For Argos Jeria.
blog originally appeared in the Sino Bello.
In his Tropicalia 2 along with Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso sings "Things have weight, mass, volume, size, time, shape, color, position, texture, length, density, value, consistency, depth, shape, temperature, function, appearance, price, destination, age, sense, things have no peace. "And I must add that I also have a policy.
many years ago, say twenty-seven, I came across an article titled "artifacts have politics?" * In it the author showed the relationship between technology and policy options, as illustrated by presenting certain design features infrastructure projects - bridges in your example - whose height did not allow access to vehicles used by the poor to more affluent areas. I think in the Chile of today we are witnessing a brutal relationship between artifacts and policy options.
When we decided to make the highways a good that could buy who could afford them, we decided simultaneously by making them available to those areas where it coexists the highest rate of car ownership and increased income: the eastern sector. So those who live there today have ready access to the airport via the north coast (which already has over $ 300 million subsidy). When we chose the same policy with public transport in area, used massively for the lower income sectors, the system was designed so that the number of buses were being funded with the then existing rate, which is why it was so low. After modern roads and buses atocha after these things, these artifacts, is the ideology of a system that discriminates on the money. It is true that this has also occurred in education and health, but these artifacts are more physically visible, although users of highways and bus atocha not see each other. I remark all this even without sin city or that such designs behave, what it is to do from the districts of Providencia and La Reina by an elevated highway, or the sin of mobility, as these highways do not solve the congestion, growing forever at the expense of urban space as seen in Mexico City and many other parties.
There are those who criticize the use of mathematics to tackle the problem of designing a public transport system. As I have shown here, the problem is not mathematical models but the objective sought to achieve with them. And this objective is political. Our goal, of course, is find a nice but.
---- * "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" By Langdon Winner. Daedalus, Vol 109, No. 1, Winter 1980. Also in The Social Shaping of Technology, edited by Donald A. MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (London: Open University Press, 1985, second edition 1999). Winner is a renowned social scientist, was a contributor to Rolling Stone Magazine in the 60s and 70s.
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