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New approach to solve

urbanisation problem

stressed

MARMARIS, (TURKEY): Ahmed Kamal, Pakistan's Ambassador to the United Nations, has said that problem of rampant urbanisation could be addressed only by evolving a system in which the new economic and technological forces of informatics were harnessed to work against the current unhealthy concentrations of work units and people.

Ahmed Kamal, who had been specially invited to Turkey to participate in a seminar in advance of the city summit being organised in Istanbul from June 3 to 14, was speaking on "habitat and cyberspace" at an international seminar held at Marmaris, a Turkish resort city.

He said that it was imperative that the policy makers, especially in developing countries, would look afresh at the crisis of urbanisation, seeking solutions in the forces of the future, rather than resisting with the failed practices of the past.

He said that a new hope had emerged for the developing countries in the form of the informatics revolution, and cyberspace. This, he said, was essentially a new layer of atmosphere, with its own network of virtual highways, sitting astride the world, available to all and sundry against a simple outlay in increasingly cheap hardware. With that hardware in hand, the poorest in the most outlying corners of the world can have the same degree of access to information and services and technology, as the very richest and most privileged. Never in the history of mankind, he said, had it been so easy to have access to all the technological information and data-bases on such a democratic and equitable basis as was afforded by the Internet of today.

Ahmad Kamal said that the developing countries must achieve a political commitment to move beyond industrialisation. The realisation should soon seep in that, not only could the developing countries move towards a post-industrial economy, they must, and that they could. He said to be truly developed, and to end the chronic state of dependency in which the developing countries presently find themselves, mere industrialisation would not been enough. Modes of production based on new information technologies would have to be adopted, which was not difficult since these were readily available.

Ambassador Ahmad Kamal pointed out that the global economy was rapidly moving into what was being termed as the post-industrial era. This was resulting in as dramatic a break, away from the industrial economy, as the latter was from its preceding agriculture-based economy. In this post-industrial era, the older manufacturing sector was slowly being over-taken by the new services sector as the basic engine for growth. Marketing, banking insurance, shipping, in fact a whole range of industries that performed various functions for customers were becoming the leading sectors of major economies.

He said the quantum increase in new productivity of the manufacturing sector had largely been due to recent advances in information technology. The advent of personal computers, faxes, electronic mail and video-conferencing, had led to a revolution in traditional modes of production. Machines driven by computer programmes could cut more pieces out of the same amount of steel than any average human operators. Rapid information could be obtained about the changing needs of the market. Production lines could be adjusted accordingly, and customized products could be provided.

By improving the speed of communication, and by decreasing the reaction time of the factory to the market needs, shorter production runs become economical, making it possible to reduce the amount of goods in warehouses.

He said all this had far reaching implication for the future shape of cities, and the developed countries were already making the best use of new information technology. In North America, major banks were handling credit cards in one state, clearing cheques in another and performing data processing in a third. In Europe, major airlines were shifting their data processing centres into distant locations. Almost everywhere the major companies were rapidly shifting their labour-intensive departments to the outskirts of metropolitan areas. All this, he said, had been made possible by the ability to move information rapidly and cheaply.-APP