09041 Services that protect us

Community development, or community building, depends on identifying, developing and sustaining relationships. Central to being successful in those relationships is community leadership. — Center for Collaborative Planning

Vinay Gupta’s work on resilience includes an in-depth consideration of the types of infrastructure that protect us from the Six Ways to Die.

In developed countries, infrastructure is invisible, universal, expensive, and hard to repair. Your sewer lines may be buried 12 feet deep in the ground. I found this out when the my connection to the city’s sewer collapsed. Excavating for that repair was a major undertaking.

The three types of services that protect us are Shelter, Supply, and Safety.

Shelter includes our houses and the utility systems that make our homes comfortable. It protects us from heat and cold and some aspects of injury. It is an essential component of Safety. Notice how these three sets of essential services beneficially connect with each other.

POP QUIZ! How many times have you read in iPermie about “beneficial connections” being important before? What does the prevalence of this concept suggest about its relative importance to the design for your life?

Police and fire departments and medical care and public health systems provide us with Safety. Informal networks of safety consist of neighborhoods, families, and friends. These systems protect us from injury and illness and provide rescue and healing when injury and illness do occur. Our houses and supply systems help keep the population safe and alive.

Supply protects us from hunger and thirst. Our safety systems ensure that supply can work economically and effectively to keep the population supplied with the necessities of life (and a considerable amount of non-necessities in the process).

Depending on where you are in the world — your geography and economics — there are dense networks of overlapping infrastructure where these three essential service systems operate. There can be as many as seven levels —

  • Individual
  • Household
  • Neighborhood/Village
  • Municipality/City
  • Region
  • Country
  • International

The successful operation of these layers and systems of infrastructure requires the interaction of technology, science, engineering, finance, manufacturing, law, communications, management, politics, and governance.

This cooperation often extends across political and bio-regional boundaries. The density and complexities of the systems are both strength and weakness. While overlapping layers provide some redundancy, if there is too much disruption, the complexity of the system makes it hard to restore during a time of trouble. For example, a food processing factory requires:

  • fuel (to haul the ingredients in and the products out, electricity and maybe natural gas to operate the processing machinery),
  • ingredients (incoming farm products),
  • containers for the processed foods,
  • trained personnel to operate the systems,
  • finances to pay for everything,
  • a system to haul way or otherwise process the waste,
  • a distribution system to take the processed products from the food factory to the distribution points.

All must be in place for one pound of food to be processed. If the product goes into jars, if there are no lids, or if there are no jars, the factory can’t operate. The lid factory may be on the other side of the continent or in another nation. There may be only one place in the whole world where a necessary component is made, without which the entire plant grinds to a halt.

If there is disruption in the area, the infrastructure may not be able to do its job protecting us from the Six Ways to Die.

At the micro (household and individual) level, our resilience, persistence, and constancy challenges are to understand the risks caused by our dependence upon continental-scale systems that are brittle and may fail in the face of future challenges and threats. We look for ways to mitigate the hazards that may result if emergencies disrupt existing infrastructure and services. This suggests a need for both alternative local systems and local storages of food, water, and other critical materials.

At the macro (community) level, we think about designs that will increase the constancy, persistence, and resilience of regions by evolving our layers of infrastructure to be more robust in the face of multiple future challenges.

We look for patterns that we can replicate to provide these services of safety, shelter, and supply. The most desirable patterns are those that —

  • stack functions,
  • provide redundancy,
  • offer many beneficial connections,
  • use natural methods, featuring the biological, the small, and the slow,
  • are conservative of all forms of stuff (resources, energy, money, etc.),
  • are conservative in their demands on people,
  • regenerate systems and supplies.

We want to see a lot of beneficial connections that will integrate our infrastructures.

The equation of safety and persistence:

More beneficial connections = more resilience = safer infrastructure = reliable services

The equation of failure:

Fewer beneficial connections = less resilience = brittle infrastructure = unreliable services prone to collapse and failure