Analyzing Inverse Infrastructures using a Complex Adaptive Systems Perspective

Abstract

The number of inverse infrastructures (Vree, 2003), that is, user-driven and self-organizing infrastructures, is rising and unsettling policies that are foremost tailored to deal with large-scale and centrally-governed infrastructures (Egyedi et al. 2012). To better understand and address this mismatch, Van den Berg (2012) has developed a complex adaptive systems (CAS) framework for analyzing inverse infrastructures. It is based on and well-fits CASs in physics, mathematics and biology. In this paper we explore the framework’s applicability to three inverse infrastructures, i.e.: Wikipedia (Davis and Nikolic, 2012), citizen-driven waste paper collection (De Jong and Mulder, 2012), and the user-driven roll-out of local glass fiber networks (Weijers, 2012; Nederkoorn, 2012). Applying it reveals that, while the framework’s most basic elements can be identified rather straightforwardly, other elements are often more difficult to identify in human CASs. Our tentative conclusion is that (i) the framework is a good starting point for analyzing inverse infrastructures, and (ii) more case studies are needed to fully understand the conditions under which self-organized emergent behavior of complex infrastructures can be observed.