Telematics networks and local development

Windows of opportunity in Cyberspace for Third World regions?

Cláudio Marinho (Emprel/Softex, Recife)(*)

"It has become increasingly difficult to imagine cities as bounded space-times with definite surroundings, wheres and elsewheres." (Thrift apud Graham, 1996)

Some say the first-wave civilization brought together the landless. Then, the second-wave industrialization spread out homelessness. And now, with the new information and communications technology (ICT) paradigm, it would be time for the "screenless". For those without the glaring light of a computer screen on their face, the future wouldn't be that promise of welfare. Worse: for governments and non-governmental organizations alike in Third World regions, the new problem of digital illiteracy of large populations is adding up to the old and persistently unabated problem of the inabilitiy to read-write of these persons, causing the aggravated drama of those who can't read, write and digitize. Not to add that these million people are the same landless and homeless...

Even though, I hope to give some focus in this short paper to the economic, political and social opportunities brought by the Internet for regional development. For that, I will draw on a 4-year pioneering experience with a freenet estabilished by the local government of the Municipality of Recife and also on the experience with the local high-tech software industry in a Ministry of Science and Technology/CNPq-supported program for software export. From these, I hope to schematize some points, as the participants in this forum may find relevant, for the agenda discussion in this policy advising committee for the PADCT.

The Software Revolution and the Internet: the phenomenon of velocity of change and the institutional challenges to local governments

The computer industry of the 90's is a 6-month production-cycle industry with a clear divide around 1993 with the World Wide Web upsurge. From the Mosaic browser on, a "genetic" change in software happened so strong that nothing would be the same in Cyberspace. At that exact point in the timeline of the industry evolution, time/space was collapsing in one (see Graham, 1996, on this collapse). And people from around the whole world began to meet each other as at the neighborhood street corner, showing their different faces and cultures to each one, being the publishers of themselves, reading on-line, chating -- communicating among themselves as never before in mankind history.

The impact on industry and government is obvious: frontiers, in this cyberspace, are not so relevant. And somebody has said, maybe properly (or not?), that the "civilizatory role of geography" was under jeopardy. That notwithstanding, I would suggest, for the sake of policy-making, that the problem IS NOT this. The main problem with telematics networks like the Internet -- the vast interlinked computers networks based on fast data communications all over the world --is velocity of change.. Knowing the problems of institutional inertia, being it a public or private organization, we could expect the tension brought to them by the software revolution on course. Re-structuring is the word-of-mouth but the rhytms in government (maybe better measured by the 4-year-or-so administrative period) are different -- institutional and political cultures are mainly conservative. Here we sure have a problem. To summarize my point:

• in the world of the global economy, the competitive advantage of industry and services is their capacity to add locally differentiated values to their products;
• in the economy of interlinked computers in production networks, strategic alliances happen in transnational projects in which nation-states have relative importance, being stronger city-to-city, firm-to-firm, region-to-region alliances;
• in this context, specially in Third World countries, first, local governments have to deal with urban economic-basis problems and, second, they can represent the fundamental catalysing agent for the localization of new businesses or for the relocalization of production units of the flexible industry in this fin-de-siècle (see Storper, 1991).

So, given the constraints of the political and institutional milieu of local governments and the character of the Internet (and the associated software revolution), and believing that this change in the economic-technological paradigm on course opens "windows of opportunity" to poor regions, it is reasonable to suggest that any help to support local initiatives in the terms proposed above would be a new and (maybe) more effective way to re-approach the regional development conundrum. After all, to cite Negroponte (1996) in hist after words for "Being Digital", calming his Greek farmacist friend for his thirteen-year-old-son, who loves computers ("there will be no work for him on this small island"): "more and more the Net is becoming a place for entrepreneurs who are building 'global cottage industries'". This is the mantra behind the experience reported below.

 

Case Study: The "Citizens' Network" of the Municipality of Recife, Brazil

The "Citizens' Network -- Information for Citizenship" was the first Latin American freenet, providing free dial-up access to the Internet since July, 1993. It begun with a gopher server at that month, with 2 modems at 2.4 kbps to permit access to the Municipality of Recife databases (at the time, with high inflation rates in Brazil, a very popular service was a weekly price survey in supermarkets to assist the citizens in price bargaining) and to other gophers on the Internet worldwide.

When the Ministry of Science and Technology national backbone bandwidth increased (from 9.6 kbps to 2 Mbits) in August 1995, the "Rede Cidadao" web site (the Portuguese name for the freenet -- it has Portuguese and English main menus) was deployed, providing free PPP connections to the citizens and disseminating information on Recife and its people all over the Internet. With 6 new dial-up lines for PPP access, and plans to have 20 more evening-switched lines, it has a 5.000 daily hitting rate, one of the highest in Brazil. Approximately 40% of the accesses are international, with a recent growth in the Brazilian figures due to the phenomenal dissemination of the Internet in Brazil (around 500,000 users, with the perspective of 1,000,000 at the beginning of next year).

The main structure of the site is a three-tier service platform: 1)the MUNCIPALITY OF RECIFE databases, including urban economic and social indicators, the plans for investment in the poor areas of the city resulting from a public-participation budgeting process, price surveys etc., with a special recent emphasis in converting the administrative services to HTML/databases Internet transactions to avoid citizens having to go to the City Hall for administrivia; 2)the web pages resulting from PARTNERSHIPS with citizens' nonprofit groups or individuals wanting to publish information on the city of Recife, specially initiatives linked to the city's rich musical culture and its marvelous Carnival; and 3)finally, the VIRTUAL TOURS of the city, resulting from very special partnerships that produce beautiful web pages (with rich illustrations) on the city historical center (Portuguese and Dutch architectural influences since the XVI century).

The freenet is also associated with other municipal projects to disseminate the use of computers and the Internet among poor families in the urban periphery. Just to mention two: the City Hall has 5 public training centers for "computer literacy" activities aiming the local market for poor boys and girls (on this, see Castells, 1996, about community telework centers) and a 20-PCs LAN routed to the point-of-presence of the Internet in Recife to train municipal teachers in the use of the Net. As for this, there is a growing sentiment in the city authorities that to be competitive means to be digital in the global economy. On the other side of the local spectrum, that of the specialized work force, the experience is in line with the initiative to support the Softex2000 (national software export program) small firms -- some of them with good perspectives to export through the Internet.

But above all, the Recife "Citizens' Network" is a collective public-private initiative using the networked computers' global pervasiveness to contribute with Brazilian local added-values to this "global civil society" under construction that is the Internet. Visit us at http://www.emprel.gov.br

 

References

Castells, M (1996). "Relationships of Advanced Information Technology, Economic Organization, and the Social Structure of Cities". In Colloquium on Advanced Information Technology, Low-Income Communities, and the City, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT, March 8, 1996, session summary.

Graham, S (1996). "Imagining the Real-Time City: Telecommunications, Urban Paradigms and the Future of Cities". In Westwood, S and Williams, J (eds), Imagining Cities, London: Routledge

Negroponte, N (1996). "Being Digital".New York: Vintage

Storper, M (1991). "Industrialization, Economic Development and the Regional Question in the Third World". London: Pion Limited.

 

(*)Cláudio Marinho is a civil engineer and specialist in urban planning and information systems. He works as Assistant Director in the Municipal Informatics Enterprise/Emprel, Municipality of Recife, Brazil.. He is also in charge, as Assistant Director for the Softex2000 (the Brazilian software export program) nucleus of Recife, of the nucleus Internet business strategy. His doctoral research in Economics (Unicamp, SP) refers to the institutional framework for industrial policies in peripheral regions and emphasizes the industrial organization of production networks. This paper has been presented at the seminar "Transdisciplinary Approaches to Regional and Local Development" of the XIIIth GEA/PADCT Meeting, Rio de Janeiro, November 18, 1996 and can be read at http://www.recife.softex.br/cmarinho/. Cláudio can be contacted by email at cmarinho@recife.softex.br