serendipityoucity

Infrastructures are not black boxes although it seems that way.  They are taken for granted, in the background, unnoticed, ubiquitous, obvious yet invisible.  They are under the ground, in the sky, on poles, under the oceans, across continents, they are even the pavement upon which we drive.  They give us power, water, transport, communications and electricity.  Once built they just get used and not much thought goes into their complexity. 

Somehow they are financed, designed, engineered and there are standards, tons of specialists, regulations, institutions, material providers and so on.  Infrastructures are also normally funded with our tax dollars and sometimes with private funds or some sort of partnership arrangement between the two.  Perhaps these are even the biggest expenditures a nation has? But we never really know what the costs are, it is not broken down on our tax bills, and somehow we even seem to pay twice as we also pay in monthly bills to some service provider or other.  How much did it cost to re pipe the copper wires with fibre optics for the entire planet? Who did it?  Did we all agree? Did anyone ask us?  Where there better solutions?  And if we paid for it does that mean we get to decide what gets into the pipes?  And well, how come infrastructures get built and no one asks us if we want them in the first place, or how we want them to be.  Are there other models to create and maintain them?  Are there particular organizational forms associated with particular kinds of infrastructures?  What factors are involved?  Is a particular type of infrastructure associated with a particular organizational form?  Does the physicality of an infrastructure affect who owns and maintains it?  If the infrastructure delivers a necessity, such as water or energy, does it have to have to be hierarchically organized?  Hmmmm!  How were rice terraces managed for centuries – communal? 

Why does the O’Train in Ottawa seemingly not go where people live are or want to go?  Well deary, it is cuz the city wanted to save money and used an existing track.  Where is the extension of the O’Train gonna go?  Well probably not to the airport.  Really!  Yup! The O’Train extension is being hotly debated.  We have one little skinny light rail train that keeps going south, and the plan is for it to go further, and further south then suddenly there is a turn just a few km shy of the airport toward a new housing development!  Wonder if the developer negotiated this before building and the city is just doing public consultations cuz it has to?  Wonder if the taxis and rent a car companies & associated unions argued against it due to the potential loss of revenue?  How did that urban planner Greber get away with removing all the street cars and our central train station by the Canal?  Who agreed to that?  Boyo are we paying for that now?  Were citizens consulted?  Is a Canadian company or an American company gonna get the contract for the new O’Train itself? The O’Train is one contemporary example of how a piece of the transportation infrastructure is loaded with controversy, big money, politics, engineering, geography, technocrats, capital interests and so on.  But hey, riders just ride! 

All the other infrastructures are the same, but we hear less about them.  No one has yet explained to me how come the street I live on has been dug up each summer for the last 3 years?  I did not ask either, they just show up year after year?  When exactly did all the copper get replaced across the country?  And just how many satellites have we launched?  And well how much space garbage have I paid for?

I want to understand other models to study these large technological systems, to create and maintain them.  In particular the communication infrastructure, in particular for people who do not have access to them, are blocked, overlooked, and just plain not serviced.  Can citizens have more input into how they are created?  Do citizens need the state to create an infrastructure?  Can communities take this on themselves?  How would such an infrastructure look?  I really want to make them obvious and think about them critically.  Dang it, we pay for them both to make and maintain them, and we pay when we rely on the environmentally unsustainable ones such as our current transportation infrastructure (e.g. climate change, oil wars, wasted time commuting, poor air quality and etc.).

And just what is an infrastructure anyway?