The Internet and the rise of the new network cities, 1969-1999

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 decisionmaking 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.