Technological Change and Cities

The United States is in the midst of a technological revolution, driven in large part by rapid advances in microelectronics. There has been much speculation about the impacts of the “information superhighway” on society as a whole, but surprisingly little is known about the potential effects of this technology revolution on the spatial distribution of jobs and people either broadly or in urban conditions specifically. This paper reviews the literature and research assessing the impact of technology on both intraand intermetropolitan change. Based in part on the review of the literature and the findings from the Office of Technology Assessment report, The Technological Reshaping of Metropolitan America, the final section speculates how this technology revolution will affect cities and metropolitan areas. The United States is in the midst of a technological revolution, driven in large part by rapid advances in microelectronics. Digital electronic technologies permit information in a myriad of forms to be generated, routed, and transmitted anywhere cheaply, nearly instantaneously, and at high volumes. Although urban scholars speculate about the impacts of the “information superhighway,” “digital society,” and emerging “cyberspace” on society as a whole, surprisingly little is known about the potentially broad effects of this revolution on the spatial distribution of jobs and people or on urban conditions specifically. This revolution is important to cities because many scholars have argued that it is comparable in scope to the revolution in transportation technology that dramatically influenced settlement patterns in the early part of this century. Today, economic activities are increasingly shaped by continuous and real-time interactions facilitated by information technologies (computing and telecommunications technology). Because these interactions differ so markedly from past interactions, which were more burdened by space and time constraints, their impact on industries and jobs has the potential to significantly reshape America’s metropolitan areas, leading to growth for some places and decline for others. However, views differ about which places will benefit and which will lose. Some students of economic geography suggest that the basic postulate of the information age is that information technology (IT) is eliminating the effects of distance, and that this, in turn, will have profound implications on the spatial organization of society. As a result, they argue that this new technology system will create an even more spatially dispersed and footloose economy, which in turn will cause metropolitan areas to be larger, more