The Transformation of Economic Structure and Its Environmental Implications for a Digital City: An Input-Output Analysis for Austin, Texas */ la Transformation De la Structure Economique D'une Ville Digitale et Ses Implications Environnementales

An Input-output Analysis for Austin, Set in the context of current discussions on the digital city, this paper presents an empirical analysis of the transformation of economic structure and examines its environmental implications for Austin, Texas. This paper traces the evolution of Austin from a college town to a technopolis specializing in information and communication technology (ICT), and the concomitant environmental implications. authors urge policymakers and urban managers to pay more attention to three types of environmental problems in Austin in particular and other rising digital cities in general: 1) environmental impacts of the ICT sectors; 2) indirect impacts of non-manufacturing economic sectors such as information and service sectors; and 3) the consumption side of the economy. authors argue that it is high time that new policy initiatives were examined to harness the power of the new economy to achieve the goals of sustainable development in the information age. Situe dans le contexte des discussions courantes sur la ville digitale, cet article presente une analyse empirique de la transformation de la structure economique et examine ses implications environnementales pour Austin, Texas. L'article trace l'evolution d'Austin, d'une ville universitaire a une technopole se specialisant dans les technologies de l'information et de communication (ICT), et les implications environnementales concomitantes. Les auteurs demandent plus d'attention des planificateurs et amenageurs urbains sur trois types de problemes ecologiques generaux, observes tant a Austin que dans d'autres villes digitales en .mergence: 1) l'impact des secteurs de I'ICT sur l'environnement; 2) les impacts indirects des secteurs economiques non manufacturiers, tels que les secteurs de l'information et des services; et 3) les dimensions de la consommation dans cette economie. Ils pretendent aussi qu'il est temps d'examiner des nouvelles initiatives de politique pour permettre a la nouvelle economie d'atteindre les buts du developpement soutenable a l'ere de l' information. Introduction and Research Background Since the publication of Manuel Castells' (1989) The Informational City, over the past 15 years urban scholars have increasingly paid attention to the role of information and communication technologies (ICY) on urban development (Graham 2004). A new form of city--digital cities in the space of electronic information flows--has emerged to rival physical cities that have existed since the dawn of civilization. Although scholars from various academic disciplines interpret the concept of digital cities differently (Mitchell 1995; Rupprecht Consult 1998; Horan 2000; Ishida 2000; Batty 2001; Goodchild 2001), they generally agree that ICT has become the backbone and penetrated into almost all major aspects of urban life in digital cities (Ishida and Isbister 2000; McCullough 2004). Computers were first introduced as a tool to study cities in the late 1950s, but with the emergence of digital cities by the late 1990s, computers became an integral part of the city we were studying using the very same computers (Sui 1997; Mitchell 1999, 2004). ICT technologies have altered the spatial and temporal types of urban life in many fundamental ways as they emerge as an integral part of global network of productions in many cities (Roper and Grimes 2004). traditional, real cities with spatial agglomeration of both commercial and non-commercial activities annihilate time by space via the morphology of the compact city whereas digital, virtual cities are characterized by the annihilation of space by time via a much more decentralized urban form knitted together by ICT technologies (Graham and Marvin 1996). rapid transformation of cities by ICT technology has resulted in a global urban splinterism (Graham 2000; Graham and Marvin 2001) with far-reaching consequences in multiple domains. Couleclis (2004) argues that the concept of digital cities is a multilayered identity that can be understood as the intersection of three domains: a physical urban area, urban population, and network society (Figure 1). …

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