Infrastructure Disruptions as Extreme Events

Stephen Graham Newcastle University

IHRR Seminar

Infrastructure and Urbanization •  2007 50% of world’s population live in

urban areas •  These 3.3 billion people concentrated

on 2.4% of earth’s surface •  Rely on spectrum of mobilities and

connections •  Once infrastructure networks are

successfully built, "unconnected localities" can be linked through what Latour calls "provisionally commensurable connections" (Latour, 1997; 2).

•  In such a context, ‘Acts of God’ or “environmental Hazards' mediated profoundly by complexes of urban infrastructure

Technosocial and Technonatural Assemblages •  Organise, and mediate, the

distribution of people, goods, services, information, wastes, capital, and energy between multiple scales within and between urban regions.

•  The contemporary urban process involves complex ‘cyborg’ liaisons a n d m u l t i p l e , d i s t a n c i a t e d connections.

•  Straddle many scales and link more or less distant elsewheres.

•  Crucial to “Anthropocene”

Cyborg Urbanization

•  Blending of social into technical (and vice versa) ; technological into natural/organic ; and social into natural/organic

•  Complexes of ‘infrastructure’ involve all three processes of blurring: socio-technical (cyborg bodies); socio-natural (urban water systems; resource commodity chains); techno-natural (urban metabolism & ecology)

•  "The city", writes Erik Swyngedouw, "cannot survive without capturing, transforming and transporting nature's water. The 'metabolism of the city' depends of the incessant flow of water through its veins" (1995, 390).

•  “The modern home, for example, has become a complex exoskeleton for the human body with its provision of water, warmth,

light and other essential needs. The home can be conceived as ‘prosthesis and prophylactic’ in which modernist distinctions between nature and culture, and between the organic and the

inorganic, become blurred” Gandy 2004

Bill Joy: When Turning Off Becomes Suicide •  Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, recently caused a furore amongst, suggested

that the mediation of human societies by astonishingly complex computerised

infrastructure systems will soon reach the stage when "people won't be able to just turn

the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide" (2000, 239).

How are Technosocial complexes ‘black boxed’ as the ‘engineer’s stuff’ of ‘infrastructure

•  For Susan Leigh-Star (1999) nine characteristics. •  embedded (i.e. “sunk into other structures); •  transparent (“it does not need to be reinvented

each time or assembled for each task”); •  offers temporal or spatial reach or scope; •  is learned by its users; •  is linked to conventions of practice (e.g. routines of

electricity use); •  embodies standards; •  is built on an installed base of sunk capital; •  is fixed in modular increments, not built all at once

or globally;

And yet, paradoxically, often only noticed when they fail

•  Finally, infrastructure “tends to become visible upon breakdown.”

•  When infrastructure networks "work best, they are noticed least of all" (David Perry, 1995).

•  Modern urbanism associated with progressive veiling of infrastructure, physically and discursively, beneath the urban scene, as part of emergence of “Wired-Piped-Tracked” Metropolis

•  Kaika and Swyngedouw (2000) "the networks became buried underground, invisible, banalised, and relegated to an apparently marginal, subterranean urban world".

The ‘Fronstaging’ of the Urban ‘Backstage’ •  Irving Goffman’s (1959)

terms, the built environment’s “backstage’ becomes momentarily “frontstaged”

•  The sudden absence of infrastructural flow creates visibility just as the continued, normalised use of infrastructures creates a deep taken-for-grantedness and invisibility.

‘Unblackboxing’ •  Technosocial ‘blackboxes” are

momentarily undone •  Cultures of normalised and taken-for-

granted infrastructure use sustain widespread assumptions that urban ‘infrastructure’ is somehow a material and utterly fixed assemblage of hard technologies embedded stably in place which is characterised by perfect order, completeness, immanence and internal homogeneity rather than leaky, partial and heterogeneous entities.

Myth of Fixed and Stable Emplacement

•  Infrastructures regarded as "symbols of the complexity, ubiquity and the embodied power of modern technology" (Summerton 1994).

•  “we sometimes seem to view mature Large Technical Systems as invulnerable, embodying more and more power over time and developing along a path whose basic direction is as foreseeable as it is impossible to detour [But] systems are more vulnerable, less stable and less predictable in their various phases than most of us tend to think (Summerton, 1994)

•  Cultures and economies of infrastructural repair and improvisation almost invisible within urban studies

Socio-technical ‘Normal Accidents’: Blackout •  “cascading effects” •  “We are all hostages to

electricity” Leslie (1999)

The Electromateriality of ‘cyberspace’

•  “When servers are down, panic sets in. Electronic power failures, internal surges, the glitches that corrupt and destroy memory, mirror our relation with power itself” (Grossman, 2003, 23).

•  a single server farm consumes as much electrical power as a city the size of Honolulu.

Blackouts and the ‘Global’ City

•  “We are talking about Mumbai as the next

Shanghai”, a general manager for a major Mumbai advertising firm, faced with losing 30% of its revenues due to daily 4 hour power

cuts, reported in 2005. “And here we are faced with the

possibilities of blackouts” (SAND, 2005).

Blackouts and Neoliberal Dogma

•  Electricity deregulation in the USA had actually ignored the economic and geographical fundamentals of an industry that

necessitates reliable, material connectivities between generation and use; that is prone to cascading and spiralling failure as

transcontinental and transnational markets in supply are established within “complex interactive networks,” with dramatic

unintended consequences ; and where the hard infrastructures are ageing and organised with a baroque level of complexity and local

fragmentation.

•  On July 19, 2001, a train shipping hydrochloric acid, computer paper, wood-pulp bales and other items from North Carolina to New Jersey

derails in a tunnel under downtown Baltimore. Later estimated to have reached 1,500 degrees, the ensuing fire is hot enough to make the

boxcars glow. A toxic cloud forces the evacuation of several city blocks. By its second day, the blaze melts a pipe containing fiber-optic lines laid along the railroad right-of-way, disrupting telecommunications traffic on a critical New York-Miami axis. Cell phones in suburban Maryland fail. The

New York–based Hearst Corporation loses its email and the ability to update its web pages. Worldcom, PSINet, and Abovenet report problems.

Slowdowns are seen as far away as Atlanta, Seattle, and Los Angeles, and the American embassy in Lusaka, Zambia loses all contact with

Washington. •  Kazys Varnelis

ICTs and Cascading Effects

Political Ecological Disruptions: Katrina

•  Urban political ecologies rendered starkly visible

•  Metabolized nature disturbed; politically constructed vulnerabilities exposed

Malign Mobilities: SARS

Malign Immobilities: Sewer Fat

Supply Disruptions: Oil Shock

Forced Disconnection: Infrastructural Warfare • "There is nothing in the world today that cannot become a weapon" (Liang and Xiangsui, 1999)

•  "If you want to destroy someone nowadays, you go after their infrastructure. " (Phil Agre, 2001)

“Global Guerillas” and Infrastructural insurgencies “Global economic networks, like today's oil networks, are typically sparse (few nodes),

hierarchical (an inverted pyramid of distribution), concentrated (big hubs), and vulnerable (not built with security in mind).

Complex infrastructure often exhibits extreme levels of vulnerability to non-planned events. The reason for this is may be found in an area of complexity research called highly optimized tolerance (HOT). HOT research has found that

complex networks, like most global infrastructure, exhibit behaviors explained by the design considerations of its makers. The

end-result of this planning is a network that is extremely robust against certain types of

anticipated failures/insults but conversely is hypersensitive to unanticipated classes of

uncertainty”. John Robb

Water…

Streets…

•  "the next Pearl Harbor will be both everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It's targets will not be the U.S. military or defense system but, instead, the U.S. public and its post-industrial and highly informatized lifestyle. What is now a tool for comfort, an object of leisure, or a necessary support for work [..] will soon become the world's deadliest weapon” (Debrix, 2001).

State-Backed Infrastructural War

•  John Warden’s “Enemy as a System”. Basis for US doctrine :

“Strategic Ring Theory”

•  Legitimises civilian infrastructures as ‘dual-use targets’

•  Ritzer "by declaring dual-use

targets legitimate military objectives, the Air Force can

directly target civilian morale".

•  Edward Felker’s (1998) embellishment of Warden

•  Infrastructure, rather than a

separate 'ring' of the 'enemy as a system', in fact pervades, and

connects, all the others to actually "constitute the society as a

whole"

•  "If infrastructure links the subsystems of a society," he wrote, "might it be the most important target ?" (1998).

First Order Effects Second Order Effects

Third Order Effects

No light after dark or in building interiors

Erosion of command and control capabilities

Greater logistics complexity

No refrigeration Increased requirement for power generating equipment

Decreased mobility

Some stoves/ovens non operable

Increased requirement for night vision devices

Decreased Situational Awareness

Inoperable hospital electronic equipment

Increased reliance on battery-powered items for news, broadcasts, etc.

Rising disease rates

No electronic access to bank accounts/money

Shortage of clean water for drinking, cleaning and preparing food

Rising rates of malnutrition

Disruption in some transportation and communications services

Hygiene problems Increased numbers of non-combatants requiring assistance

Disruption to water supply, treatment facilities, and sanitation

Inability to prepare and process some foods

Difficulty in communicating with non-combatants

‘Bomb Now, Die Later’ : The ‘War on Public Health’ in Iraq -- 1991-2003 •  General Buster Glosson 1991 : ”I want to put every [Iraqi] household in an

autonomous mode and make them feel they were isolated… We wanted to play with their psyche"

Towards State Computer Network Attack (CNA)