Information
Age Calls San Diego, But will City Wait for a Busy Signal?
By John M. Eger, San Diego Union-Tribune, Sunday, November 29, 1992
San Diego is beginning to nurture a new and exciting vision of itself as an international, information-rich city. With fiber optic cables, broadband wireless communications systems, and interactive multimedia computing, San Diego -- as Mayor elect Susan Golding put it -- is poised to become "the telecommunications hub of the new North American Common Market."
But, San Diego, like other cities, states and nation states around the world, has a problem. With the globalization of markets has come a scramble for scarce capital. There is simply no money to invest in our future. Indeed, we are barely able to maintain the status quo. Economist Sharon Kahn calls it the "fundamental dilemma of unlimited wants bumping up against limited means."
Many foreign governments are now literally selling off their national monopolies -- airlines, railroads, electric utilities -- to the highest bidder; then pocketing the cash to reinvest elsewhere or simply to service their national debt. However, many others are struggling to rebuild existing infrastructures -- bridges, roads, airports -- by joining hands with private enterprise both to finance them and in many cases to manage them as well. According to Ms. Kahn, $50 billion of such partnership-funded projects are already in the works with many more in the planning stage.
In most cases, the government isn't getting out of the business entirely. If the public welfare is at stake, governments are merely redefining their responsibility to "provide" public services, and "partnering" with industry to "deliver" them.
For America, and for San Diego, this partnership approach holds great promise to deliver the new infrastructures of the information age. The United States already produces more information -- books, movies, data bases, software of all kinds -- than any other country in the world. We also enjoy a leadership position in the technologies of production and distribution including: fiber optics or laser communications, high powered satellites and high resolution multimedia computing. Unfortunately, we have not yet figured out how to build the new communications infrastructures so essential to capitalizing on our inherent and practical strengths.
Meanwhile, other countries like Japan, Singapore and Taiwan, with government and industry moving forward hand-in-hand, are spending billions of dollars to establish teleports, provide broadband wireless communications systems, or wire their nations with fiber optic cables that connect every home, school, hospital and office to deliver a broad range of educational, healthcare, entertainment and information services.
They are preparing for the new post-industrial information society. They know that cities of the past were successful because of their location along waterways, railroads or other modes of transportation. They know too that cities and city-states of the future will be successful because of their thoughtful and aggressive deployment of advanced technology, and their location along information or telecommunications highways. They have a vision of what the world is going to be like, when every school, business, hospital and library will be connected by fiber optic cable. We don't. Indeed, we eschew "the vision thing" altogether, and continue to push competition as an end in itself.
For example, both the existing telephone and cable television industries are in a horse race to rewire America to provide enhanced television, voice and data services for commercial use. Hundreds of new telecommunications firms are also entering the fray to provide competitive services in the most lucrative business markets. Government too, is looking to telecommunications and information technologies to enhance the delivery of public services, and in some cases restructure the delivery of education, health care and government itself. But the private and public sectors in the United States are all clearly on separate paths. There is no shared vision of America in the post-industrial information age; no plan for conserving capital, joining forces or focusing our collective energies and intellect toward some common goal.
We are still caught up in the short term thinking characteristic of the quarter-to-quarter mentality. And unlike other countries, our government and business sectors are constantly at each other's throats -- adversaries, not advocates for change for the benefit of our country. Meanwhile 65 of our top 100 cities are dying. Our systems of education and health care are faltering. And apathy and despair have crept deep into public consciousness.
Yet, if we are to be successful as a nation, a people, or as individuals, we have got to change the way we think about competition. We have got to change the way we think about government and industry cooperation, and about the importance of telecommunications to business and society. Because we and our businesses and industries are not just competing with ourselves. We are competing with every other country, every province, and every other company in the world. Competition is truly global.
Norman Cousins, philosopher and former editor of the Saturday Review used to say, "the nation state has gotten too big to solve the problems of the city and too small to solve the problems of the world." In a sense, all we have left is a global economy and a local community. Here in San Diego, we can't do much about the global economy or, for that matter, the national economy. Neither can Bill Clinton. Certainly not in the short term. However, we can and must do something about the local community.
Fortunately San Diego is ripe for such new thinking and new leadership. We have more PC's and foreign alliances than any other county in the world. We have three great universities and we have a city and county looking for leadership. But the leadership must come out of a new accord between business and government -- a new partnership for rebuilding a city of the future.
California recently took an important first step with "Info/California," a joint venture between the state and IBM to provide Californians with a quick and user-friendly way of getting all kinds of information about state services, whether education, transportation or health care. IBM and California are truly venture partners, with IBM contributing the computer software as well as the hardware, and the state providing all of the information. Both will benefit, particularly as they enter phase two, which will allow for automatic transactions for renewing drivers licenses, issuing birth certificates and providing other services for which fees will be collected remotely.
In other cities throughout California and across the United States, smaller experiments with privatizing the delivery of government services are taking place. In a few instances, the development of truly public-private partnerships are beginning to emerge. New York, for example, has the most aggressive. Called Metrotech, it is a $500 million, 16 acre urban research and office park that is being developed by Brooklyn Polytechnic University in cooperation with the State of New York and various businesses in the region. Metrotech will create 14,500 new jobs, while retaining more than 500 existing jobs in the area. New York Telephone and the New York Teleport, which is the largest such facility in New York, will support Metrotech's high speed communications needs with fiber optic networks. It is this immediate, direct access to optical fiber and broadband communications which led the Securities Industry Automation Corporation to locate in the park. For the same reason, investment banks Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs also moved recently to downtown Brooklyn, just blocks from the site.
In our own community, a recent study by SDSU's International Center for Communications, under contract to the City and the County of San Diego, concluded that the world is moving swiftly toward global interconnectivity, and that economic and social rewards will go to the cities and regions that organize themselves to participate effectively in the information-led economy that is emerging. Those areas that do not choose to follow this path will be left behind. The study put it succinctly:
"There is a tendency to see communications issues in national and state terms, to the neglect of the pivotal role of the city or region, where responsibility for the whole community is finally lodged. The city's purview encompasses all elements of the community: not only industry at large, but small business, the farmer, the average citizen and family as well, and assure access to the business, professional, educational, health and social benefits that are the promise of a universally accessible, advanced communications infrastructure."
"San Diego has a choice: to let the future arrive as it will, shaped by events and circumstance, or to take on a leadership role and focus its public and private sector energies on the challenge of building its segment of the Information Highway in its own corner of the Global Village."
John M. Eger, Van Deerlin Professor of Communications and Public Policy at San Diego State University, is President of the San Diego Communications Council.