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 anymore, if you believe the critiques!
First, if the rich actually did use more public transport, 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 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.
What then do critics recommend? For some, the answer is, well, “people-as-infrastructure.” The hope is that the marginalized potential users would self-organize and coordinate their own transport services and care systems. Presumably, if in so doing they put up a lot of CCTVs and opened access to everyone (including the rich), only then would those amendments be A-okay.
For this line of infrastructure thinking, I too say “Not anymore!”
These different positions are usefully captured in https://doi.org/10.1093/secdia/xhaf001
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 
2 thoughts on ““Not anymore!” in Infrastructure Studies”