Low Tech
From Bricowiki
Contents |
Bricolabs @ Elniuton
Intro
The times are a-changing. That is the only certainty we have. What is different maybe, is that they are changing faster. This acceleration is due to possibilities internet and mobile networks offer for individuals to find likeminds faster. For most people the internet is the WorldWideWeb now about 16 years old. In these sixteen years we have seen many varieties of disruptive innovations in various forms of content (individuals gaining power with their ideas and opinions through blogs, issue websites, online collaboration), as well as in formats (YouTube video, tomtom navigation).
The next major step will be the change we are now witnessing daily in our conceptual models of framing data-informating and knowledge in our institutions and formal environments. The Internet of Things (IoT) imagines a world where everything can be both analogue and digitally approached - and reformulates our relationship with objects -things- as well as the objects themselves.
According to Gérald Santucci, Head of RFID Unit EU, the Internet of Things cannot be built without artists, designers and philosophers. These insights have been clear to us from the moment we - as designers, artists, coders, tinkerers and thinkers spotted such developments. This was one of the reasons we had for forming the loose network Bricolabs (www.bricolabs.net) : which asks how can open source hardware allow citizens throughout the world to have more control over applications, devices and infrastructures which are rapidly disappearing into 'smart environments' (but readableand accessible to only few people)? The network now has around 180 members in over 40 countries throughout the world. It is a space for discourse and ideas sharing, for polemic and for collaborations to be spawned, tested and made true.
Low-Tech: Only-Tech
Rob van Kranenburg
"When Steve Jobs came back to Apple he closed down the group I was part of, the so-called Advanced Technology Group. He said, "research is done in the crucible of development" and that was nine years ago. I guess he was not far off. We were dispensible." (Steve Cisler)
"I remember the first meeting we had at Granja do Torto in which I understood absolutely nothing about what these people were discussing, and there was an enormous tension between those defending the adoption of Free Software by Brazil and those saying we should just do what we always did - buy and pay for others intelligence. Thanks God, in our country, the decision to adopt Free Software prevailed." - Lula, President of Brazil @ FISL 2009
In a recent brainstorm in Amsterdam on the 'next wave of computing' (intelligent everything) attended by people from GS1, Philips, Mobi Ubiq, University of Nijmegen, Technology Foresight Group STT, etc - a view emerged that the real immediate value for people of current developments lies not so much in the home as in neighbourhoods and communities (ie walkable distances).. Breaking down the day of a family of four into a set of activities clustering around morning, afternoon and evening, the main issues centered on all the traffic and trips families undertook which coincided with their immediate neighbours. Coordinating childrens' trips to school, shopping trips and sharing of tools that too many people own individually - coupling green with social cohesion - were among the first scenarios.
These collaborative ideas of 2009 are very much in line with the recent developments in web2.0, the rise of social sites and networks ad collaborative projects such as wikipedia. These developments have begun to change the content and the formats of the old forms of social media production and are now beginning to be applied to core functions and core models of organization (institutions, representative democracy, national law, copyright, patent law) as is shown quite accurately by documentaries and films such as 'Us Now'.
In Europe (as well as in the rest of the world) the prediction is that these developments will continue and not stop at the heart of what is still the key to the nation states that have shed their own right to control their currencies etc eg in Europe we have the euro, 85% of laws are made by Brussels not at national level, we have privatization of core services, pay high taxes. Consider this scenario: in 2011 the first mass refusal to pay a lump sum of money to ineffective shells of organization takes place. Nation states implode within weeks creating chaos in the just in time economy that results in running out of food in cities in two to three days. Cars break down, people cannot repair them. The communication infrastructure is so seamless nobody can find a handle to open a door to get inside. Some people refer to it as the Detroit scenario. However there is a major difference: this will directly affect 500 million people, not "only" two, resulting in a new medieval age plus gang rule.It is inevitable that the vertical institutions will break under the weight of the internet based decision possibilities of evergrowing groups of people organizing themselves on all kinds of specific topics. The organizational structure of taxes and fines, one men one vote every four years, cannot harnass that kind of change. The question is not when it will break, but how we can help existing institutions and power nodes to transform into a networked form of a variety of heterogeneous forms of organization that need mediation. There is no difference between Europe, US, China, Latin America, Africa or any other continent or nation in this respect. What differs is the level of violence old forms of power will go to or cling to in other to keep from changing.
As people are not ready for self-organization, having not been educated into it, it is no option now to fuel the fire (hack the systems that are used for control and classification schemes, coordinate large scale demonstrations alerting a larger public to spychips and the building of a golden shield Shenzen style, go underground with our own forms of secure communications) without proposing a viable alternative for a general public. It is in the long run inevitable as a social structure of educated individuals choosing how to live together with whom they want in freedom. We need to educate people into living it. This is the premisse of bricolabs: following the logic of a dark but plausible scenario focusing on breakdown rather then contuinity, we want to bypass the possibility of this scenario by facilitating citizens with the ability to work and rework not only their applications and services but the infrastructures that determine and color the outlook and scale of these too.
Web 2.0 technologies (such as wikis, blogs, content systems, image repositories, etc.) are progressively allowing novel forms of self-organised communication and associations. Web sites such as Squid Labs Instructables, ([1]), online magazines like Make, ([2]) and Craft ([3]), and e-commerce sites like Etsy ([4]) encourage individuals and groups to take control of their material environment by transforming it. These sites provide information resources for hardware and software hackers, mechanics, and crafters, and assist creators in selling and distributing the results. The sites listed above are only the most obvious and public aspects of what is a growing phenomenon - the sharing of DIY information and resources.
This calls for large scale experimentation with and comparison of visionary approaches for network architectures and technologies focused on bottom up agency and end user programming of citizens as deep into the network architecture as possible and desirable for new ways of organizing individual needs and dreams, the business contexts in which we live locally and want to be mobile globally and the political ways of organizing the balances between individual behaviour and public space, short term gain versus long term neighbourhood plans, in short: mediation, slowing down, dissemination inclusiveness, negotiatation.
The central theme is that of "re-working", "re-using", and "re-purposing" existing infrastructures in order to develop novel forms of knowledge exchange between artists, technologists, and socio-technical theorists, as well as the development of new models for innovation in business and in society more generally. Bricolabs aims at making toolkits for communities. These toolkits can have some generic components such as the bricophone which is a community-oriented mobile phone infrastructure in Open Source. It is a low cost, low energy, open hardware, open source project built for communities up to ten thousand people within regional distances. The characteristic of the Bricophone infrastructure is that it does not require any static infrastructure like relays, antennas, or digital data centers. This provides the opportunity for special uses in poor communities, mass rescueing in disastered areas, and cultural and social activities like festivals and other mass events. [5]
There is also the idea of open source washing machine which aims to rethink the way we wash clothes around the world, in accordance with economical, sociological, cultural and environmental aspects. Most of the people in this planet (predominantly also female) wash clothes by hand in harsh conditions related to poverty, lack of sanitation, water or energy. [6]
Also among the bricolabs members is the [HONF (House of Natural Fiber)] in Indonesia (Yogjakarta) which has set up projects for disabled people in Indonesia. The production of prosthetics in Indonesia is still done manually and consumes more time than is available. With their own tools HONF will make tailormade prosthetics.
[HONF (House of Natural Fiber)]: http://www.natural-fiber.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=85&Itemid=87
Grass-Root Tech
Vanessa Gocksch
In 1991, I moved to Mexico to continue my studies as a sculptor. As a European who had spent too many years in Miami and had never lived in the "south" one of the first things that amazed me was to discover that a foundry was not necessarily an expensive machine you had to buy from a manufacturer but something that you could make, and that the tools used for modelling could also be made by hand with local exotic hardwoods instead of the bristle pine tools I had bought at the arts supply store in the US. For a person like me, coming from a consumerist culture like the USA, it was amazing to see how people in Mexico invented so many things themselves, this discovery opening for me a whole new perspective where creating anything I wanted as a sculptor was no longer an economic question but a question of learning.
Today, I live in Colombia where there is also a rich tradition of inventiveness and self manufacturing of almost anything (as Alejo Duque illustrates below), yet at the same time each day this capacity for creation is disappearing. This occurs because most of the younger generation, influenced by television, migration to the cities and the dynamics of westernization cease to value their own patrimonial cultural heritage. Pride of one’s unique cultural identity is being replaced by a desire to imitate and conform / blend to the standards of western lifestyles which includes standards of life which almost none of Colombia's population can afford economically and which have been proven unsustainable as they consume too much of the planets resources. A consciousness as to what traditional low technologies (adobe construction or polyculture etc.) or newer low technologies (recycling of old computers or use of peltons) are and how they can improve peoples living standards while making possible an ecologically sustainable world society is crucial in order for people to gain an interest in recuperating traditional technologies and the curiosity to investigate new ones.
I would like to give a few examples of how low tech applied to
everyday living situation on the coast of Colombia can improve living
standards.
Traditionally in the Caribbean of Colombia, the houses were made in
bareke, a technique combining wood and earth for the walls with a roof
covered in palm leaves. These house are extremely resistant and only
the palm has to be changed every 8 year approximately. These house are
also cool and free to make because all that is needed are your own
labor, all of the materials are availbale from nature. Today on the
Colombian coast, almost no one constructs in bareke anymore, they use
cement, bricks and zinc. These materials are toxic to the environment,
expensive and have to be brought to the region from long distances. In
my town I searched for someone to teach us how to construct in bareke
but could no longer find anyone who knew the exact technique, although
there are still several bareke houses standing in the village. The
most important problem at a global scale with cement, is that it is
bad for the environment as the CO2 that is produced during its
fabrication is high, it also makes for very hot houses and cement
traps humidity which produces mold and can lead to health problems,
this material is usually fabricated far from the site of construction,
thus incrementing the harm to the environment as fuel is needed for
transport. So why do people choose then to construct in cement? The
two arguments I have received from the local people as to why they
prefer cement and brick is that its easier to construct with, and yes
it is true that working with lime or earth is more time consuming and
requires more skill, as all low technologies are also slower
technologies....but time is an unemployed man«s greatest asset, and
the if the skill no longer exists it is because the people have chosen
to forget them, having lost interest in their own technologies. As
Felipe mentioned in reference to the situation in Brazil, knowledge is
no longer something you can find within but that you look for
elsewhere Ð big brother has all the best solutions, eyes closed, I
will consume. This leads me to the second argument local people gave
me for constructing cement houses which was simply that these were
better, but this is an assumption based on acceptance of the status
quo, not on investigation or common sense which proves other wise....
We are constructing our own house in earth and we have employed our
neighbors which are empirical masons for our construction, they live
in cement houses which they are making slowly over the years each time
they have enough money to buy the next load of bricks and bags of
cement, we have not been able to convince them to construct their own
house in earth as to date, yet they spend their lunch break in our
house resting, because it is cooler.
Another example is a beach near Tairona Park called Playa Picua, here
a family has lived for over 6 years, the wells of this beach do not
provide water suitable for showering and much less for drinking, and
the family has been bringing water for the past years from the town
which is 3 klm. away, sometimes by foot, or bicycle or motorcycle or
horse. Their children had skin problems as a result of the poor
water. A friend of mine, Oscar Jimenez saw this problem and helped
them to install a simple water catching system from their roof top
which cost them 175 US $ including 2 big water holding tank.With this
system they now have descent water for showering and drinking. All
that was missing was an idea leading to a low tech solution.
A similar situation occurs in the village where I live,Taganga, where the water is not suitable for drinking and so the consumption of low quality drinking water that comes in two gallon plastic bags. My neighbor Ruben Reyes made his own water filter from recycled materials which provides for his families needs. His filter costs $ 25 US to make is very simple to fabricate, he sells it for $ 50 US. But there are not many Tagangeros interested in making their own filter or buying one from Ruben. This lack of interest in Ruben´s filter probably is related to the fact that this is a fishing village which implies that traditionally food and other goods are obtained day to day, depending on how much fish has been caught, which implies that investing a "large" sum of money to clean water for the next five years is not something they are used to. There is also a strange myth in Taganga that has it that rain water is bad water, not to be used for washing or anything else. In the past Taganga had a river and wells, but today the river is dry and the aquifer has been poisoned by septic tanks and so Tagangeros are stuck depending on the city or companies selling them water because they have not been able to adopt new ideas in order to solve their necessity.
These are just a few scenarios which illustrate that what is missing
in many cases to improve living standards is only information;
traditional information that has been lost or new information as to
what options of DIY low technology exist and how one can tailor these
to owns own needs.
To see a video of Ruben´s filter: [7]
[file:images/barekesolar.jpg] A bareke house in the Guajira peninsula of
colombia with a roof made of yotojoro which are dry cactus branches,
two solar panels adorn the roof, this is a perfect example of
combining the knowledge of the past with that of the present for
simple yet comfortable living.
[file:images/barekecemento.jpg] A bareke house in the Guajira peninsula, here instead of earth, cement was used for the outside stucco. The cement is falling of because this is inappropriate use of the different materials which cannot be combined.
[file:images/rainwater.jpg] The rain water catching system installed in Playa Picua.
From Low-Tech to [k]NO[w]-Tech
Alejo Duque
"Oh mother of pearl!*"
Where is that missile supposed to be landing?
Bricolabs responds to a call traced within the framework of
a Colombian online magazine named "elniuton". It main focus: "new technologies+art+science". It is my opinion
that the content of the magazine relates mostly to the yearly examples
validated by an international community of artists, designers,
programmers... often over represented by their respective art festivals,
conferences and friend curators.
Being teased to deal in words with the notion of Low-Tech and to come close to the subject matter engaging on defining what such an
overly oxygenated notion could be or mean within the kingdom of tropical
maladies one should at the very least try first to map the place where targeted group strives to exist.
It would be relevant to address in parallel the very notion of techne,
(from ancient greek Τέχνη meaning craftsmanship, craft, or art) which
is always the very essence of though. A track that is way too foreign as the
language im using here, while the main is to lineate a place where the idea of
"low-tech" can be presented and studied in the context of a colombian editorial project.
One can easily guess that all imported (from Europe or the US) models
fail miserably when trying to enact valuable practices or discourse on
local South American communities. In the case of Colombia, a place
that remains in the midst of sustained intellectual addiction to the
"first" world, whatever comes from the outside is consider by default
as better. All induced information flows get mixed up with a lack of
identity, a leftover complex gift of the colonialist endeavors to
erase all roots and history. Today we leave on such backslash that is
sadly driven and maintained by "Us" the locals. Colombians live
currently an international seizure. Ostrasized from a World that is
forbidden a place, while at the same time they get bombarded without
mercy, via mass mediated images, news-lines, lifestyles, and what not.
Only About 14 countries in the planet allow Colombians to freely enter their territory. Most of these are neighboring countries.
In the context of the magazine in question I propose that instead of looking out to what the "Other" is
producing under the low-tech slogan, we should subvert the approach put our attention to
reconsider why and how are those ("made in colombia") minisubmarines being built?
http://scrying.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?w=&h=&cache=cache&media=pm:weallliveinabluesubmarine_l.png For More go here: [2]
It's not just a "criminal" act as the media will put it. Fearlessly,
we should think about how their navigational and communications
systems can be improved, following drone designs to avoid putting the
life of the desperate in risk. Or, a less life threatening task, how
can we build simple helical antennas and beam signals onto
geostationary satellites to create networks for people living in the
most remote locations (this has been done and proved to work and ia
cheap and easy so would remove telecommunications companies and data
transmission ISP's). Aactivity from Brazilian pirates is mostly on
255.550 MHZ but one can also hear them on 266.66 - 262.2 AOR
fltscom 8. Some Russian pirates are discovering this UHF realm and
make test calls on 257,000 and 257,900 MHZ via a IOR (Indian Ocean
Region) satellite.
It will be then the so called "Other" and not "Us" who would follow
this free will examples of insurrection. We are all here receiving a
call on Civil disobedience.
[file:images/antenna_240mhz_4ele_yagi_500.png] This is a 4 elements yagi
antenna for 260mhz UHF Military band.
From homegrown Coca-Cola recipes, USD, Euros or Australian (known to
be one of the most secure systems) currency falsification, Black
Cocaine, Drug Cartel messaging pigeons, radio tehcniques from 50 year
old guerrilleros, GPS guided european border crossing (nothing to do
with Heath Buntings project). This is only a short list of practices
that some will clasify as illegal, all bond by the kinship of the
praxis tracing communities that are not the often quoted examples by
Negri, Hardt, Klein, Moore, etc.. to define their notion of
multitude. There will be no more knolwedge than this on the practices
of the everyday life taking place in most of the places of the
developed world.
People pushed by the need to survive acquires and develop a way of
living fearless to death, such techniques could be mistakenly labelled
as "low-tech", but I claim them far from such a classification cause
they are actualize, they enact a will to power, a particular
philosophy of living.
(IMG of cocaine balls via X-rays - on the email that comes with this
revision) caption: 10 to 15 condom made balls each containing 10grm of
cocaine.
Many Southern people stand with such attitude, pushed and driven by
the basic needs to survive and operate. They conform communities,
systems which that perform as "life technologies" (like individually
we do our breathing, walking or shitting), Invisible technologies that
we could also define as "high tech" appropriation. A 'Dispositif' that
has managed to force a detour on established social economical
structures (from the upraisal of the indigenous communities movements
in South America to the Pirate Party in Sweden). If one can't
acknowledge this, then there will be no point introducing over hyped
notions of "low tech", it will be all reduced to designers marketing
strategies for selling online and offline little gadgets on the hype
of the "Green", "enviromantally aware" or the "radical artist" posing
as councious actor... It makes me see the MAKE magazine as todays
version of what the Radio Shack catalog was for the American household
but expanded to the global scale market.
*[Roxy Music]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4J6Uyv0JDY&feature=related
2[mini submarines]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco_submarine
3[are being built]: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/magazine/26drugs-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all
4[other stories on mini-submarines]: http://scrying.org/doku.php?id=pm:alejoduque
Gambiarra
Felipe Fonseca e Hernani Dimantas
The gambiarra appears as the art of doing. The re-emergence of the do-it-yourself. Without all the conceptual tools, without the proper arguments, but with the knowledge accumulated by generations. To do in order to change the world. A counterpoint to the wild entrepreneur. To do in order to transform something that was useless in an ascending movement of creativity. The innovation is present in the post-modern DNA, in the post-human. In a gaseous life. We open parenthesis here to critique Bauman and his diverse liquid modernities. The liquid adapts to the recipient. It can be a glass, a vase, or simply the earth against which the ocean lets itself be. The gaseous flows in space, in time and in the being in existence. Post-modernity is not only liquid or gaseous, it is the multiplicity of states that are mixed, in the confluence of the Ipiranga Avenue with São João Avenue1, in the co-existence of all levels of economic and technological development. A gambiarra that remixes, modifies, transforms and mixes itself. A common trait of the everyday ingenuity, of the impromptu, the spontaneous discovery, the transformation of realities from the multiplicity of usage. The most trivial of objects, full of potential uses: in the solution of problems, in the improvised ornament, in pure and simple re-invention. The potential of shifting and reinterpreting present in each use. The tactic innovation, happening everyday, everywhere.
Gambiarra is a Portuguese word that in the dictionary means a kind of electric extension, but in real life it (naturally?) adopted another meaning, to which we can only find a few synonyms: improvisation, temporary solution, bricolage, deconstruction, precariousness. It is said to be consequence of a society that is not already completely mature: as we don't have the proper structures, the adequate tools, the specialized professionals (or the money to hire them), we improvise. We dislocate the finality of one and another object, find out a temporary solution and, this way, life goes on.
But gambiarra is much more than this. The ideal of a hyper-specialized society – with fragmented knowledge, kept in little shelves and sold in shiny wrappings – has already given signs of exhaustion. The acceleration of the acceleration of the economic growth has already started to vacillate (and we are not even going to talk about crisis, ok?). The 20th century's model of development hasn't kept its promises: the rich countries didn't manage to integrate the populations of immigrants, they created a feeling of stability and prosperity that was totally illusory, and they transformed into marketing all cultural production and solution of problems. In the name of full employment and of a totally functional society, common people have lost an essential skill: that of identifying problems, analysing the resources available and, with them, creating solutions. Instead of using creativity to solve problems, people grab the phone and the credit card. They are all victims of the logic of the Costumer Services!
This movement encompasses the seed of its own reaction. The do-it-yourself is its sequel. The new generations assume the need for acting. You can't stay with your mouth wide open, full of teeth, waiting for death to come.2 One must make a difference. Even in the rich countries and in the Brazilian urban centres, the repression of the everyday inventive impulse causes a lack of satisfaction that ends up being channelled to creative activities. Potential inventors search, in and with their pairs, acknowledgement and exchange , and gambiarra is reborn. The arrival of new technologies has opened us some spaces. People are building more and more shortcuts to participate in networks. Affinity groups are meeting to organize hacklabs, do-it-yourself initiatives, free software, low cost robotics, open hardware and experiments of various natures. In this sense, the gambiarra, our so Brazilian trait of the gambiarra, is not a delay or inadequacy, but rather a warning and an appeal to the world: develop this essential skill and the sensibility that it demands in relation to objects and their usage. Don't alienate your creativity! Don't believe in the occidental structures that want to transform creativity (the "creative industries" and all its fallacies) in nothing more than a sector of the economy, restricted and regulated. Creativity is not about the individual submission to the "creative" market that transforms everything into a product, but rather the stimulation of the ability of invention in all areas.
Gambiarra hasn't yet become a product. We must resist to this. Our anthropophagic spirit helps, but the temptations of a fully consumerist society are always around the corner (right there, in front of the shopping centre, to be precise). Curiously, it is not the precariousness of the extremes that makes the global world a threat to gambiarra. The danger is right on the other size: the spectrum of a stupid kind of development for the almost-developed. We can't have too much faith in the civilized dream of a society in which all knowledge enforcement becomes consumption, because this destroys the creative potential of the extremes that will be more and more important.
Similarly, it is also essential to question the use of gambiarra as a mere instrumental reference of aesthetic renovation, without considering this important aspect of understanding creativity as a diffused and transforming process. A question made by Aracy Amaral – and quoted in an article written by Juliana Monachesi [1] questioning the so called "aesthetic of the gambiarra" in the magazine Rumos Artes Visuais 2005-2006 – Paradoxos Brasil – is still in the air: "Has this necessary condition in which Brazilian artists are in the situation of producing or working with wastes become a mannerism?”. Gambiarra cannot be a mere formal ornament to occupy galleries – so it can develop into all its potency it has to be legitimized, lose its aura of delay and attract more and more people in the perspective of tactic creativity. These are the basis for the 'Gambiology'. We don't aspire to a praise of precariousness, of what is below the ideal, of what is beneath. No, we are working and building a world where every condition is that of abundance. If the spectrum of invention is latent in everyday life, any problem is small. You just have to train your eyes.
Alter-Natives
Denis Jaromil Roio
Bricolabs weaves its narrative between the tension and cohesion occurring in different places of the South, be it a geographical or political notion now. For this narrative to exist, a crucial role is played by social and political aspects transpiring from people's practices, the Πράξις (Praxis) of the Multitudes.
The constitutive potential lying in grass-root re-use of infrastructure is the most significative signal of emergence for irresistible contradictions cracking the monopolies of established powers.
As low-tech has grown a trend in the past 10 years (and many of us were actively involved in this process) the time has come to envision a real possibility for total democracy on planetary span, also suggested by the "free and open" philosophy elaborated by the Free Software Foundation.
What we still can't answer is a crucial question: how the multitude will pass from potency to decision, how the changes we're envisioning will constitute new institutions and organizations, to substitute the stagnating panorama of conglomearated powers.
Open knowledge, technological appropriation, code sharing are the fulcrum for a narrative as the one that Bricolabs is tracking: they are humming sources of power for societies that have been marginalized for long, be them criminalised, oppressed or alienated.
This power really flourishes within urgency and scarcity: it takes the risk to exist within the Καιρός (Kairos) and like a tree can suddenly crack a cemented pavement with its roots.
The manifestation of the collective "Other", the "Alter", becomes constituent for a democratic governance, as creative subjects can appropriate and re-combine the infrastructures they live in: grass-root development becomes a third way between the polarizing tension of privatized and state-centered system designs.
The rise of Alter-natives is evident even in the so called "developed world", in the middle of tragedies as the Katrina hurricane hitting New Orleans, as well the recent earthquake that hit Abruzzo, a southern region of Italy, with a seismic swarm of medium intensity.
This event provoked the death of 300 people in L'Aquila and surrounding towns, among other constructions it destroyed half of the city hospital and half of student house where many young engineers were sleeping. The 6th of April 2009, at 3:32 AM, an European city of historical relevance, since many years bound to special anti-seismic regulations and controls for its constructions, was made to its knees by a 6 grade Richter earthquake.
[file:images/ragno_cupola_aquila.jpg]
The local population quickly responded to these facts finding out, among other construction irregularities, that salty water was being mixed to make cement: it was cheaper for construction industries to pump public water from the nearby sea, while this process could be kept hidden until these final results. Cement, a seamless technology widely deployed for cheap constructions, was made very weak by the presence of salt in its inner composition, while it was almost impossible for citizens to be aware of the dangers they were facing.
The tragedy unfolded counting more than 24.000 homeless people of which 6.000 still live in tents, as of today under the snow, 6 months later. The Italian government promised new housing for everyone and has even hosted a G8 summit in the middle of the disaster area, meanwhile it has posed obstacles to all grass-root forms of organizations and horizontal platforms for information exchange during the disaster relief. Survivors (not "activists coming from outside") were interdicted from gathering meetings and even printing and distributing fliers. A strictly top-down form of management for all the reconstruction process was enforced (and its efficiency exalted) denying any form of participation by the native population directly affected.
Nevertheless grass-root forms of coordination like the 3e32 committee and the Brigate di Solidarieta' attiva have seen birth, to claim the legitimacy of a participative process in the reconstruction, but also implementing parallel forms of local democratic governance.
As this story still unfolds, it is not up to us to draw conclusions, rather than suggest a focused research on these dynamics and their strenuous growth: they suggest future problems that more communities, also those living in the developed world, might face.
Related Links:
Lowtech vs. Control
Fernando Rabelo
Watch the video online: http://www.vimeo.com/3056914
