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Constructing infrastructure
Published in Sarah Bell, Urban Water Sustainability, 2017
The failure of top-down models of development, based on direct transfer of industrial and technological systems from the Global North to the Global South, to deliver improvements in the lives of the poorest people provided impetus for the emergence of the ‘appropriate technology’ movement from the 1960s until the 1980s (Smith et al., 2016). Partly inspired by ideas presented in E.F. Schumacher’s (1973) classic Small is Beautiful, calls for appropriate technology challenged the transfer of large-scale industrial development to the developing world and called for development that was rooted in local environments and cultures and operated on a ‘human scale’. Appropriate technologies meet local needs, are able to be fabricated and maintained using local resources and skills, and have net positive impacts on the local environment. The principles of appropriate technology, also known as ‘alternative technology’ or ‘intermediate technology’, also found relevance in the Global North, particularly amongst environmentalists. Decentralisation of infrastructure, and associated political and social institutions, has become a common theme in much environmental literature, activism and design. The alternative technology movement in industrialised economies promoted energy efficiency, renewable energy, composting, rainwater harvesting, greywater reuse and other alternatives to centralised infrastructural systems.
Public participation and democratization: effects on the production and consumption of science and technology
Published in Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 2020
Alternative energies, such as solar, wind and biogas, were one of the main focuses (and legacy) of the alternative technology movement. They were conceived as small-scale and decentralized projects, compatible with a social project that provided for their use and administration by communities aiming at self-sufficiency (Elliott 2016). Embraced by environmental movements, their use has expanded since the 1990s. For example, Vasi (2009) shows that the expansion of wind energy in Europe is correlated not only with wind conditions, but also with the intensity of the environmental movement across different countries. However, the situation created was contradictory. If, on the one hand, the design of alternative technologies has left its imprint—in 2013, 40% of renewable energy capacity in Germany was locally owned, produced by individuals or cooperatives—on the other hand, there has been a tendency for them to be co-opted by corporations, escalated to mass production, centrally controlled and used to maintain high standards of energy consumption (Elliott 2016; Smith 2005).