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Look at this photo:
On the one hand, there is a paved bike lane. It is a part of a biggest urban network which follows a project. The network is public owned and its management is centralized in higher bodies: local Administrations, in this case, which are also in charge of the maintenance.
Next to the bike lane, there is a path which didn´t came from any design or project, but from the spontaneous use, firstly by one citizen and later by many others. It is a consequence of self-regulation; it is the desired path emerged as a response to a poor design. It is maintained by the own movement of the people that every day uses it.
There are many more and wider scoped situations similar to this bike lane. Think of the people living almost totally off the supply networks, as a response to the organization of the basic services supply (water, electricity, communications, housing,…)
Other example that is a breaking new: the Uber service of shred vehicles which is establishing a disruptive way of mobility, apart from lot of concern throughout the taxi sector.
Cases like these are emerging all around the world in the four main infrastructure systems: energy, transportation, water and information and communication technologies.
It is not about anti systems activism, rebellion nor something like that.
Not at all. This kind of emerging infrastructures are perfectly identified and are studied for some years now at universities [1] as a model of innovative services, disruptive in may cases. They are named inverse infrastructures, and emerge from the tensions with a given administration which has typically perform a poor management. They are the response to wrongly stablished systems.
Inverse infrastructures are usually user-driven, taking advantage sometimes of the legal vacuums and become a competence for the actors well-stablished and very matured in the market, which notice their commercial interest threatened. This leads to tensions and starts change processes involving to the most higher bodies.
It is paradoxical how, while inverse infrastructures are taken as a development model, many of the withered actors in different sectors continue thinking that inverse infrastructures among other disruptive initiatives are just anti system actions that get resolved by the traditional ways. They do not even do a proper problem demarcation and actor analysis to see what they face to.
These are the signs of very changing times; disruptive changes when it comes to infrastructures. Some see anti system activists that must be brought into line, other see inverse infrastructures as progress patterns.
It is up to each…
Bibliography: [1] EDX.ORG. DelftX: NGI101x Next Generation Infrastructures. 6.5 Inverse infrastructures: Self organized infrastructures. June 2014. https://courses.edx.org/courses/DelftX/NGI101x/1T2014/courseware/c8f309fe5da7480dab01486ea5932b53/2aa56a3128cd46eba987b03b3b7bb9e0/. Consulted 11 june 2014
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