What causes an infrastructure to be (well) maintained or, alternatively, to fall into disrepair? When revisiting our beloved Big Island on the occasion of this year’s Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), we stayed in a cosy little house hidden behind a wall of palm trees in Paradise Park, located south of Hilo, the island’s almost forgotten capital. Eager to find sites we hadn’t seen during our previous visits, we decided to return via a coastal road called the ‘Government Beach Road’ after a trip to a supermarket in nearby Pāhoa. Coming across a desert-like lava-covered plain, that road embraced us with lush vegetation and afforded a gorgeous ride along its old alley trees:
After crossing a narrow strip of settlements, the main road turns away from the coastline. However, we decided to continue northwards since that street, now just called the Beach Road, would bring us directly back to Paradise Park, according to Google Maps. What looked like a regular road on the map, however, turned out to be an abandoned infrastructure where the asphalt of the old road accounted only for a minor fraction of the road’s surface which otherwise consisted of huge potholes. Driving at walking speed, I feared that one of the wheels of our four wheel drive car might break off any moment. It didn’t happen and we safely reached Paradise Park.
A couple of days later, we decided to explore a coastal hiking path located directly north of Paradise Park, called the Puna Historic Trail. It leads to a secluded beach known for its population of sea turtles, the Haena Beach or Shipman Beach. It is a relatively broad path going right through the jungle. Walking is not easy because the path is covered with leaves and other decaying plant parts which hide uneven lava stones underneath.
Suddenly, we found something strange, the remains of a car on the wayside. Musing about the stupidity of some past visitors, who obviously had attempted to take this path by car — there were several signs and a barrier at the entrance of the path warning and preventing visitors from riding bicycles — we passed by another car wreck after some time, and another and yet another.
Upon closer inspection, the lava stones underneath the dead growth turned out to be old cobble stones. It now dawned on me that this path once was a road. Indeed, it turns out that this path was once the continuation of the Government Beach Road that we had taken a few days earlier. It was used to connect the coastal towns and, when still functioning as such, was just called the Government Road, as documented here. We had encountered this road in three different states of repair/disrepair.
What is it that causes a road to be well maintained or, alternatively, to fall into disrepair? I did not further dig into the reasons why parts of this former coastal road were left to decay, partly re-vitalized as a hiking path; this probably has a lot to do with urban planning such as of the various ‘parks’, really local settlements of recreational homes, and the construction of a wider road encircling the whole islands (except along those stretches where recent lava flows have interrupted it). However, I began to occasionally ponder this question in more general terms.
Watching a Youtube video on the eight best preserved Roman structures, I was recently particularly struck by two cases, the Pont du Gard (story begins right after the introduction to the video) and the Aqueduct of Segovia (story starts at 6:40′). Both were built as aqueducts, i.e. waterways, but, with the declining population of Nimes served by the Pont du Gard it stopped to function as such in 6th century. It was then repurposed as a toll bridge and kept intact for that purpose by local lords for centuries, untill it was abandoned as an infrastructure and threatened by the practice of using it as a quarry in the 17th century, only to be put into repair again in the 18th century due to its increasing touristic value. The amazing thing about the Aqueduct of Segovia, built around 100 a.d., is that it is still used as such in our times, an infrastructure that serves its purpose since almost 2,000 years and, therefore, is well maintained.
My son, who visited me recently, suggested an interesting explanation for why infrastructures might be maintained or left to decay when I told him of my Big Island experience. Drawing on the case of the in Ireland only recently rediscovered practice of stone lifting, he suggested that it is the handing down of narratives through the centuries that is the basis for the continued maintenance of an infrastructure. He reasoned that such narratives provide a potential source for identity reproduction and are thus considered valuable. When an infrastructure is threatened, e.g. by short-term economic considerations or by declining use, remembering these stories and their symbolic value may be the reason why it is protected. What came to my mind are the examples of the Silk Road(s), surrounded by many stories and tales, such as the Chinese classic ‘Journey to the West’, and of the Jacob’s Way, where the symbolic value of the way itself nowadays seems to surpass the value of the destination that originally attracted pilgrims to Santiago de Compostella, supposedly the grave of St. Jakobus the apostle. If these narratives are forgotten, an infrastructure is at risk.
Incidently, the paper I had presented at this year’s HICSS concerns the rise and fall of the medical prescription as a so-called boundary object, easily characterised as an infrastructure, that has organized the relationship between physician and pharmacist for centuries. In this paper, we speculate that the digitalization of the medical prescription in Germany, introduced two years ago, may cause it to stop functioning as a boundary object, and hence as an infrastructure, because, when dispensing a drug based on an electronic prescription, the pharmacist no long needs to know who the prescribing physician is, so that this information is no longer displayed by default. The pharmacist might therefore forget that the prescription once was a link with the physician, which was a source for identity reproduction for centuries, and hence no longer see it as valuable. Pharmacist will therefore probably not fight for its preservation should it be decided that the dispensing of drugs to a particular patient is to be authorized by a physician without a prescription.