Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
continually re-values the advantages of home and away, not just in memory
but also in ongoing planning; it is constantly connected.
Second, accompanying the expansion of networked space is the compres-
sion of time through the instantaneous electronic transmission of informa-
tion and capital between nodes across this interlocking field. Virtual
simultaneity in the movement of goods and people by air travel (Dodge and
Kitchin 2004) permitted SARS to travel from East Asia to central Canada
in less than a day. The proximity of places has been enhanced by greater
transportation affordability as well as by savings in time. The large reduc-
tion in transaction costs, lowering the barrier of distance, has extended
mobility to larger numbers of travellers, while thickening the network con-
nectivity of formerly isolated places (Kasper 2000). Among a sample of
some 1500 immigrants in Vancouver, most from Asia, over 40 percent main-
tain contact with their country of origin at least weekly, primarily by tele-
phone and e-mail, a quarter fly home once a year or more often, over
one-fifth own a home or other property in their native land (Hiebert and
Ley 2006).
Third, in contrast to the frequently celebratory discussion of the net-
worked globe, SARS was a reminder that to be globally connected means
exposure not only to life lines but also to less welcome networks, including
disease, drug cartels, and terrorist cells.
Fourth, new spaces are being incorporated into the networked globe.
The Toronto SARS outbreaks were concentrated in suburban hospitals,
the metropolitan setting of growing proportions of recent immigrants.
The older model of inner city sites of arrival and residence, adjacent to the
downtown railway station or the docks, is being bypassed. Today many
immigrants enter and leave a city repeatedly by air, and for some of them
proximity to the suburban airport is desirable. But the suburbs have other
assets. Downtown and inner city neighbourhoods in gateway cities have
been increasingly claimed as the employment and housing markets of
global rangers engaged in private and public corporate activity, so that
poorer immigrants are commonly displaced to the housing stock of cheaper
suburbs, the new location of industry, warehousing and routine service
activities that have themselves re-located from the expensive post-industrial
core. Middle-class migrants also find advantages in suburban home-
ownership, so that in many gateway cities, including Toronto and Vancouver
as well as Los Angeles, New York and Washington, the
ethnoburb
, a district
of concentrated immigrant settlement, has become a new feature of subur-
ban life (Li 2006).
Finally, SARS implicated issues of spatial scale and shifting jurisdictions.
The disease was presented in the Naylor report (2003) as typical of contem-
porary 'Viruses without borders'. Invoking Marshall McLuhan, the report
expressed the inevitability of contact in a global village where time-space
