Infrastructuring text:
This paper demonstrates how community support is often quintessential for populations experiencing routine disruptions to be resilient (e.g. LGBTQ individuals who created community over online forums). This community support is also essential for people in Philadelphia experiencing energy vulnerability during COVID-19. People who faced energy service disruptions such as having heating systems that stopped working, knew someone in their community who could come out and look at it as opposed to calling an unknown HVAC company. The elderly relied on community members/community organizations to help them stay connected during COVID. Community organizations offered Zoom tutorials, and community orgs bought prepaid cell phones for vulnerable community members. Additionally, NEC staff reached out to clients, especially vulnerable and elderly clients, to ensure that they were connected to resources during the pandemic.
The fourth principle of infrastructuring practices that generated resilience is that it creates alternative pathways through people to manage disruptions. “People were building alternative infrastructures through which they and others could more successfully adapt to their disruptions. Beyond being able to adapt and manage their disruptions, we find that infrastructuring also led to innovations that may not have been possible otherwise” An example of this seen with our research is Hunting Park’s GofundMe for air conditioning units and fans for people dealing with extreme heat this summer. This use of information and communication technologies served as counter infrastructure for failing assistance programs/physical home infrastructure that is insufficient. Another example is the usage of space heaters when individuals experienced disruptions to their home heating system. They created an alternative technical infrastructure when their normative home infrastructure failed them.
Technology isn’t always accessible/easily usable for those experiencing energy vulnerability, so technology can’t always be a means of resilience. If technical infrastructures themselves (access to sustainable internet, having electricity in one’s home) is the infrastructure that is failing folks, it cannot be a means of resilience. Additionally because of utility inaffordability, the usage of technology as a means of resilience may further burden energy vulnerable households.
Maintenance text:
“The Restart Project has a slightly different ethos. This U.K.- based organization hosts parties and a podcast and collaborates with schools to teach people how to repair their devices. In a similar vein, some public libraries in the U.S. have opened “U-Fix-It” clinics and “repair cafes,” which are a natural extension of the recent proliferation of library makerspaces.” → These resources which embrace “salvage” and the possibilities of adaptation mirror energy conservation workshops where maintenance of home heating systems is mildly touched on, but could be expanded into an entire workshop of its own. The difference lies between the essentiality and mobility of the technologies being repaired- home heating systems may be deemed more essential than a television, and cannot be taken physically to a shop to be repaired.
“We can perform various actions on broken objects — “mending, repairing, fixing, restoring, preserving, cleaning, recycling, up-keeping, and so on” — yet these objects, much like architectures, vary in their “openness and capacity to be taken care of.” → home heating systems often lack the openness and capacity for homeowners to take care of them.
Slow emergencies text:
This text argues that governing through emergencies seeks to reconsolidate and restore the liberal order after disruption. Many policies put forth by the federal government during the emergency declaration during COVID-19 exemplify this, as one-time stimulus payments were made to maintain social order and restore the liberal status quo. More specifically relating to energy, energy assistance programs were not rethought as crisis ensued and more households were in need of energy assistance, and larger sums were necessary for households to avoid energy emergencies, but rather more funding was placed in preexisting pools for energy assistance to again restore the liberal status quo.
There is one section in this reading that has potential to aid in our framing. At one point, the author, Shannon Mattern, discusses slow disasters and how the lack of repair can lead to this. It wasn’t large scale things like a bridge collapse, but small, nearly indiscernible domino effects. Mattern uses the example of a broken washing machine that can no longer filter out bacteria. Because of this, household members can get sick. There’s a nearly endless amount of examples we can use when discussing maintenance and repair. This article does not mention disruptions directly, but I am certain that we can use this framework of slow disasters due to disrepair and relate it to disruptions.