, as recorded by the censuses, the nation has continued in the 1990s to divide socially geographically, often at a faster rate than was occurring in the 1980s or 1970s. Where there appears to have been a reduction in polarisation it tends to have been for those aspects of life which are now poorly measured by the census. The paper concludes with speculation about the possible reasons for the continued division of the country into areas now more easily than ever typified as being old and young, settled and migrant, black and white, or rich and poor. Finally the potential for the continued sociospatial polarisation of Britain is discussed. The paper begins with a fictional vignette.

This paper addresses the structural change in a local urban housing market within a submarket framework. There is a voluminous literature examining the economic structure and operation of urban housing submarkets, with much of the associated empirical work based on static cross-sectional studies. Analysis of the temporal dynamics of local markets has tended to be perfunctory. As such, our understanding of structural change over time remains underdeveloped. In this paper we construct repeat-sale indices at the urban submarket level and deploy cointegration analysis to examine the stability of spatially defined housing submarkets within Glasgow between 1984 and 1997. Specifically, we consider whether price differences between submarkets have been eroded by a process of arbitrage operating through supply-side responses and/or migration flows. The empirical analysis shows that a stable system of housing submarkets persists throughout the study period.