Development, Urbanization, Migration, and Quality of Life - Dragons and Tigers: A Geography of South, East and Southeast Asia - page 110

motorbikes, and making all taxis run on liquefied (subsi-
dized) natural gas.
Expanding urban populations will continue to pres-
ent an array of daunting challenges to local, national, and
international governments. Geographer T Terry McGee
recommends the following steps to ameliorate ongoing
and future urban problems.

The VirtualReceptionist

TRG, based in Lahore, Pakistan, offers small American
companies “virtual receptionists.” Mussarat, also
known as Margaret, is a receptionist for a six-
person office in Washington, D.C. With her TV
screen in Lahore, she can see visitors entering the
D.C. office. She enters instructions on her com-
puter and, miraculously , the American company' s
door opens for the visitors. There, her voice comes
out of a speaker and instructs the visitors on how
to get to the coffee room, etc. Meanwhile, she has
notified company employees that their appointments
are waiting.
Margaret performs all the tasks of a typical re-
ceptionist. She answers incoming calls from over-
seas, orders supplies for overseas offices, and
completes small tasks for her overseas customers.
For instance, when someone in the Washington
office wants a pizza delivered or a cab, she calls
Margaret, who makes the arrangements. Margaret
has a hard copy of the D.C. Y ellow Pages in her
Lahore office.
Paid US$300 a month (a lot in Lahore),
Margaret can function as a receptionist for several
companies at the same time. With the cost of
equipment and bandwidth at less than US$5,000
a month for six offices, she could replace six recep-
tionists at US$3,000 a month. This translates into
savings for the Washington, D.C., company and
profits for the Lahore agency .

Creation of urban databases that enable monitoring
and assessment of city progress.
Reevaluation of relationships between national and
city governments as urbanization proceeds. This
might lead to bottom-up rather than top-down
fiscal deployment.
Provision of suitable housing, transportation, clean
water, sanitation, and social services.
Encouragement of civil participation in urban
governance not only to increase private and other
investment but also to garner the involvement of
citizen' s groups in planning.
Development and enforcement of environmental
standards.

Bureaucratic complexity , corruption, patronage,
and lack of funding will render some of these steps in-
effective or even impossible. Ad hoc approaches will
not work either. As T Terry McGee states, “The first steps
to cope with the challenges of Asian urbanization are
to recognize that urbanization is an integral part of de-
velopment and give strategic priority to policies for the
urban sector.”

Urbanization and Employment

Cities and meg-acities are part of an all-encompassing in-
ternational urban hierarchy topped by world cities such as
London, New Y ork, and T Tokyo. The entire structure—from
world cities, to powerful international economic centers
such as Singapore, to regional market-oriented capitals
such as Kuala Lumpur, through smaller regional and local
urban centers—is interconnected by political and
economic transactions conducted across Earth-space and
cyberspace. Information and its technology disseminate
from technopoles such as The Netherlands' “Randstad”
region, England' s “M-4 Corridor,” Taiwan' s “silicon valley ,”
centered on Hsinchu, or India' s “silicon valley” centered on
Bangaluru. From such world cities and technopoles, global
corporations manage their global networks and subsets of
urban and rural production and processing sites.

Urban job creation is a gravitational pull on the un-
employed in the rural hinterland. Rural to urban migra-
tion draws less educated and unskilled people into the
urban employment realm. More people require addi-
tional infrastructure, which generates more jobs, which
stimulates more in-migration. This ongoing process
generally results in a permanent excess of workers over
jobs and expands the informal and shadow economies.
Underemployment is also boosted with urban growth
in developing countries. Underemployment is a Western
notion referring to the underutilization of labor. It might
take the form of jobs available only on a cyclical basis such
as agriculture, construction, and tourism that operate on
daily , weekly , or seasonal schedules. Or it might mean that
a person takes ten hours to do a job that normally could be