The Local Government System

A vision of local government (LG) in the future addresses two fundamental questions: why is LG necessary; and how will it secure the skills and capacity to do its job well. City planning thus involves the anticipation, so far as practicable, of all the city's future needs, physical, social, and financial. It seeks to turn the lessons of the past to the profit of the future.

Increased attention is now being given, the world over, to the improvement of the fundamental influences affecting city life. This new solicitude has been inspired by the extraordinary growth of cities, by the steadily increasing complexity of urban relations, and by a better appreciation of the fact that contented citizenship is largely a matter of congenial environment. The enterprise is today known as city planning—an endeavor to transform the modern community into a safer, more convenient, more healthful, and more attractive place of human abode.


The new system of local government indeed superbly excellent, despite initial years of its implantation, continues to sail in troubled waters. Most key officials are yet to understand the new situation providing a dominating role to the locally elected members in running the affairs of the city government. With this ambiguity we continue to see tons of uncollected trash, broken roads, and contaminated water supply and sewerage system in ghastly conditions. Many problems remain to be solved—securing clarity and understanding about the concept by all stakeholders. Still much work still has to be done.

The councils were elected on non-party basis to avoid conflict in service delivery. Sadly, not only the conflict continues to exist but cooperation is also absent. The development of LGs has also created a dearth of trained manpower, particularly in finance and planning, information technology, law and literacy groups.

Contrary to the concept of LG, the prevailing corrupt culture has thrown consumers of services at far end, with no say, whatsoever. The Council members receiving kickbacks from infrastructure projects, display large banners in self-praise and thus trying to create false impressions of their good work. Local projects are conceived not on preference basis, but on the amount of sweetener the elected representative will get. Thus the representatives elected by people turned out to be the guardians of their own private interests.

Among the varied activities of the modern city few are more intimately related to the daily life of the people. To safeguard the public health in any large community is a task of the first magnitude. But it is an indispensable public undertaking, for health is the greatest single factor in personal efficiency.

The modern city throws off an enormous amount of waste material from day to day. The total is sometimes as much as a ton daily per head of population. This waste consists of a great variety of things namely, rubbish, garbage, and sewage. Rubbish and garbage may become a health menace under certain conditions by increasing the number of rats, mosquitoes, flies and other insect carriers. The LG must engage private sector in handling these issues.

If the most imperative need of a modern city is its water supply, the next in point of urgency among its daily requirements is the removal of waste. A modern community could endure for a season without pavements, street lights, parks, telephones, or street cars; and it might conceivably struggle along for a time without schools, police, or fire protection; but without water and sewerage it would find the greatest discomfort and inconvenience within twenty-four hours. Public sanitation is therefore entitled to a place at the top of the list among the essential industries of every large community. It may be briefly defined as the art of removing all objectionable wastes in the most unobjectionable way.

The street plan of the city determines the configuration of its growth and development, including the general uniformity or variety of private structures. Nearly all the physical aspects of municipal administration are in some way or other related to the public thoroughfares, and it is for this reason that the fundamental importance of street planning, street construction, and street maintenance can hardly be exaggerated. In the modern city one-third or more of all the land area is dedicated to street use.

The Nazim occupies a position of great visibility, and constituents have high expectations about the leadership that he ought to deliver. He is viewed as the problem-solver-in-chief in city government. Unfortunately, despite the available power and authority, his honor has failed to get things done. The incumbents are more concerned in pseudo publicity rather than real work. They need to learn that only service to people matters. They will win hearts of people when they will solve their real problems. False publicity only promotes cynicism.

EDOs are professionals, and skilled civil servants. They have adopted a policy leadership role as well as implementation of programs, delivery of services, and management of resources. Though still somewhat ambivalent about this new role, they bypass the LGs for provincial governments on many important issues, including preparation of budgets.

LG should be seen as an asset rather than a potential threat. It is not defined as a delivery agent for federal or provincial government. It is another democratically elected tier of government, with the strengths and responsibilities that come with a democratic mandate.
Bureaucracy should accept this changed situation.

Cities in Pakistan are under increasing pressure to find effective ways to meet their problems and respond to the needs of citizens. With diminishing outside assistance, officials in city government are challenged to determine the purpose and direction of their government and to generate the resources to carry out their mission. They must not only find more revenues locally to address their problems, they must also discover the resources within themselves to give leadership to their city, provide quality services, and manage shrinking budgets with greater efficiency. Asif J. Mir, Organizational Transformation

Homes: Upcoming Trends

The home of most value in the future will not use technology primarily to automatically control the environment. It will help its occupants learn how to control the environment on their own.

People spend more time in their homes than in any other space. The home ideally provides a safe, comfortable environment in which to relax, communicate, learn, and be entertained. Increasingly, it is where people connect with friends and family, conduct supplementary business, manage resources, learn about the world, and maintain health and autonomy as they age. People invest extraordinary amounts of time, money, and emotional energy to mold their homes into living spaces that meet their needs.

Unfortunately, homes today are ill suited to exploiting the pervasive computing applications being developed in laboratories. Most homes do not easily accommodate even the simplest new technologies, let alone embedded sensor infrastructures and ubiquitous display technologies. Perhaps, homeowners generally believe that computer devices make life more complex and frustrating rather than easier and more relaxing. They are wary of the aesthetic, financial, and cognitive challenges of bringing new technologies into their homes.

If we are to believe most movies, television, and popular press articles that mention home life in the future, we will have complete control over our spaces at the touch of a button. In fact, our homes will be so fully automated and “smart” that we will rarely have to think about everyday tasks at all. We will spend nearly all our time in the home engaged in leisure activities because digital and robotic agents will have taken over the mundane chores of day-to-day life.

Technology will require human effort in ways that keep life as mentally and physically challenging as possible as people age. Environments shall be created that help people live long and healthy lives in their homes; reduce resource consumption and integrate learning into their everyday activity in the home

Computer technology shall be ever-present but in a more subtle way. Information will be presented to people at precisely the time and place they need it. The pervasive technologies to empower people with information will help people make decisions; they will not be stripped of their sense of control as psychologically and physically debilitating.

There will be an environment that uses pervasive computing technology to save energy by automatically controlling the heater-vent-air conditioning system. The environment’s embedded sensors will infer context such as where people are, what they are doing, and what the inside environmental conditions are. The home will contain computer-controlled appliances, windows, and blinds.

To reduce resource consumption homes will be designed that control environmental conditions. The home’s occupant will inform the system via some type of user interface that he or she wishes to stay comfortable while saving as much energy or money as possible. The home will then use a set of optimization algorithms to simultaneously maximize savings and comfort by automatically controlling the systems, windows, and blinds. For instance, on a day when the temperature is predicted to shift from warm to cool, the home might determine that the optimal cooling strategy is to shut down the AC and automatically open a set of blinds and windows so as to create an efficient cross breeze.

There appear to be many situations in which the automatic system might succeed in optimizing temperature comfort yet fail in “doing the right thing”: something noisy is occurring outside, someone is smoking outside the window, someone in the home is allergic to pollen and the pollen count is high, it is raining outside, it is too quiet for a person reading when the hum of the air conditioner is off, someone did not want the blinds open because it throws glare on a computer screen, and so on. No matter how hard the system designer tries to program contingency plans for all possible contexts, invariably the system will sometimes frustrate the home occupant and perform in unexpected and undesirable ways.

In the home of the future, the windows include a tiny light that is either embedded in the window frame (for example, a light-emitting diode) or projected on the window using display technology (for example, an IBM Everywhere Display). The home’s embedded sensors and optimization algorithms compute a strategy for cooling the home by opening a particular set of windows, but they do not proactively implement the strategy.

Imagine that the light on the window subtly illuminates. It does not interrupt the home occupant. When someone in the home notices it, he or she knows the light means “it might be a good idea to open this window right now.” The home thereby unobtrusively informs the user of actions that might be taken to conserve energy or money. In this way, the home teaches the occupant, in an unobtrusive way, how to achieve the optimal settings. The home can take a similar approach when the goal is to improve health or introduce learning into everyday life.

The labor and material cost ratio is irrational today. This will be altered in making future homes. More money shall be devoted to materials, design, engineering, safety, and technologies in the home. Borrowing from recent innovations in the automobile industry, an integrated “chassis–infill” construction system shall be developed capable of rapidly installing with minimal labor. In one integrated assembly, composite beams and columns provide structure, insulation, sensor arrays, lighting, signal and power cable raceways, and ductwork. The beams use special connectors that lock together easily. Infill sections that form the structure’s interior and exterior walls are then “snapped in” to the chassis structure without requiring skilled labor. Finally, interior finishes are snapped on to cover joints and wiring raceways.

The resulting structure will be easier to change than conventional housing, require less expensive labor during construction, allow more money to be spent on higher-quality materials and technologies, and easily accommodate sensing infrastructure and new output technologies. Asif J. Mir, Organizational Transformation