City Networks of Korea : A Telephone-Call Flows Interpretation

An issue as regard to the spatial organization of urban settlements in the information era has been on the notions of city networks. The literature posits that a network city would evolve when two or more previously independent cities strive to cooperate, aided by fast and reliable corridors of transport and communications infrastructure. The present study examined if the geographical patterns of inter-urban information flows indicate some types of network relationships among cities of Korea, using the data of inter-city telephone calls during the May of 1999. The study employed the dominance flow analysis and spatial interaction models to reveal a sweeping dominance of Seoul over the entire Korea. Most cities were subordinate to the national hub in one way or another, then to their respective regional centers too. These findings imply that the hypothesis of network relationships among cities may not be a suitabe frame of explanation on the spatial pattern of urban settlements in developing countries like Korea, where a high urban primacy has persisted for long time. The study also found several clusters of local centers with significant information flows, among the cities in the eastern mountainous region and in the southern coastal band in particular, which guarantee a further examination whether there do exist network relationships within those city clusters.Huh Woo-Kung. City Networks of Korea : A Telephone-Call Flows Interpretation. In: NETCOM : Réseaux, communication et territoires / Networks and Communication Studies, vol. 15 n°1-2, september 2001. Geocyberspace: building territories on the geographical space of the 21th century (I) pp. 101-118