Only Connect
Recent posts have contrasted two ways of governing the ecology: Polycentrism and Gargantua as characterized by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom respectively. These may also be called bottom-up and top-down methods corresponding to the self-organization of the ecology or projects to alter it.
We create a path whenever we connect. Photo by Melanie Kanzler at Unsplash
My interest in these opposite methods came from my battles to preserve the developed urban form of Troy, NY against State projects of highways and urban removal. The background on all that in in my Limits to Mobility (LTM). That is generally about the collapse of transit-oriented development (TOD) for the State-imposition/negligence of auto-oriented sprawl (AOS). That transition and for Troy particularly is documented in Urban Rail and Troy.
I make the case that that development of the TOD—our urban-industrial ecology behind our settlement frontier—was self-organizing. And just when that had matured, the top-down Gargantua of State projects and indifference to ecological regulation imposed the AOS.
There are of course many issues buried in that thesis. I will pick on some as inspired by an article: T.M. Egyedi, J.L.M. Vrancken and J. Ubacht, Inverse Infrastructures: Coordination in Self-Organizing Systems, published in Tineke M. Egyedi and Donna C. Meho Editors, Inverse Infrastructures, 30 Apr 2012 [abstract]:
“…a new category of infrastructures is emerging, user-driven, self-organizing and with de-centralized control: Inverse Infrastructures (IIs)…they represent a paradigm shift in infrastructure development. Their bottom-up development shows tension with the current socio-institutional framework for infrastructures. Internationally infrastructure laws and policies are based on a top-down and centralized view of infrastructures. Regulation is based on a control paradigm that does not fit the characteristics of inverse infrastructures and has no ways to deal with them. Policy (re)design is needed in the face of inverse infrastructure emergence.
“…The paper concludes that, similar to the behavior of ant colonies, II emergence can be understood as an accumulation of local attempts to optimize a situation. Complex citizen and citizen-company partnerships evolve which compete with existing infrastructure provisions and touch on public values…
I have a quibble with eliding top-down projects and regulation. These are entirely different functions in LTM. The issues of regulation were discussed in the post on dosage-risk within the general governance function of risk management. Projects are different because they create risk and inequity.
Settlement and Connection
There would be little dispute about the fact that our neural networks (brains etc.) self-organize. That is part of our development from our genomic form: No engineers required. They develop by connecting with the ecology and soon wind off into their own abstract self-organization.
When it comes to what we live and act in—the ecology—there is a similar argument about how that self-organizes beyond us and any genomic form: The discrete parts of the ecology interact and from that emerges what contains the parts and connections. As “nature” this bottom up emergence and any of its connectivity (e.g., ant trails, waterways, etc.) as “inverse infrastructure” is unexceptional.
The problem starts when there are powerful agents able to construct structures, whether called buildings or roads or pipelines or electrical lines. Then even the class of “infrastructure” is ambiguous. But we will pick on the physical connections of our interactions. Specifically, consider places (agglomerations of some human activity) and what connects them.
I can look out the window and see roads, electrical lines, communication lines and know where the gas, water and sewer lines are under the road. Oh, it happens that my net electrical energy, with surplus, comes from the solar panels on the roof of my house. If I were entirely “off the grid” that would be another proof of inverse infrastructure.
That the roads etc. were constructed as projects by the government, and eminent domain extended to the corporate utilities is simply fact. It is as much fact as “I need the freeway to commute to work”. Except that was not a fact at all a century ago in the TOD when “I need the trolley to commute to work” and there were still many cases where “I walk to work”. Things change.
Settlement as the process that went on behind our frontier was all change of a previous ecology. That aboriginal ecology is a purer case of self-organizing “inverse infrastructure”. And yet projects started, e.g., the immense Cahokian mounds if not the Aztec structures. The “roads” of the Chaco culture are ambiguously projects or communal trodding [Kathryn Gabriel, Roads to Center Place: A Cultural Atlas of Chaco Canyon and the Anasazi, 1991].
There was a spectrum between pure individual interaction with “nature” and those projects that are evidence of some hierarchical organization if not fully a State. What about cliff dwellings and long houses? As cooperative-community work those fit the polycentrism model of Elinor Ostrom [Governing the Commons, 1991]. The pyramids etc. are more toward Vincent Ostrom’s Gargantua, top-down, model.
The before-us ecology then illustrates how much “inverse infrastructure” there could be even in an ecology with a lot of willful humans. The humans themselves spanned a spectrum of organization from cooperative to monarchical. There is an ensemble (a comparative set) of how structures and connectors emerged or were made. And that parallels the extent of the social organization with hierarchical levels.
American settlement was pure transient of development. And for that it is quite obvious that the State did not lay out all the “infrastructure” and sell house lots and mortgages to customers. The frontier myth is that individuals, families and occasional communities (especially in congregational New England) were dumped off in America, made their own way and built cabins or sod bunkers. What infrastructure?
Mixed Projects in the TOD
That phase is succeeded (I skip any interim phases) by the TOD. Let us imagine the urban-industrial ecology as it was about 1893. I pick that because it is the start of the State highway program that locks the assumed relation between “Top-down” and “infrastructure”. And by the way, who exactly is responsible for the “decaying infrastructure”?
The TOD in 1893 is at a critical point in our urban-industrial development. That is elaborated in LTM Part II. It is in the transient of our development when two alternative paths were possible. One was more on the side of “inverse infrastructure” self-organization and the other, that we took is almost complete identification between infrastructure and State eminent-domain projects (EDP). What was completely overrun in the process was the possibility of regional governance of development. The State stepped in for lack of that but also eliminated the possibility. Seer my comment on the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) in LTM Part II and “Regional Governance or Traffic Model?”
But the maturity of the TOD is also when a hierarchical regulation function becomes necessary. And we took the path by which the EDP becomes antagonistic to the dosage-risk regulation (e.g., air and noise pollution). Further growth puts corporations (on the edge of needing monopoly regulation) against any regulation of their “spillover” production (what they are not making money from but we are forced to consume, like plastic waste).
I make a perhaps-too-strong case in LTM that the TOD was self-organized inverse infrastructure: I would rather say self-organizing ecology. Insofar as every urban place developed absent State EDP, I contrast the pre-1893 case with what happened afterwards. But the case is clouded by the fact of rail corporations, both the urban-rail franchises and the intercity rail corporations. The intercity rail corporations in particular—although there were many more then than now—were the primary examples of corporate Gargantua to challenge the State. They were symbiotic with the commodity-monopoly corporations. Then did they do EDP as top-down infrastructure and was the TOD then itself such a top-down constructed ecology?
I have argued in Urban Rail and Troy that at least the rail corporations were financially accountable. And that was their downfall against State EDP. When what happened is examined closely, the argument that the State can consider a “public interest” (let alone “ecological interest”) far beyond a money-grubbing corporations falls apart. The corporations need regulation but the State does not regulate itself. he railroads had to fir the TOD form, and highways evidently did not. The State could transfer public wealth from urban to rural places and that is just what started the Good Roads project that became urban freeways. We talked ourselves into the AOS where we cannot imagine “inverse infrastructure” anymore, nor the self-organization of any ecology. Some call that the Anthropocene but it is more correctly the Corporate-Stateocene. We are exploiting the ecology and not regulating it.
The AOS Rips up Urban Infrastructure
The TOD self-organized in the broad definition that its parts and their connections (infrastructure?) fit the emergent form. The urban places were the centers where rail transit converged and the walking was easy surrounded closely with green agrarian space. I could see that still in the UK as late as the 1960’s.
Self-organizing systems (SOS) emerge/evolve by the bottom-up interaction of parts. The financial accountability of the corporate rail required a fit to the market and that became the mature central-place network. In the congested-network model the methods of interaction (infrastructure?) are a joint field of the parts that is recursive with the parts. The organization of form is strictly bottom-up as parts compose. This is physically the specification of the possibilities of physics into chemistry, biology and ecology. Nowhere does it go the other way.
Whether or not this process is fully understood in terms of physical theory [see Prigogine, From Being to Becoming, 1980] we simply had a TOD and functioning urban-industrial ecology before it was thought that top-down infrastructure projects were necessary. When such projects dominated in the 20th century they could only disrupt and displace the TOD. The urban infrastructure—of neighborhoods of buildings and the rail transport system—were ripped up, evicted and displaced. The State proved it could not maintain the ecology it initially gave its space to. The overbuilding of infrastructure and indifference to what had already emerged in the old urban centers of course led to “decaying infrastructure” [see Erick Guerra, Overbuilt: The High Costs and Low Rewards of US Highway Construction, 2025]. The top-down process has destroyed and neglected. It has consumed more space and the whole process is just what is wrong with the human management of the ecology.
Regulation and Polycentrism
The concept of top-down infrastructure is contradictory on the face of it. What is under (infra) our interactions cannot be plopped down on top of what is interacting. But if only part of this critique is accepted there is still room for the bottom up organization. And the hyper-exploitation of the ecology that EDP enables makes regulation of the emergent effects even more necessary. The defect of our current State is the scissors of too much EDP and too little regulation. Correcting that requires more bottom-up formation of the ecology and more responsibility by the State for regulation. If “inverse infrastructure” has a meaning it is reversing the scissors that the State has become over the last century. What is an inverse scissors? Perhaps it is sewing up the seam of our current social polarization. That can only be helped by bringing accountability for real communities back down to the level of community, out of the ideological aether. And that was pretty much Elinor Ostrom’s idea for polycentrism.
As we came into the 20th century the problem was not a lack of infrastructure to increase the flow of traffic, water, sewage, energy or even information. That seems heretical in the same way of suggesting that EDP is not necessary for freeways. This is the heresy at the heart of LTM. It was justified in the critiques of mobility and bandwidth as efficiencies and a repeat in terms of the efficiency of exploiting the ecology against its limits.
There is an efficiency that is doing the same for less, and an efficiency that is doing more because it costs less. In the TOD doing the same consumption of space with less offal, poverty and material was already a need. Instead the mission of highways was to make auto vehicle-miles cheaper. Of course more were consumed and the highway program is still on that treadmill.
The failure to stem the efficiency of consuming space (different from developing locations) and information (different from understanding) has left us with an intensification and extension of our interactions. That is just what we have come to expect from infrastructure. And the one sure thing that has produced are the spillovers, the externalities, the crap we jointly produce and no one wants. Some of that is the polarizing ideology the “networks” love to propagate, the blareness doctrine that replaced any fairness doctrine. But it is also the trash and pollution we intensify and concentrate. That is what still calls for regulation, not more capacity for dumping the stuff somewhere else..
The bias of the State against regulation reflects our greed for consumption without accountability. When blared by corporate interests it is made to seem a right to be free to pursue. The net result is more inequitable risk to all. We get to the Tragedy of the Commons (TOTC) that only proves the sum of wants is not wanted.
The argument for State regulation is consistent with the Constitution and EDP is not. That suggests something about how the State has reversed its sewing-up of the more perfect Union into a scissors.
I have no doubt that a thesis of less EDP and more regulation are two impossible things before breakfast. Until you think about them. The argument for regulation in its original version (of the railroads and monopolies in late 19th century) is however as self-evident as for pollution in the 1960’s. But it was hardly ever coupled with the other blade of EDP. In many cases (e.g., wastewater treatment, even the idea that freeways reduced tailpipe pollution) projects were part of the response to their own problems.
The consistent path to less destructive projects and better regulation of the spillovers is accountability. That is strongly tied to physical propinquity. That was the argument of Jane Jacobs and implicitly of Elinor Ostrom for polycentrism. The modules keep their own accountability for their risk. I developed that idea in systems engineering. It is simply the principle of complex systems. That is also the route to our continued evolution of complexity and it is NOT top-down EDP and indifferent regulation. It is sewing up the seams in our own fission. That is where we have been misled by the blaring of the ideologues of growth, meaning a more inequitable and autocratic corporate State. Not what the Constitution intended.