Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Anthony Townsend on lightweight infrastructures in the urban wilderness
We've been looking at lightweight infrastructures, and now are following how those infrastructures play out in favelas and other urban squatter settlements. "These communities are starting to recognize their own assets and potential. We should too."
Lightweight infrastructures are new ways or organizing, processing, and distributing materials and services. Their key features:
- Leverage new materials. Reduce the scale at which services become economical.
- Scale through networks. Traditionally you growth through making productive entitites bigger; these become more efficient as they get bigger. BitTorrent is a great example.
- Leverage disaggregation. Distributes tasks to optimized players.
- Originates as ad hoc structures. After 9/11, enterprise sales of backup generators, fuel cells, and other local power sources jumped; these are now becoming more efficient, and are
- Simple to use. The hand-cranked radio is one example of something that's designed for simplicity; in other cases, appropriation or remixing has the unintended consequence of leveraging familiarity with existing technologies.
- Use multiple-actor networks. Old systems were centrally managed; these use multiple players.
Examples of from > to transitions:
Electric power: megawatt generators > portable fuel cells
Water purification: sewage treatment plants > personal desalinizers
Public transportation: buses > coordinated ridesharing
Cooperative catalysts:
- Shared resources can create wealth. Privatizing land titles end up driving speculation, whereas collective titles let land stay in community hands.
- Local lead users share expertise.
- Leverage self-interest to benefit collective good.
Lightweight infrastructures in the favelas. What's happening when you put lightweight infrastructures together with cooperative catalysts?
- Regenerative commerce. Do business through systems that generate local wealth, by sharing information about local producers, coordinating/bundling purchasing. (It also light on the underground economy.) Brazil's Viva Favela is one example; Washington's Interra is another.
- Mobile learning networks. See the $100 laptop.
- Bottom-up health care. Information delivery and sharing holds the potential to spread and transform health care.
- Micro-finance. This is well-known, but it's worth noting that the micro-finance space has become more diverse: Kiva, for example, serves as a cross between eBay and a lending institution, allowing African entrepreneurs to pitch to a market of Western individuals. Vodafone's m-pesa is another example that builds on microfinance. Vodafone has been trying hard to figure out what mobile phones mean for African users. M-pesa is a phone banking system developed in Kenya that lets users request tiny loans using SMS; approved loans can be redeemed by participating retailers.
- Dynamic transportation. India's Koolpool is a service that lets people coordinate carpools via SMS. It has an internal economy (you get points for providing rides), does criminal background checks on members, and uses bus routes to map.
- Ad hoc disaster response. The 1989 and 1994 earthquakes were huge boons to telecommuting, because of the damage they did to highways. Katrinalist.net and wikis for the 2004 tsunami are more recent examples of IT systems that grew up quickly after more recent disasters.
The growing importance of the urban wilderness. As long as there have been cities, there have been slums. Over time, most slums rise out of poverty, and improve the lives of residents. In the future:
- These will be large, rapidly growing markets;
- People who grow up in them will be accustomed to local cooperative behavior (but suspicious of outsiders);
- There will be global cultural impacts as big as those we saw in the wake of Western urbanization.