Accessibility of cities in the digital economy

► A new digital city accessibility concept based on a potential accessibility measure. ► The results indicate a consistent golden diamond of digital accessibility in Europe. ► Outside this digital core, cities have the opportunity to perform new hub roles. This paper introduces a new measure to appr...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cities 2013-02, Vol.30, p.59-67
Main Authors: Tranos, Emmanouil, Reggiani, Aura, Nijkamp, Peter
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Access to information
Business networks
Centre-periphery relations
Digital accessibility
Digital technology
Economic geography
Europe
Impedance functions
Information and communication technologies
Internet
Internet geography
Potential accessibility
Urban economics
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:► A new digital city accessibility concept based on a potential accessibility measure. ► The results indicate a consistent golden diamond of digital accessibility in Europe. ► Outside this digital core, cities have the opportunity to perform new hub roles. This paper introduces a new measure to approach the accessibility of places in the frame of the digital economy. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and the Internet are not equally spread around places and this heterogeneity affects spatial configuration. Despite the wide societal changes due to ICTs and the extensive interest in accessibility studies, these two themes have not yet come together in order to study the digital accessibility (DA) of places. Adopting an infrastructural perspective and a potential accessibility framework, a DA measure – embedding different types of impedance distance functions – is calculated for cities in Europe. Spatial Interaction Model and Complex Network Analysis are employed to calibrate and validate the DA results. The outcome of this approach is a new urban hierarchy which reveals a core-periphery pattern in Europe owing to digital accessibility.
ISSN:0264-2751
1873-6084
DOI:10.1016/j.cities.2012.03.001