30. The quietly radical importance of everyday infrastructures
There is no normal, there are everyday social infrastructures; Night trains are not just night trains; Isabel Wilkerson on caste as infrastructure, Simon Baron-Cohen on empathy; Planning remains socially distant from reality
COVID-19 thrives on the inequalities and fractures in our systems. Yet the way the virus spreads also demonstrates that a genuinely systemic response could not only prevent the increased likelihood of pandemics, but also bushfires, health inequalities, climate crisis, and racism. whilst developing social, cultural and economic resilience. Systems can be flipped to reverse the polarity of these negative outcomes, using the same relational logic with entirely different motives. And as with a bushfire, or a virus, or a protest, such interventions can start small and grow.
“In an unstable complex system, small islands of coherence have the potential to change the whole system.”—Ilya Progogine
This attempt to flip systems is unlikely to emerge from a technocratic approach, as if we can simply pull a few levers and step back and watch in…
