Information Technology and Urban Form: Challenges to Smart Growth

Abstract

This article discusses how information and communications technology (ICT), construed either as evolutionary or revolutionary, permeates two broad urban research traditions of metropolitan change. It reviews research findings from these two research traditions concerning metropolitan population and employment redistribution. It suggests that synergies between ICT and our car, truck, and airplane society may be a thrust behind well-established urban decentralization and deconcentration trends. Furthermore, a review of research on ICT-intensive firms, assumed to be the “glue” of urban agglomerations, reveals that metropolitan dispersion and regional deconcentration are also occurring in this sector. Although both centrifugal and centripetal forces are shaping the form of the information age metropolis, rather than central city renaissance or absolute urban dissolution, the resulting spatially distributed network pattern is polycentric and evolving into a regional constellation of ICT agglomerations interconnected via high-speed transportation and digital networks. The increasingly spread-out metropolitan form embodies the time-sensitive logic of the information age. However, such logic poses serious challenges to smart growth’s metropolitan agenda.