Despite a growing demand for effective administrative systems to serve local communities, residents in urban areas feel these structures to be complex and remote. This impression is enhanced by the difficult, often lengthy procedures of requests, applications, appointments, waiting lists, negotiations, telephone calls, visits and letters. Although services are known to be available, applicants are constantly met with technical procedures that delay service delivery. Proliferation of legal data still leaves many uninformed about legal rights and special benefits. Despite efforts by administrators to find the best means for delivering services, the weight of official machinery and the number of requests make their task increasingly difficult. In effect, both the administrators and those whom they are intended to serve are clear that existing structures are no longer effective in providing the service for which they were created; but there is an underlying powerlessness in the face of the present vast socio-economic machinery.