Joey Wagemans
Cars have been in our lives for as long as we can remember. Many people probably can’t even imagine how to live without them. It has become more than just a technical artefact. It has become a social construct. At the same time there are people in this world right now, who have never used a car. Perhaps they don’t need transportation or perhaps the car is simply not an important part of their social circle. This could be the case, for example, for people living on an island.
The car can be seen as a social-technical system, which means it’s not merely a technical artefact that doesn’t operate in isolation, but it’s highly dependent on specific and complex ensembles of elements and the interplay between them, like other technical and non-technical elements in society and the economy. If you would apply such a technical artefact on a small scale society, like an island, it may look quite different when compared to how the technical artefact is used on a global scale. Let me give an example.
In the summer of 2014 I went on a backpacking trip through Scandinavia and eventually I ended up in Göteburg, Sweden . This large city has an archipelago with its own community. To get to an island of this archipelago, one must ride a small ferry. This ferry enters all the small ports of the islands, before returning to the dock on the shore of Göteburg. It works almost like a tram line.
Since the islands are so small, there is no need for cars on the island. Every island is a small community on itself, offering some small stores. The bigger islands might have a school or a small health clinic. Locals have to use the ferry, not only to go back to the shore, but also to switch between islands. Most adults use the ferry every day to get to work. Some children have to use the ferry to go to school. Every islands offers its own community, but all the islands together also form a community on a bigger scale.
But since there are no cars on these islands, how would you transport many and/or heavy objects? All the islands have big hills and moving stuff around takes a lot of energy. The islanders have various solutions for that. The island of Brännö, the second largest island, uses small mopeds with a loading space. It’s their very own type of transportation. One of the smaller islands, Köpstadsö, doesn’t even need motorized vehicles. Instead, every islander has its personal wheelbarrow. They don’t need much more to live with.
My point would be, on a small scale community, like an island, maybe the globally used technology isn’t the best one. Perhaps a new technology has to be used with which the people are more comfortable and perhaps this technology could offer the rest of the world some new insights.
