Unprecedented and previously unimaginable infrastructures have emerged recently. They are not owned by governments or large businesses nor are they governed centrally and controlled top-down. Instead, individuals own and develop them, often on a voluntary basis, and they mushroom into local, regional and even global infrastructures. Examples are Wikipedia, privately-owned solar energy systems, and city-wide WiFi networks. They seem a far cry from ‘large-scale technical systems’ (LTSs), the term widely used to characterise infrastructures. Rather, these infrastructures exhibit user-driven, bottom-up and self-organizing characteristics. Taken together, self-organizing infrastructures and other alternatives to LTSs are described as inverse infrastructures. Because inverse infrastructures represent a critical transformation in the common model of large-scale infrastructures, the gap between the inverse reality and traditional infrastructure policy is increasing. Given that inverse infrastructures represent a new model for infrastructure development, this project addresses repercussions and recommendations for new policies of infrastructure governance.
Senior Researchers Tineke M. Egyedi and Donna C. Mehos are editing the book Inverse Infrastructures: New Phenomena in Emerging Infrastructures (working title) that will be published by Edward Elgar early 2010. It includes contributions from researchers working in other NG Infrastructures projects who study a wide range of sectors.The NG Infrastructures project Inverse Infrastructures interfaces between the Flexible Infrastructures and Public Values themes.
