Hubs, Nodes, and Bypassed Places A Typology of E-commerce Regions in the United States.pdf

Hubs, Nodes, and Bypassed Places: A Typology of E-commerce Regions in the United States by Matthew A. Zook Public Policy Institute of California University of Kentucky zook@ 415-291-4408 This version - November 30, 2001 This is a pre-publication version of an article which will appear in Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie. Please check with the author before citation. Zook- Hubs, Nddes, and Bypassed Places 1 The end of the 20 th century was marked by dramatic changes in telecommunications as national monopolies and plain old telephone service (POTS) gave way to increased competition, lower prices, and growing data communications and advanced services. The most visible example of this process is the growth of the packet-switched network of networks, i.e., the Internet. The unlikely progeny of a Cold War defense project, the Internet emerged during the 1990s from the cloistered confines of academia and courtesy of the user-friendly World Wide Web, transformed itself into an increasingly commercial environment (Abbate, 1999; Reid, 1997). The bursting of the dot-com bubble in April 2000 resulted in a marked decrease in rhetoric on the ability of the Internet and E-commerce to completely transform the economy. Despite this decline in visibility, E-commerce continues to grow and affect the way companies conduct business. While it is no longer the stuff of instant companies and 20 year old billionaires, it has important implications for the development trajectories of cities and regions. This paper assesses U.S. metropolitan regions in terms of the adoption of E-commerce by businesses located within them. This analysis shows that E-commerce is not bringing about the destruction of place and space as some pundits predicted, but is providing the impetus and means to reorganize the economic space in which businesses operate. In additional, spatial divisions in the use of E- commerce in which many cities in the South and Midwest appear to be lagging behind thei