The Urban-Suburban Divide *

15 The Urban-Suburban Divide *

Data for comparing urban and peri- urban areas are too scarce to give much more than a glimpse of the signifi cant diff erences between them as far as both the availability and the uses of new information and communication technologies ( ICTs) are concerned. ICT development fi rst begins in large cities whose suburbs often remain excluded from the economic and cultural wealth of the centre. When the cities are – as in the United States – polycentric in structure, the nature of the gap is more complex. In France, communities in the north of the Hauts-de-Seine department are less well equipped in ICTs than the neighbouring La Défense business district, which is on a par with inner Paris. But a survey of the socio-economically more disadvantaged residential areas around La Défense has shown them to have access to its excellent equipment. This does not seem to be the case everywhere. In the more deregulated setting of Santiago (Chile), for instance, the trickle-down eff ect works to the advantage of none but the better-off neighbourhoods. Generally speaking, deregulation of the telecommunications

sector can be regarded as having a tendency to accentuate disparities between some urban areas that enjoy access to premium networks and others with nothing but basic and, as it happens, deteriorating services – the ICT version of the splintering urbanism theory (Graham & Marvin, 2001). Increasing peri- urbanization leads to increasingly complex disparities, with some relatively sparsely populated peri-

urban areas inhabited by young, relatively high-income, households. However, satisfactory access to – and extensive use of – ICTs is possible in peri- urban areas after all,

as seen in the following extract from an article by Dominique Malécot, published in the 9 June 2006 edition of the French equivalent of the Financial Times, Les Echos:

Peri- urban areas enter the ICT age Seine-et-Marne General Council, with the support of the Ile-de-France regional authorities, has just

fi nished equipping the entire department for ADSL coverage. The €60 million committed to the project, which has paved the way for the construction of very high- speed broadband infrastructure in 2007, has helped produce a mix of technologies – fi bre optic, Wi-Fi, powerline, and WiMAX – to off er the best possible

Internet access to residents of the department’s 514 towns and villages, 80 percent of which are inhabited by fewer than 2,000 people, and few of which are covered by the operators’ commercial networks.

“Originally,” explains Gérard Eude the Socialist Vice-Chairman of Seine-et-Marne General Council and Chairman of the Seine-et-Marne Development agency, “the aim was to meet the quite strong demand and provide every resident of the department with ADSL access. But there was an economic side to it, too. We enjoy a very high quality of life in our area, and many freelancers and senior executives may be tempted to move here if they have the chance of an ADSL line. This, in turn, would help create new activities.”

Without disowning its rural image, Seine-et-Marne has opted for the new technologies…

* Previously published as « La Fracture Ville-Banlieue ». In: Dupuy, G., 2007, La Fracture Numerique. Series Transversale Débats. Paris, Editions Ellipses, pp. 66-70. Included with permission.

Chapter 15: The Urban-Suburban Divide

Gómez-Barroso and Pérez-Martínez (2007), in a study of ADSL development in the outskirts of Madrid, help identify the operator’s strategy and the risks of a possible divide. Population density defi nitely does appear to be the key factor, although its infl uence is tempered when household wealth is taken into account. The wider-ranging work of Grubesic and Murray (2002) tends to reach similar conclusions. Suburbs may be less advanced in ICT terms than the city centre – or centres – but they can also be more so than rural areas with low housing density. So where does one have to place the divide?

At the same time, the suburbs are underequipped for technical reasons. In the case of ultra high- speed broadband, for instance, access to services is available only within a two-kilometre radius of a telephone exchange. So the suburbs lose out to the centre due to the spatial distribution of telephone exchanges as a result of the density not just of the population and economic activities, but also of telephone lines.

Diff erences between the centre and the suburbs stem also from socio-economic factors. Social housing districts, despite being densely populated, do not meet the minimum social and economic conditions for ICTs to be able to fl ourish there. Notwithstanding which, there arises the issue of their cultural signifi cance: what kind of progress or chances of social advancement do they enable in those neighbourhoods? Where is the point in adopting ICTs if they are used merely to meet basic communication needs – already satisfi ed quite inexpensively by cellphones and SMS – or for strictly recreational purposes (games consoles)? Questions like these are increasingly prevalent given that public service supply, which is often all that is available via community ‘cybercentres’, goes hand-in- hand with strict orders. Offi cial texts talk about the ‘need for scrupulous supervision and monitoring’.

This puts quite a dampener on eff orts to encourage the adoption of ICTs. Nevertheless, other issues need to be taken into account here. A number of studies have shown contemporary musical creation to be an extremely selective process, with just one in a hundred new releases managing to turn a profi t. Yet there are places that act as a breeding ground for creativity in this fi eld: not only large cities around the world such as Memphis or Stockholm, but also often isolated or outlying urban areas featuring

a concentration of alternative cultures whose representatives are spawning new musical genres and maintaining standards of excellence by means of the cluster eff ect. So the suburbs appear to be conducive to the production of contemporary music, meaning that their inhabitants are acquiring

digital technologies, especially for recording. Hence a quarter of the Ile-de-France region’s record companies and labels are located in peri- urban areas – mainly in Hauts-de-Seine and Seine-Saint Denis – and as many records are recorded and pressed in those areas as in Paris (Calenge, 2002).

Urban regeneration policies – now a leitmotif for local political authorities – frequently hinge on the assumption that ICTs can take over from outmoded or relocated manufacturing activities. The new technologies are promoted as being an engine for growth and for improving the quality of urban life. It is by no means certain that magic formulas like these are enough to overcome the reluctance of inhabitants who, unable to identify with them, fear that they will yet again be the have-nots of urban change. Firmino (2005) points to the need to communicate these futuristic visions, and to show that they are not based on a risky form of technological determinism. A “more receptive and mature

environment [must be created] for the acceptance of new paradigms of the virtual city and the network society”, which is some challenge given how the causes of the resistance are most probably the same as those that gave rise to the digital divide in the fi rst place.

Urban Networks – Network Urbanism

Recent studies on the layout of the Wi-Fi network seem to corroborate the inhabitants’ suspicions. Tony Grubesic and Alan Murray provide quite an accurate account of Wi-Fi coverage in the American city of Cincinnati, linking it to the spatial distribution of inhabitants and economic activities. The fact is that the location of certain activities and/or population groups is a key factor in regard to Wi-Fi

coverage; and technological advances in Cincinnati do not help narrow the digital divide (Grubesic and Murray, 2004).

When there is a clear digital divide between urban and peri- urban areas – i.e. distinguishable from the complex forms of spatial diff erentiation found in the contemporary urban environment – it is, more often than not, double-edged: a rift in terms both of the levels of ICT development and how the technologies are used.

Chapter 15: The Urban-Suburban Divide

Urban Networks – Network Urbanism