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Hello.
I'm Tineke Egyedi.

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I am the founder and director of DIRoS,
a company that focuses on standardization

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research,
and board member of the European Academy on

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Standardization (EURAS).

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I am keenly interested in how standards affect
the development and evolution of infrastructures.

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I led the NGInfra Foundation project that
resulted in the edited volume Inverse Infrastructures:

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Disrupting Networks from Below,
the book on which this lecture is based as

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well as most of my examples.

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What we will be looking at in this video is
a phenomenon which professor Vree has coined

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'Inverse Infrastructures', that is, infrastructures
developed bottom-up by citizens and users,

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that is, by you and me.

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Let's look at an example.

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You are walking along a road that turns left.

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But instead of following the pavement,
you take a short cut across the grass.

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You are not the first one to do so.

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There's a desire path.

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Without any prompting,
you and those before you have spontaneously

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created this path.

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It results from self-organization - remember
Eve Mitleton's explanation of the term in

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the module on complexity theory?

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Of interest is that you could have chosen
the pavement.

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The pavement is part of a Large Technical
System,

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an LTS as Thomas Hughes,
the famous author of Networks of Power, calls them.

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The road infrastructure is pre-designed,
public property,

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and governed centrally and top-down by the
public authorities.

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The desire path is different.

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No one owns it.

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No one specifically designed it.

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No one is assigned to maintain it.

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But note,
by walking it you contribute to its maintenance.

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This example touches on several characteristics
of inverse infrastructures.

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In this module,
we will be looking more closely at these characteristics,

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at in what respect inverse infrastructures
differ from LTSs,

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and at how the two are related.

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Here's an overview of what we will be looking at.

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The lecture will provide an initial basis
for understanding how heterogeneous the infrastructure

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landscape actually is,
and for thinking about possible futures.

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So, let's first list the main characteristics
of inverse infrastructures.

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Typically, they are developed by citizens
or technology users,

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usually volunteers.

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To start them off,
citizens and users are prepared to privately

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invest in them.

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They are then developed,
operated and managed de-centrally.

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The volunteers self-organize and,
as is the case with emergent systems,

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the outcome of self-organization can be very
unpredictable.

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Ownership of the resulting infrastructure
is absent or unclear.

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Let me illustrate what I mean with the example
of citywide wireless networks.

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These networks exist in many cities across
the world.

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Non-commercial, inverse ones start with citizens
that have wireless Internet access at home.

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But they would also like to have such a facility
elsewhere in town,

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when they are in a café or on the street.

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To allow passers-by in the street to freely
access their surplus Wi-Fi capacity,

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they install an antenna on their roof.

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This can be a very cheap,
self-made and primitive one.

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Imagine what happens if these individual citizens
collaborate.

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Imagine if others allow them to also install
antennas on high public buildings and church

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towers in order to achieve wider coverage.

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A city-wide wireless network results,
driven and maintained by citizen volunteers.

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An example is Wireless Leiden.

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It started out with citizens that had technical
expertise and lay persons who already had

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wireless Internet access at home.

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Little extra was needed,
which meant a low threshold to join in.

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They sought cheap solutions for the problems
they encountered.

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For example, a sieve and a dongle to extend
the Wi-Fi range.

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The expert and lay volunteers invested time
to get things going and keep the infrastructure running.

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The map shows all the nodes active in the
city of Leiden in the Netherlands early April

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2009.

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Let's return to the inverse infrastructure
characteristics with this example in mind.

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The initiators and participants are citizen
users.

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That is, they themselves use the technology
and the resulting network.

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They are volunteer technical experts and laypersons,
who self-organize the development and maintenance

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of the infrastructure.

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They do so in a de-centralized way.

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From the start it is unpredictable who will
join in,

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who will stay over time and remain involved,
and how much area coverage will be achieved.

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Participants already use Wi-Fi at home.

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Only a minor extra investment is needed.

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And lastly, although it is clear who owns
the nodes,

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who actually owns the network,
the wireless access service?

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There is no clear owner.

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In this respect, inverse infrastructures very
much differ from most LTS-like infrastructures

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we see around us.

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Let's look a little closer at the difference
with LTSs.

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Typically, infrastructure services such as
electricity,

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water supply, transport, IT, etc.

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are provided and handled by government agencies
or large companies (by concession).

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These invest in them and own them.

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The infrastructures of today are often LTSs.

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They are designed top-down and developed by
professionals.

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They are centrally governed and operated by
hierarchically organized formal authorities

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and/or companies.

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Think of the metro in Paris,
the infrastructures of newly built cities

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in China,
or the road grid in New York.

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These examples differ totally from the prototypical
bottom-up inverse approach.

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So, let's step back and have another look
at the infrastructure landscape.

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First of all, prototypical inverse infrastructures
emerge in an environment in which LTSs dominate.

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This sets inverse infras apart from early
developments of LTSs such as beginnings of

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electricity or telegraphy.

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Think of the picture of the desire path.

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It also showed a top-down infrastructure option
for pedestrians:

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you could have walked along the pavement instead
of taking the shortcut.

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Second, LTSs have dominated the scene these
last decades.

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Current institutions and regulations have
evolved specifically to deal with these top-down

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and centrally organized infrastructures.

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Think about what this means for bottom-up
developed inverse infrastructures.

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These do not blend in well.

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Friction is likely to arise with the authorities.

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Inverse initiatives might be branded as illegal.

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For how should governments,
who inherently deal with societal matters

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in a top-down manner,
address this novel phenomenon where even basic

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assumptions such as clear ownership do not
apply.

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Third, imagine furthermore that these citizen-driven
infrastructures really take off and become successful.

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Village Telco in rural areas.

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Wikipedia.

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Wind energy cooperatives.

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In these cases inverse solutions may tread
on what government authorities and commercial

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providers may view as their turf.

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And inverse infrastructures may become competitors.

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Let's look at an example.

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In an area relatively close to Johannesburg,
where telecommunication was ill-affordable,

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a group of volunteers took the initiative
to develop a mobile network.

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This led to a conflict with the incumbent
South African telecom operator,

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who called in the help of the regulatory authority
to block the initiative.

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The example illustrates the friction that
may arise between inverse initiatives and

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their top-down oriented surroundings.

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Government authorities should become conscious
of and address their likely bias in favor

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of LTS approaches.

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Why?

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Because bottom-up initiatives may succeed
where government and commercial providers

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fail for different reasons... This applies
especially to rural areas in developing countries.

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In the additional resources you will find
some links to videos with nice examples.

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One about the re-introduction of a traditional
rain harvesting technology in a very dry area

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in Pakistan,
and the other about the introduction of solar

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energy in a remote African village by female
resident crash-course engineers.

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Let's add some nuance and complexity.

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The relation between top-down and bottom-up
developed infrastructures entails more than

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possible competition.

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The infrastructures are often interdependent
and highly intertwined.

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Take the example of waste:

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waste paper, glass, plastics, metals and cloth
are valuable resources for industry.

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In many countries,
citizens voluntarily separate household waste.

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In the Netherlands,
this waste used to be collected by school

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children,
members of sports clubs or churches to bring

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in a little extra money.

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More recently citizens dispose of them in
special containers.

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If you think about it,
citizen-driven waste separation has become

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an inverse link in an otherwise highly centralized,
high-tech chain of waste collection and processing.

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Or take Wikipedia.

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This is a user-driven knowledge infrastructure
that can compete with any Encyclopedia.

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It runs on the Internet,
which is itself an inverse infrastructure,

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which in turn requires electricity - usually
provided by large companies who are obliged

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to guarantee reliable service provision.

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And as a final example,
note that what you do locally with regard

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to water,
rainwater harvesting or sewage systems,

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will affect the larger hydrological cycle.

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Possibly, it will affect it for worse.

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So, it is important to realize that inverse
infrastructures don't develop in a void.

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To summarize, we first looked at the main
characteristics of inverse infrastructures.

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Then we went on to discuss how they differ
from LTSs,

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infrastructures designed top-down and organized
centrally.

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And we rounded off by talking about competition
and interrelatedness between inverse and top-down infrastructures.

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Thank you for your attention.