E-city: Stephen Graham looks at some of the strange ways in which the growth of e-commerce is affecting cities. (Feature).

Contemporary cities can be thought of as constructions which support mobilities and flow to more or less distant places: flows of people, goods, services, information, capital, waste, water, meaning. According to Manuel Castells, as cities become enmeshed in what he calls the `variable geometry' of the internationalising `space of flows', (1) so technological and economic integration is taking place in virtually all cities.

But this is happening in extremely partial, uneven, and diverse ways. A logic of intense geographical differentiation is under way, within which people and places are enrolled: in very different ways into the broadening circuits of economic and technological exchange. Networked infrastructures and new technologies, far from somehow equalising geography, as so often portrayed in the business press, are actually being organised to exploit differences between places within evermore sophisticated geographical divisions of labour.

A proliferation of new urban spaces across the world are being constructed to organise, manage, and synchronise the precise and rapid shipment of goods, information, freight, and people across the planet between various transport and communications modes to integrate these intense geographical differentiations. This is being driven by the imperative of securing what we might term `economies of conjunction'. (2) These are the efficiencies that arise when firms operate within highly connected urban spaces which seamlessly interconnect virtual and physical systems of movement, allowing the precise and agile co-ordination of all forms of flow and transaction at the same time and space.

The American architect Keller Easterling believes, in fact, that virtually all contemporary urban developments -- transport interchanges, ports, airports, malls, economic franchises, museums -- can best be understood as dynamic sites for organising logistical processes. `The primary means of making space,' at least in contemporary America, she believes, `they can be thought of as `a special series of games for distributing spatial commodities'. (3) However, she also notes that `the critical architectures of these spaces are not visible', but are woven into their extended technical and information systems and often hidden infrastructure networks. `The real power of many urban organizations,' she continues, `lies within their relationships between distributed sites that are disconnected materially, but which remotely affect each other.'

A particularly important set of rapidly emerging mobility zones that needs to be explored is that which inevitably burgeons with the explosive international growth of on-line retailing and e-commerce: the digitally connected internet and electronic transaction space. Such spaces are a reaction to the exponential growth of internet traffic and electronic commerce, which is projected to double globally every year for the next ten years. Three emerging types of space can be identified:

* urban `telecom hotels';

* e-commerce distribution hubs; and

* data havens.

Urban `telecom hotels'

First, and against the rhetoric that the internet is somehow `anti-spatial', secure developments for the mushrooming telecommunications industry are proliferating, clustered around the invisible terminals to super-high-capacity optical-fibre trunk lines between cities. These, in turn, tend to be laid along highways or railway tracks to minimise construction costs.

As development concentrates around such optical-fibre `points of presence', the edges of major global city cores are now being equipped with portfolios of anonymous, windowless buildings -- massive, highly fortified spaces which house the computer and telecommunications equipment for the blossoming commercial internet industry.

Akamai, for example, one of the world's largest web server management companies, operates `the largest, most global network of servers in the industry, deployed across multiple carriers'. Its state-of-the-art server `farms' are housed in highly secure building complexes located in the major global cities of the worlds. This offers the `closest proximity to users possible', a factor of continuing importance in the location of heavily trafficked web sites because of internet congestion, bandwidth bottlenecks, and the dominance of global telecoms capacity by major metropolitan regions (see www.akamai.com).

`What's critical to these companies is access to business centers, access to fibre routes, and access to physical transportation,' writes the New York Times. (4) For example, as with other major US cities, many `telecom hotel' projects -- centres for the telecom switching and equipment of multiple competitors, housed in new and refurbished factory buildings -- are now being built in and around the Boston area. They house the region's fast expanding internet operators, web providers, and telecom and multi-media firms; they cluster around the city's major optical-fibre terminals, such as the Prudential Centre over the Massachusetts turnpike highway. This reflects the new mantra of many real estate providers for IT-intensive users (a slight variation on that for the industrial age): `location, bandwidth, location'. (5)

To occupying companies, the physical qualities of the chosen buildings (high ceiling height, high power, and back-up electricity supplies) need to be combined with nodal positions on fibre networks. `Whose fibre (and what type of fibre for that matter) will be a major consideration in the site selection process. A perfectly built building in the wrong part of town will be a disaster.' (6) In a frenzied process of competition to build or refurbish buildings in the right locations, a New York agent reported recently that `if you're on top of a fibre line, the property is worth double what it might have been'. (6)

E-commerce distribution hubs

The wider explosion of e-commerce mediated by internet or telephone transactions, and underpinned by advanced logistics systems distributing goods to customers, is leading to the proliferation of a second type of classic e-commerce space, in which connections elsewhere are far more important than links to the local urban area. Across the Western world, in fact, declining warehouse parks are being gradually reconstituted as `virtual' warehouses -- automated spaces, close to major mail and highway hubs, that are linked seamlessly into the just-in-time logistics systems designed to serve national and even continental markets for internet-sold goods.

In the US alone, it has been estimated that 60-100million square feet of new warehouses, sited on major distribution hubs, will be needed between 2000 and 2003, to meet the exploding demands of business to consumer (`B2C') and business to business (`B2B') e-commerce companies. (4) Often, such spaces are gravitating to `piggy back' on existing UPS or Federal Express hubs. As with other digital economy complexes, multiple fibre loops, high-capability electrical infrastructure, and backup power are mandatory for e-commerce warehousing, both for major single-occupant centres and multi-tenant developments.

Such demands for customised network spaces for e-commerce seem likely to continue growing: it has been estimated that by 2010 one third of the world's $60 trillion B2B economy will operate online, mediated by intra- and internets, and organised through e-commerce warehousing and logistical systems. (7)

E-commerce distribution hubs are also growing rapidly in Europe. Towns like Slough and Bedford, for example, are already emerging as national and international e-commerce distribution hubs. Bedford houses the UK version of Amazon.com -- the major e-commerce book seller. As e-commerce explodes with the mass diffusion of the internet and with the growing sophistication of `virtual malls' and on-line grocery shopping, the physical, hidden support, storage, and transaction-processing systems for virtually sold goods are likely to become ever more important examples of urban space.

Data havens

Finally, the imperative of security for data storage among many e-commerce and corporate firms is such that a wide range of peripheral, isolated, and ultra-secure spaces are currently being configured as spaces for remotely housing the computer and data storage operations of major e-commerce operators (a process known as `colocation'). There are several elements of this process. In the first element, a variety of `offshore' small island states -- Anguilla and Bermuda to name two -- are currently packaging themselves as `free internet zones' -- secure locations for web server platforms which conveniently minimise corporate taxation liabilities, vulnerabilities to internet regulation, and operating costs.

In the second part of the process, old disused sea forts and oil rigs are now being actively reconfigured by e-commerce entrepreneurs, in attempts to secede from the jurisdictions of nation states altogether. For example, the self-styled `Principality of Sealand' -- a disused Second World War anti-aircraft fort 6miles off the coast of Essex -- is being touted as an e-commerce platform and ultra-secure space for corporate web servers. Were the developers' plans to be realised, the platform would escape intervention, taxation, or regulatory powers of all nation and supra-national bodies and states. It would also be beyond interference from any company, pressure group, or hacker, while maintaining high-capacity 20 millisecond links with all the world's data capitals (see www.havenco.com). The Oceania Project, a much larger proposed new island city-state in the Caribbean, is also being mooted, aimed at creating an unregulated e-commerce space (see http://oceania.org/).

But perhaps even more bizarre is the third part of the process: the reconstruction of old cold-war missile launch sites to offer the ultimate in security against risks of both electronic and physical incursion.(8) Developers of an old `Titan' facility at Moses Lake in Washington State, for example, are exploiting the old ICBM (inter-continental ballistic missile) launching and control bunkers to offer 166,000 square feet of the most dependable and secure data storage spaces on the planet.

The buildings are `tremor proof, fireproof and impervious to even the most powerful tornado. Their three-foot thick concrete walls, reinforced with steel and lead, could withstand a truck bomb the size of the one that brought down the Murrah building in Oklahoma City or a 10megaton atomic explosion just one quarter-mile away'.(8) All infrastructures are backed-up for guaranteed uninterrupted supplies. The space's computers are separated from the public internet to deter hackers; the service and manufacturing firms that use the space are required to have private intranets that offer the best electronic firewalls available.

Notes

(1) M. Castells: The Rise of the Network Society. Volume 1 of The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Blackwell, Oxford, 1996, pp.145-147

(2) This term comes from the US economist Rondinelli

(3) K. Easterling: Organization Space. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1999, p.113

(4) New York Times, 21 Mar., 2000, p.4

(5) M. Evans: `It's a wired world'. Journal of Property Management, 1999, Nov./Dec., pp.42-47

(6) B. Bernet: `Understanding the needs of telecommunications tenants'. Development Magazine, 2000, Spring, pp.16-18

(7) G. Lohse: `The state of the web'. Wharton Real Estate Review, 2000, Spring, pp.19-24

(8) M.D'Antonio: `Bunker mentality'. New York Times Magazine, 2000, 26 Mar., p.26

Stephen Graham works at the Centre for Urban Technology in Newcastle University's School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. This article is adapted from parts of the book Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, which has just been published by Routledge.