Remember the days when you could agree with the Bogotá mayor, “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.”
Not any more, if you believe the critiques!
First, if the rich actually did use more public transport, then they’d demand more security and survellance systems. Here, the presence of what is already there needs to be corrected. But such surveillance is a big no-no for some critics. Second, segments of the poor are routinely under-served, if served at all, by public transport. Here the absence of what is not there needs to be corrected. In this way, supporters of existing infrastructures rightly feel they are damned for what they do, and damned for what they don’t do.
So what do critics recommend? For some, the answer is, well, “people-as-infrastructure.” Here the idea is that the currently marginalized potential users would self-organize and coordinate their own transport services and care systems. Presumably, if in so doing they want CCTVs and to open access to everyone (including the rich), only then is that A-OK.
For this line of infrastructure thinking, I too say “Not anymore!”
These different positions are usefully capturedin https://doi.org/10.1093/secdia/xhaf001
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 