De Landstad : landstedelijk wonen in de netwerkstad

Recensie van Frank van Dam, Like Bijlsma, Miranda van Leeuwen, Hanna Lára Pálsdóttir, De Landstad : landstedelijk wonen in de netwerkstad. - Rotterdam ; Den Haag : NAi ; RBP. - ISBN 90-5662-440-

City networks in cyberspace and time : using Google hyperlinks to measure global economic and environmental crises

Geographers and social scientists have long been interested in ranking and classifying the cities of the world. The cutting edge of this research is characterized by a recognition of the crucial importance of information and, specifically, ICTs to cities’ positions in the current Knowledge Economy. This chapter builds on recent “cyberspace” analyses of the global urban system by arguing for, and demonstrating empirically, the value of Web search engine data as a means of understanding cities as situated within, and constituted by, flows of digital information. To this end, we show how the Google search engine can be used to specify a dynamic, informational classification of North American cities based on both the production and the consumption of Web information about two prominent current issues global in scope: the global financial crisis, and global climate change

Searching for cyberspace : the position of major cities in the information age

In this paper, we introduce an approach to identifying and ranking cities in the current Information Age. Mindful of Manuel Castells' call for a onew spatial logic,o we argue that the informational oflowo characteristics of contemporary inter-city connections has to be taken into account when measuring the (relative) oimportanceo of cities. While recent information-based studies on urban networks are valuable additions to the global urban-systems literature, we would argue that there remains a lack of up-to-date and updatable studies of information flows that acknowledge that these flows are intangible and not simply embodied in people (in the case of airline network analysis) or places (in the case of studies that focus on the physical, enabling infrastructure of electronic communications). In order to understand more about cities and their relative positions in the Information World, we should study not only tangible informational infrastructures and their associated material flows between places, but also the cyberspaces of cities in relation to digital information. To illustrate our approach, we introduce and argue that Web search engine databases comprise appropriate datasets for examining the growing importance of knowledge as a raison d'etre for a city's economic ranking on national, regional, and global scales. Based on a quantitative and qualitative hyperlink analysis using the leading and de facto standard Web search engine Google, we derive informational rankings of the world's 100 largest cities in respect to two prominent current issues that are global in scope: the global financial crisis and global climate change. Results include: that traditional, developed Western cities are most prominent in terms of the environmental measures while, in terms of the financial criteria, onewo Asian financial centers are ranked more highly. The paper concludes by outlining an agenda for further work on Web-based informational city rankings

Measuring hierarchical differentiation: connectivity and dominance in the European urban network

This paper presents an examination of the empirical merits of a set of spatial interaction indices for measuring hierarchical differentiation (i.e. dominance and connectivity) in a spatial network. To allow for the comparison of the degree of hierarchical differentiation in networks with different numbers of nodes/links, we propose to normalize the ratio between the real measures and the corresponding values for a rank size distribution in order to obtain readily interpretable measures of hierarchical differentiation. When applied to data on air passenger flows within Europe, the normalized indices, interpreted together, appear to give a good idea of the tendency toward hierarchical differentiation. The potential usefulness of this analytical framework is discussed in the context of studies on (transnational) inter-city relations and empirical assessments of changes in the spatial configuration of airline networks