CONCEPT
Infrastructure Otherwise
Cowen's ongoing research project investigating logistical systems designed for collective sustenance rather than extraction — infrastructures built around care rather than throughput.
Infrastructure Otherwise is the constructive companion to Cowen's critical logistics work. Where The Deadly Life of Logistics maps how global supply chains produce systematic violence, the Infrastructure Otherwise project investigates alternative models already in operation: indigenous water management systems, community land trusts, cooperative energy networks, mutual aid distribution. These are logistical systems — they move resources, organize flows, coordinate collective action across space and time — but their design priorities are inverted. They optimize not for throughput but for the sustainability of the communities they serve. The Bogotá Avenida Primero de Mayo redesign is one instance: a road that still moves traffic but has been reoriented from vehicular throughput to community care, reducing fatalities by sixty percent. Cowen's AI application asks what a cognitive pipeline redesigned on these principles would look like — valves, buffers, distributional audits, mechanisms for voice.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The project's central move is refusing the assumption that infrastructure must be extractive to function. Cowen's case studies demonstrate that infrastructures optimized for community