European Regional Science Association
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European Regional Science Association
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The abstract for paper number 311:
Suntje Schmidt, Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning (IRS), Erkner, Germany
Information Services in Metropolitan Regions – Location Demands and Mobility Patterns
Within the de-industrializing process, information and services are gaining economic significance. With this not only intra- and interregional economic and social schemes of interactions are changing but location demands and mobility schemes as well.
Information as products of knowledge-intensive services have been gaining importance as industrial countries began to transform into service economies during the structural change. While the industrial revolution transformed space regarding settlement structure, infrastructure, population and spatial distribution of cultural and natural space not much is known about the spatial impacts of an informa-tion based economy.
The research project “The impact of the service economy on metropolitan regions: organization, mo-bility and communication” carried out by a research group at the Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning (IRS) focuses on knowledge-intensive services within the metropolitan re-gions of Berlin and Munich and investigates the systems of functional and spatial relationships be-tween service industries in metropolitan regions, the institutional integration of the service economy and the associated communication and mobility structures.
In this context knowledge-intensive services are understood as business services that focus on produc-ing, collecting, uniting, storing, controlling, interpreting and analysing information. During the course of business, customers are participating the production procedure of information. Additionally knowl-edge-intensive services will also have to use other sources of information to produce a new product. Therefore the companies are not only closely linked with their customers but also with business part-ners, external services and suppliers as well as external information sources.
This new and very complex way to develop an information service requires certain location factors, that not only depend on the proximity to customers, but also on availability of additional information resources (e.g. proximity to universities and government or the possibility to participate in fair). Based on the kind of information the service companies produce, different kinds of interactions with the above mentioned actors will develop. In order to fulfil the interaction needs certain infrastructures are needed. Interestingly enough, our case study will show, that it is not the “classical” infrastructure, such as accessibility to airports, railroads and highways, that seem to be most decisive. Instead, telecommu-nication infrastructures play a dominant role in location decisions, underlying the role of IC-technologies and the possibility of virtual mobility.
Therefore the paper will also focus the usage of IC-Technologies as well as its connection with mobility tasks and face-to-face contacts. The paper intends to introduce mobility patterns of knowledge-intensive services that are emerging in the networks of business. Mobility patterns in this context will describe and analyze networks of personal (face-to-face) and virtual (phone, email, internet) contacts and their implications on infrastructure.
Unfortunately full paper has not been submitted.