Urban and regional analysis and the digital revolution: Challenges and opportunities

The current discussion on the importance of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for cities and regions is not something new in the literature. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Britain’s hegemony in the world economy was reflected in London’s dominance in the global telegraph network and in its role (inter)connecting London with North America and the outskirts of the British Empire (Hugill 1999). Some thirty years ago, Toffler was talking about the emergence of tele-cottages (1980), Hepworth in the late 1980s was analysing the Geography of the Information Economy, and later on, heated debates around the ‘death of cities’ (Gilder 1995, Drucker 1998 Kolko 1999), the Internet’s anti-spatial nature (Mitchell 1995) and the ‘death of distance’ (Cairncross 2001) occurred more frequently in the relevant literature. A common denominator in this stream of studies was the lack of empirical analysis in support of the policy-related discussion about the pervasive character of ICTs, at least from a spatial perspective.