The new Issey Miyake shop, which opened on Friday in London's West End, breaks out of the mould of the hungry high-street stores along Regent Street and the gold-plated designer labels of Bond Street. Rather than dump 20,000 cubic feet of contaminated soil in Bedfordshire, they mixed it with lime and cement and used it to fill the car park.Viz magazine's character Student Grant may still be suffering cutbacks and refusing to grow up, but the joined-up thinking on energy-saving and urban regeneration displayed by frugal universities such as East London may yet get into the league tables.. Ventilation and air-conditioning a building sealed all along its south side - a planning stipulation because of aircraft noise - encouraged them to use the Swedish Thermodeck heating and cooling system, which pushes air through standard precast concrete planks for 40 per cent of the cost of conventional air-conditioning. It also cuts the wind factor."The main drift was to keep it a convivial place," explains Nicholson, omitting to say that he lost a fight to choose street furniture and control the paving. He battled in vain with LDDC over lighting the river-front, and now sternly averts his gaze from the innocuous white glass baubles along the Thames.For 30 years Edward Cullinan has advanced his ideas on energy-saving. Paved and planted with trees, this piazza is more Milanese than any other square in London.

So rather than provide a narrow, dimly lit alley between blocks, the architects distanced the main block from the lecture theatres, thereby creating a square. A public right of way runs to the river from Cyprus station on the Docklands Light Railway, slap bang through the centre of the campus. A 95-metre-long "street" runs the length of the main building under cover of an atrium, serving as the campus's thoroughfare, with lecture halls on the river-front side and laboratories and workshops on the other.Strategic planning can turn daunting site problems into advantages. Giddy roof lines and cliff-face elevations make the main building, with its studios, offices, workshops and lecture rooms, masquerade as a five-storeyed building, although it in fact has only four floors."We did what the ancient Greeks did - painted red the underside of the overhangs, to emphasise that line," Nicholson says. "Cut the detail and keep things large", was the axiom that drove their decision to make buildings on the 26-acre site as big as the budget would allow. One factor in East London's favour is that construction costs for academic halls work out at pounds 1,045 per square metre here, as opposed to pounds 2,000 elsewhere.The site avoids what Robin Nicholson calls "the conventional wisdom of three-storeyed business parks" that has cemented over so many out-of-town sites. For years it has been scattered all over London in desultory halls, and has now put a lot of hope into its new campus, designed by Edward Cullinan architects, which opened in September. The brief of Cullinan and his partner Robin Nicholson was to provide a campus for 2,700 undergraduates, 98 per cent of whom come from comprehensive schools and 60 per cent of whom are from the bottom socio-economic groups.

It may look playful, but the University of East London is no playschool. It is fighting to stay alive and improve its league position as the university with the worst drop-out rate in Britain. "It's the new leisure centre for East London," the minicab driver assures me How wrong he is. Nor does it offer them any real stake in the new information society. And, as Nelson Mandela told the Telecom 95 convention in Geneva: "If we cannot ensure that this global revolution creates a world-wide information society in which everyone has a stake and can play a part, then it will not have been a revolution at all.". IN THE slipstream of aircraft landing at London City Airport, an intriguing new skyline mushrooms. Yellow and blue and white stubby cylinders, ducted with big silver grilles, cluster on the Docklands waterfront.

In far flung parts of rural Peru, where the postal service is highly infrequent,e-mail messages are printed out and distributed to the recipients.But that hardly puts poor Peruvians on a par with cyber-savvy citizens of the First World. "Most people in the Third World will never be able to afford their own PCs and many countries will not be able to invest in the infrastructure or training required," argues Paula Uimonen, who advocated in her UN report that the focus should switch from individual to community access.That is one way in which the Blair government is attempting to bridge Britain's own digital divide. A major advance for the strategy was hailed recently when the country's main telephone companies agreed to cut prices for Internet access to libraries, citizens advice bureaux and further education colleges.Similar initiatives are taking place in a number of developing countries through, for example, local post offices or commercially run cybercafes. Even they have struggled to keep prices low since the recent earthquake in Taiwan sent microchip prices surging. In cyberspace, the best laid plans of ambitious government technocrats often go awry.Even if South Korea's plan succeeds, it won't offer a solution to the world's poorest countries. The major PC producers in the region, such as Samsung, have refused to back the project, forcing the government to cobble together deals with a dozen relatively minor suppliers.

If it bears fruit, many developing nations will follow suit."Success is far from certain. "Compared with the United States and other advanced countries, our PC penetration rate is still low," commented Lee Sang Yup, a project planner at the information and communication ministry in Seoul "This project is unprecedented in the world. South Koreans are to be offered computers at cut-rate prices in an experimental project which aims to more than double the number of PCs in their country from seven million to 16 million in three years.At present, just over six per cent of South Korea's population are Internet users. South Korea's President Kim Dae Sung recently inaugurated his very own information revolution, called "Cyber Korea 21". In the jubilant aftermath of his recent election victory, India's Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, promised to restructure the telecommunications industry to provide world-class telephone services at reasonable cost throughout the country.Other developing countries are doing even more to kit out their citizens for the computer-driven global knowledge economy. As Uimonen noted, developing telecommunications infrastructure has, understandably, not been high on the agenda of the poorest developing countries struggling to provide basic health and education services for their citizens.Telecoms are, however, swiftly moving up the political agenda in many parts of the Third World. Tragically, there has been little change in the intervening period.