# History (and stories) of off-grid technologies: a reappraisal

Olivier Coutard, Benjamin Bothereau, Joel Tarr

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Olivier Coutard, Benjamin Bothereau, Joel Tarr. History (and stories) of off-grid technologies: a reappraisal. Flux - Cahiers scientifiques internationaux Réseaux et territoires, 2023, N° 131 (1), pp.1-14. 10.3917/flux1.131.0001 . halshs-04469244

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# History (and stories) of off-grid technologies: a reappraisal

Olivier Coutard, Benjamin Bothereau, Joel Tarr

DANS FLUX 2023/1 (N° 131), PAGES 1 À 14

ÉDITIONS UNIVERSITÉ GUSTAVE EIFFEL

ISSN 1154-2721

DOI 10.3917/flux1.131.0001

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# History (and stories) of off-grid technologies: a reappraisal

## L'histoire des techniques hors réseau : une réévaluation

Olivier Coutard
Benjamin Bothereau
Joel Tarr

Flux was created more than 30 years ago to explore the many facets of the expansion of technological networks, networked forms of territoriality, and more generally, networked organizations, that has characterized long-industrialized countries of the “global West” since the early nineteenth century. Although most contributions to the journal have addressed contemporary processes, changes, or issues, a historical (or, at least, retrospective) perspective was often part and parcel of “networkification” studies in the journal, and Flux has regularly published the writings of historians—starting with the “historiographical notes” that appeared in the first issue of the journal and were co-authored by one of the authors of the present introduction (Tarr et alii, 1990).

As already noted, the dominant perspective in Flux articles was one of (irrepressible) expansion of technological networks, although analyses became increasingly critical of (some aspects of) this expansion, pertaining in particular to the uneven provision of, and access to, essential services; the limitations of economic and political regulation; and, more recently, the (often high) associated environmental costs. More fundamentally,

primarily as a result of the extension of network studies to urban and national contexts in the global South (with first articles published in Flux in the last years of the 1990s), the expansion paradigm was increasingly questioned: were networks bound to grow? And, even, should they always grow?

This “paradigm shift” led to the publication of themed issues dedicated to “networked services and off-grid services in cities in the South” (n56-57, 2004); “the margins of the networks” (n76-77, 2009); the “mutations of urban services” (n87, 2012); “the growth and degrowth of networks” (n105, 2016); as well as several recent issues dedicated to the changing scales and logics of, especially, energy supply and waste management systems. In the contributions to these themed issues, a retrospective or historical perspective was, again, often developed to account for the situation observed in the present.

In bringing together this issue, we have sought to develop a slightly different perspective. We aim to contribute to the growing body of historical scholarship that not only seeks to explain, or account for, how and why “we got there”, but also
to shed new light on what was gained and lost on the way, how and to what extent things could have been different, and what are the opportunities and the potentialities—as well as, obviously, the threats and the constraints—contained in the present state of things. This approach aims to highlight not only the strong persistence of economic, material and political realities through time that support a technological path, but also the dynamics that could have challenged the “momentum” (Hughes, 1987) or “inertia” (Gras, 1987) of a heavy heritage, i.e., the large dependence of infrastructural futures on past sociotechnical assemblages. Economics and political science contributed to the understanding of such path dependency in the specific field of energy systems (Fouquet, 2016). Historians have also been prolific when questioning the persistence and synergies and in the history of energy technologies, whether it be global approaches to energy history (Gras, 1997, 2003; Debeir et alii, 2013; Massard-Guilbaud, Mathis, 2019; New Daggett, 2019), the study of alternative proposals or contestations (Jarrige, Vrignon, 2020) or the challenge of the notion of linear “energy transitions” and the “ageofism”, i.e., periodization based on successive dominant sociotechnical systems (Fressoz, 2013, 2021, 2022). Within this dynamic, the call for papers for this issue invited reflective historical contributions to reconstitute the course of the social, technological and/or territorial path dependencies and techno-imaginaries at play in the competition (or symbiosis) between networked and off-grid technologies.

Foregrounding such issues, we contend, is a way for us, network scholars, to move beyond the modern(ist) attitude and “think (again) with history” (Schorske, 1998) when studying the ins and outs of an emblematic expression of modernity: networked infrastructure systems.

In this perspective, the three articles forming this themed issue re-examine, and reappraise, the historical significance of so-called “off-grid technologies” in the development of urban services in Western societies, as well as their contemporary implications. The interview with Jean Gecit about the (failed) development of early solar energy projects in West Africa offers a valuable counterpoint to this European and North American focus. We will briefly discuss here these articles in terms of their contribution to three distinct but complementary perspectives:

i) A “counter historical” perspective that could be described as a focus on “what it took” to ensure the supremacy of networked forms of service organization and

provision and the elimination of alternatives—a loser's perspective so to speak;

ii) A “counter-factual” perspective, exploring what was lost on the way, in comparison with the evolution that could have prevailed if alternatives had not been eliminated (or marginalized);

iii) A “rehabilitation” perspective, in which historical research is used to explore the potentialities associated with the current *and future* (re)development of “off-grid technologies”.

In this discussion, we will conveniently refer to the typology of “usable pasts” suggested by Moss (2023). This typology contains five types, among which three are more specifically relevant to the exploration of the dynamics and significance of off-grid technologies (see Box) and will be highlighted in particular in this short introduction: parallel, futured, and discarded pasts.

### Box: Typology of “usable infrastructure pasts”

(Source: Moss, 2023)

Moss (2023) identifies five main forms of usable pasts.

“Embedded pasts are legacies of established structures and practices that can enable or constrain options for the future. Infrastructural obduracy can express itself in material form. [...] But it can also be social. [...] The power relations embedded in infrastructures can prove more obdurate than physical structures.”

“Adapted pasts draw attention to past processes of reconfiguring infrastructures to meet changing circumstances and the openings these imply for the future. For if infrastructures are less obdurate than meets the eye, then adaptation of the sociotechnical assemblage—whether deliberate or not—becomes a core characteristic that offers traction for transformative agendas.”

“Parallel pasts refer to dimensions of infrastructure that often go unseen yet are revealing of alternative histories. They direct our gaze beyond the hegemonic large-scale technical networks generally associated with infrastructure systems to the small-scale, decentred, and informal technologies and sociotechnical practices that can be just as important in providing water or energy services.”
"Futured pasts are sociotechnical imaginaries of the past that can continue to frame infrastructure presents and futures. Sociotechnical imaginaries, as Sheila Jasanoff points out, always link past and future times in their representation of alternative futures. Infrastructures have been described, indeed, as "the material manifestation of a 'past future'" (van Laak 2001)."

"Discarded pasts are sociotechnical trajectories that get abandoned or forgotten yet hold value in their re-emergence or rehabilitation. The history of technology is full of examples of technologies that appeared outdated or inferior at one time but were reactivated later when circumstances changed."

## CHARACTERIZING OFF-GRID TECHNOLOGIES

First, however, some clarification is in order as regards the misleadingly self-evident notion of “off-grid technologies”. Intuitively, the notion refers to a device that is at the same time relatively small in size and disconnected from a centrally-operated networked infrastructure. Privately owned and managed solar PVs, windmills, or sewage device (such as septic tanks) are emblematic examples of such off-grid technologie. Yet the contributions to this themed issue suggest a less obvious definition.

Viguié (this issue), who studies home heating as a dimension of networked vs. “off-grid comfort”, carefully elaborates a classification of home heating systems (see Viguié, Table 1, p. 18). Viguié considers that, to be classified as off-grid, a heating device should (i) be limited to one single room, one single dwelling or one single building (including multi-dwellings buildings); and (ii) use fuels that are not delivered to the building by a larger-scale technological infrastructure (wood, coal, fuel oil, bottled gas are “off-grid”, but electricity and network gas aren’t. This distinction could obviously be debated: some multi-dwelling buildings are immense, for example, and collective heating in those buildings shares many common features with district heating, which Viguié logically enough considers as a grid-based system. But Viguié highlights a more important aspect of the discussion: he at least implicitly holds that the sometimes highly centralized organizations delivering wood, coal, or fuel gas in some urban areas—today or in the past—should not be considered as fuel supply infrastructure networks, even though he refers, for example, to “an Italian network that

controlled a large part of the coal supply for the boilers of the Parisian building heating systems" in the first half of the twentieth century (Viguié, this issue, p. 23, our emphasis).

Dufour (this issue), in his account of the ups and downs of industrial household waste composting throughout the twentieth century in the French capital region, contrasts this “more or less diffuse or decentralized” technology (Dufour, p. 33) that developed “outside large technological networks” with the all-encompassing “centralized, homogenous and partly atomized network” (Dufour, p. 32) that increasingly rested on the incineration or disposal (dumping) of household waste. Yet in his contribution Dufour notes, for example, that until the second World War domestic waste collection systems in suburban and rural areas, where such systems were in place, generally diverted compostable organic waste toward agricultural uses (Dufour, p. 34); or that until the 1970s, waste policies developed composting facilities in the (predominant) low-density and rural areas of the Paris region, as part of the region’s “scheme for the collection and treatment of urban waste” (Dufour, p. 34). Hence, for Dufour, the distinction between grid-based and off-grid facilities (and services) does not primarily rest on the existence or absence of links with technological infrastructure networks, or even with centrally-planned or operated such networks. Rather, he emphasizes other aspects that differentiate composting systems from what is, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the dominant waste management system. Three main aspects are mentioned: the relative disconnection from the (now) dominant system; more circular material flows; the more local scale of composting infrastructures; and their territoriality, namely the metabolic connection between waste composting systems and local needs—especially farmland needs in fertilizers—resting on a differentiated treatment of organic and non-organic waste.

Studying the history of stormwater management in Providence (RI), Coren (this issue) in a way reverses the perspective adopted in the other articles by examining how off-grid technologies were developed in response to the limitations of the end-of-pipe solutions to problems resulting from the expansion of the centralized (combined) sewer system serving the Providence urban region. Indeed, Coren discusses the “green infrastructure” projects “departing from the past century-and-a-half of hydraulic governance” (Coren, p. 51) and designed to “disconnect from the sewer system altogether” (ibid.) in order to “manage rainwater where it falls” (Coren, p. 58) and thus help
address or mitigate the problems associated with the sewer system. His definition of off-grid devices is therefore quite straight-forward (devices disconnected from the main sewer system), but in his analysis other features appear as definitional of green infrastructures. In particular, he notes, “green infrastructure for stormwater management is distinct from so-called gray infrastructure for the fact that it claims living landscape features, whether spontaneous or planned, as essential components of any given [GI project]” (Coren, p. 58).

Finally, in the interview he gave us, Jean Gecit discusses the development of solar energy technologies in West Africa (Senegal, Mali, and Niger) from the 1960s to the 1980s (Gecit, p. 66). At first glance, Gecit's typology seems dualistic, describing off-grid solar devices and facilities (thermodynamic and photovoltaic solar isolated installations for water pumps, water heaters and farm dryers) as an alternative to grid-based electricity supply. Yet a closer look shows that some degree of “hybridity” (Jaglin, 2014) is at play. In the 1980s, the equipment of hotels, hospitals, or the private residences of wealthy urbanites with solar water heaters points to a form of complementarity with the grid to which these buildings were already connected (Gecit, p. 66). Gecit also mentions the example of the world's first solar thermodynamic power plant in Diré (p. 67), near Timbuktu, in 1979, which was dimensioned to produce enough energy to sustain a complete networked infrastructure—water pumps for 3,000 hectares of crops, but also electric lighting and air conditioning—but lacked the “inertia” (Gras, 1997) of energy systems, their ability to prosper and grow, since the plant was never connected to the city of Diré. After four years of activity, the installation stopped working (Gecit, p. 67).

As this brief discussion shows, the notion of “off-grid technology” does not boil down to devices that are individually small and disconnected from any centrally-operated networked infrastructure. They can be connected to a network, provided that this network is relatively small and less technology-intensive compared to the dominant infrastructure; the material flows they handle should display a greater degree of circularity; they should be more attuned to the characteristics, resources, and needs of the local territories they serve… This specific framing results, in part, from contemporary debates on the limitations of large-scale, centrally-operated infrastructures; and in part from the terminology put forward in the call for contributions and used in this introduction, the very phrase “off-grid” which, in effect, defines the objects examined in this themed

issue “contingently”, so to speak, as devices falling without the current (as of 2022) dominant infrastructure system(s) in a given context.

An alternative approach would seek to conceptualize the notion of “grid” in more abstract terms, as a specific combination of characteristics shared by a specific family of systems (grid systems) within a wider ensemble of sociotechnical infrastructure systems performing specific societal functions. This approach would, in particular, help identify different modalities of “networkification”, not all consistent with the vision of a large technical system relying on a dedicated infrastructure (e.g., the electricity supply system). Halfway between an arguably over-simplified understanding of networks as technology-intensive, single-purpose infrastructures and Simone’s (2004) very broad framing of “people as infrastructure”, Joerges and Braun (1994) have put forward the useful notion of “second-order large technical systems (LTSs)”, which, as could be expected, they distinguish from “first order” LTSs:

> First-order large technical systems refer to the familiar, relatively easily delimitated all-purpose infrastructures such as the road, railroad, energy and telecommunications systems that have been at the center of large technical systems research. By contrast, the concept of second-order large technical system refers to the process of networking parts of different first-order systems for specific, macro-level social domains. [...] in technical terms, they are situated between the interconnected [first-order] large technical systems. In organizational terms, they are situated between large technical system operators and users. The concept of second-order large technical system is meant to emphasize this *doublé hybrid* character. (Braun and Joerges, 1994, p. 27 and 45; emphasis in original).

Within this perspective, the scope of what can be considered as a networked organization is significantly enlarged. This allows to distinguish analytically between the presence of a dedicated technological network and other “alternative” organizational forms of networking or, in other words, of coordination in time and space. Coming back to the focus of this themed issue, this has two important implications:

> Conceptually: a “grid” system could be defined as a dedicated, technology- and capital-intensive, centrally-planned and operated technological network within a specific technological domain (or sub-domain), serving in a relatively
homogeneous way an otherwise diverse territory and tending to invisibilize material flows (1) (resources, waste, dif-fuse pollutants) and (because of its centralization) tending to escape oversight from the (local) communities served. Analytically: this more conceptual definition would help identify grid and other networking forms of organization, both in the past and in the present, and formulate questions on grid vs. off-grid technologies in less retrospective terms as is currently the case (when off-grid technologies or devices are simply defined in terms of their distance to currently-dominant grid systems).

With this critical understanding of the notion of “off-grid technology” in mind, we examine below how the articles in this themed issue shed light on three main issues: how “off-grid” technologies were actively marginalized or eliminated; what was “lost” on the way, compared to counter-factual expectations of how things could have evolved, should these alternative technologies have prospered and expanded; what these historical insights suggest for the present and future development of “off-grid technologies”. Additionally, these insights will thus also shed new light on the question why, for some—but not all—essential societal functions and in some—but not all—contexts, specialized, dedicated technological networks became a dominant organizational form; and with what implications. But before we turn to that discussion, we would like to shortly reflect on the questions raised in this special issue based on the research on the history of street-lighting carried by two of the issue’s coordinators (Bothereau and Tarr), which was a main source of inspiration in outlining the theme of this special issue.

## OFF-GRID BUT NETWORKED TECHNOLOGIES?
INSIGHTS FROM THE HISTORY OF STREET LIGHTING
IN FRANCE AND THE USA

Today, some of our street lamps have emancipated themselves from the electrical network and have become ‘autonomous’, operating with a dedicated photovoltaic panel, thus independently from their neighbors. This coexistence of connected and off-grid street lighting modes reflects the cohabitation (but also the competition and the tensions) between the paradigm of the networked city and the return to the flexibility of the autonomous object. A historical examination of street lighting can shed light on the theme of this issue of *Flux* in two ways. Firstly, history of public lighting shows a long period of overlap

in the use of grid and off-grid technologies. Secondly, a historical and morphological approach can be used to distinguish between network forms of organization (which have existed to some degree since the end of the 17th century) and the street lighting network as a centralized technological network (the familiar grid), and thus relativize the dualistic (grid vs. off-grid) conceptual typology.

Let us go back to the days of the very beginnings of gas lighting. In 1819, Nicolas Clément-Desormes, a French chemist living in Paris, reflected on the sociotechnical trajectory of street lighting in his *Appréciation du procédé d'éclairage par le gaz hydrogène du charbon de terre*:

> Let us suppose that gas lighting was the first [technology] to be known, that it is in use everywhere, and that a man of genius presents us with an Argand lamp (2) or a simple lighted candle. How great would be our admiration before such an astonishing simplification! (3)

Nicolas Clément questions the superiority of the novelty (gas network) and even suggests reversal of the notion of innovation (Fressoz, 2012). He opposes the heaviness and the complexity of the gas network—the pipelines and their trenches that “imitate in a costly way” the previous lighting mode—to the simplicity of the oil lamp and the candle, presented as a light, autonomous and portable source of light. His argument echoes the notion of ‘simplification as innovation’ in history of technology (Pérez, 2019; Simondon, 1958).

In Paris, gaslight became the dominant lighting mode only in the 1840s (Williot, 1999) and there were still more than 1500 old (rapeseed) oil street lanterns in activity in the center of Paris in the 1870s (4). In the same period, to respond to the lack of street lighting in the French capital, Léon Say, the new prefect of the Seine after Baron Haussmann, ordered to install “700 (kerosene) oil street lamps” (5) in the central districts of the Sorbonne and Luxembourg. The preferred technical solution is not to densify the gas network but to deal with off-grid technologies. This dynamic challenges the idea of an “inertia” (Gras, 1997) of some grid-based energy systems—their propensity to perpetuate themselves and grow—and reflects, on the contrary, the lasting complementarity between grid and off-grid technologies.

In particular, kerosene was used in off-grid street lights as well as for domestic lighting in many European cities. Kerosene often served as a bridge between manufactured gas systems
and electricity and co-existed with the two energy sources. In a number of cities kerosene street lamps replaced lamps burning substances such as whale oil, olive oil, or rape and hemp seed oil before competing with manufactured gas.

Going further back in time, in late seventeenth and eighteenth century Paris, another history can be told. Stand-alone candle lanterns (from 1667) and organic oil (mainly rapeseed) streetlamps (from the 1760s) were, strictly speaking, off-grid technologies; but a simple periodization as "non-networked" can be challenged from both an organizational and a symbolic perspectives.

First of all, the new modern organization of street lighting can be seen as a complex system, with technical and non-technical components (Hughes, 1987; Tarr, Dupuy, 1988; Lorrain, 2005): the oil stores, the lamplighters, and what was the first French street lighting institution (1667) supervised by the new police administration, *la lieutenance de police* (also established in 1667). It is part of a larger system that included fuel, labor force, the organization of fuel transportation and distribution, and an administrative structure. As Gilbert Simondon wrote in his study of the ontological status of artifacts, "the technical object realizes its *technophanie*" (Simondon, 1958), by which he means the ritualistic and symbolic phenomenon that allows the insertion of the object into culture, its transformation from a stand-alone artifact, into an element that interacts with technical, non-technical and human actors. Moreover, although it was not a technologically networked system, its elements all share the characteristic of interconnectedness (Tarr, Dupuy, 1988; Lorrain, 2005): a change in one component, such as a difficulty in logistics (a fuel crisis for example) impacts the whole street lighting system.

Secondly, the imaginary dimension is as structuring as the economic and social aspects in the use and the implementation of new energy techniques (Garçon, 2012). The police control over the city through public lighting has been studied by historians (Bouman, 1987; Schivelbusch, 1988; Denys, 2002; Vidoni, 2018) with a reference to Foucault's panopticon to emphasize its relationship to absolutist surveillance and policing. Combining the history of technology, police history and material history in a biography of the 18th century Parisian lantern, Bothereau (2023) shows how these political discourses were more specifically embedded in street lighting technologies. The entanglement of technical and political imaginaries in 18th century Paris illumination was strong, whether it be

royal police or revolutionary (Bothereau, 2020). The head of the Paris police imposed the standardization of the streetlamps to all lamp makers as well as strict public lighting schedules and lamplighter instructions to standardize and homogenize illumination throughout the city. The—fantasized—homogeneous distribution of the lanterns (6,777 in 1766) all over the city (Bothereau, 2019), the—real—simultaneity of their lighting, all under the close and centralized supervision of the police, as well as police propaganda on security achievements, sustained the entwining of control narratives with the material objects (lanterns) and tended to project the idea of a networked monitoring (Bothereau, 2023).

Eighteenth century's unconnected lanterns therefore coexisted with an administration eager to make real a fantasy of (centralized) networked control over the streets. We may therefore wonder whether, and if so in what (variegated) ways, this sociotechnical imaginary inspired debates on network infrastructures and gas technologies. It is indeed at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that the meaning of the word *réseau* (the French word for "network") undergoes a major mutation with the *Saint-Simoniens* and the *Fourieristes*, from a fabric enveloping a living body to an infrastructure enveloping the whole territory (Picon, 2014). Studies have shown the importance of the imaginary of the network and associated analogies for engineers designing river canals, railways and telephone networks in nineteenth-century France (Flichy, 1995). Thus, can we argue that eighteenth century off-grid technologies cohabited with a *proto-network* imaginary?

The case of alternative forms of street lighting in major American cities was similar and different in several significant ways from those in Paris. Initially whale oil from sperm whales (an organic source) provided fuel for stand-alone street lamps lighted by lamplighters. These stand-alone lamps fueled by whale oil were like the Paris rapeseed (organic) fueled lamps with similar support systems. They constituted, as would later non-networked street lights, a system with several components that were not technologically linked but had important functions in the system as a whole.

Research by various chemists and inventors seeking improved lighting technology had been going on for several decades and in 1807 the Gas Light and Coke Company of London constructed the world's first manufactured gas plant connected to a piped distribution network. It was emulated in 1816 by the city of Baltimore followed in the 1830s by additional large
Americans cities such as Boston, New York and Philadelphia that constructed manufacturing gas plants that primarily used coal (a mineral source) to produce gas and distributed it through piped distribution networks. By 1850 the U.S. Census reported the operation of thirty manufactured gas plants but within approximately half a century (1909) almost 1,300 cities had such plants with attached pipe networks. In the first half of the 19th century, whale oil lamps for street lights began to be replaced in large cities by street lights fueled by pipelines supplying manufactured gas, providing major advances in illumination. This change process is similar to the replacement of rapeseed oil lamps in Paris by manufactured gas from piped networks—a shift from an organic to a mineral source. Night watchmen were also responsible for lighting lamps. Appeals for expenditure of public funds for gas street lamps often rested on claims that they would produce better and safer illumination of streets and sidewalks.

A major difference between Paris and large American cities, however, was that the stand-alone street lamps that competed with gas street lights were fueled by gasoline and naphtha, a technique not used in Paris or other French cities. Oil had been discovered in northwest Pennsylvania in 1859 and was shipped to refineries in Pittsburgh and Cleveland for distilling. The most valuable product of the refining process was kerosene, a fraction of the distilling of petroleum that remained as the lighter and less valuable fractions of gasoline and naphtha were discarded as byproducts. Kerosene became widely used for domestic lighting purposes in stand-alone lamps located largely in middle and upper-class homes but does not appear to have been widely used for streetlamps, probably because of its high cost.

In the early 1870s, American chemists and engineers had been striving unsuccessfully to construct a lighting technology (vapor burners) allowing the use byproduct gasoline and naphtha in street lamps. These lights could be used for street lighting without the necessity of constructing gas manufacturing plants and piped distribution systems. In the middle 1870s breakthroughs in producing improved vapor lamps were made by two Boston chemists and their patents were licensed to a Philadelphia engineer by the name of Martin Maloney who, with a petroleum distiller, William Elkins, formed a firm called Penn Globe that became the nation's largest installer of gasoline and naphtha street lights.

Off-grid street lights were especially suited to illuminate the large undeveloped areas, suburbs, parks and niche areas that

characterized many American cities. Here cost considerations played an important role for cities that wanted street lighting but could not afford the expense of manufactured gas lighting networks. Thus, several critical cost factors appeared to have driven the installation of stand-alone gasoline and naphtha street lamps in American cities: the low cost of gasoline and naphtha; the expense of producing manufactured gas and distributing it by pipeline, with resulting high costs of light; and the expense of installing gas distribution networks in marginal or lightly populated areas. From an environmental as well as a social and economic perspective another gain was the recycling of the byproducts of petroleum distilling to obtain kerosene—gasoline and naphtha—rather than having them wasted.

The off-grid gasoline and naphtha street lamps were gradually phased out after 1900 except for their occasional use in specialized niches. They were not, however, phased-out by competition from electricity as were manufactured gas lights, but rather by competition from a new technology that used gasoline—the internal combustion engine. A competing use for the petroleum byproduct of gasoline that drove up its costs rather than a competing technology alone thus resulted in the disappearance of stand-alone and off-grid street lamps.

More broadly, the history of the improvement and development of the oil lamp and of the stearic candle industries in the middle of the nineteenth century for domestic lighting and the history of the increase in organic light consumption as late as the early twentieth century are still poorly known (Fressoz, 2007). A ‘use-centered’ history (Edgerton, 2006) shows that old and new lighting artefacts interact in the long run. Yet, this material history could challenge the widely held view of a linear transition from off-grid organic lighting devices (candles and oil lamps) to networked fossil-fuel based technologies (gas lighting).

The history of lighting thus reveals a long period of overlap and intermeshing in the use of connected and unconnected technologies. But this history also challenges the mere dichotomy of grid vs. off-grid technologies, where, in Paris for example, unconnected technologies (stand-alone lanterns) were coordinated (in time and space) and centrally planned (by the police) on a large scale (the entire city of Paris), therefore creating a hybrid techno-human networked infrastructure. These few examples of past technological choices (sometimes indecisive) in the field of domestic and street lighting therefore open up new possibilities for the present, by suggesting that long-industrialized
societies can emancipate from a historical heritage characterized by the sociotechnical *imaginary* of the network.

In the three following sections, we turn to discussing more specifically how the articles collected in this themed issue inform a renewed historiography on off-grid technologies.

## PARALLEL PASTS: DOCUMENTING HOW OFF-GRID ALTERNATIVES WERE MARGINALIZED OR ELIMINATED

In this section, we adopt what some authors (more often social thinkers or philosophers than historians (6)) have called a counter-historical perspective or, put very bluntly, the perspective of historically dominated, marginalized or otherwise disempowered groups or interests, and the blind spots associated—so the promoters of counter-history claim—with dominant historical narratives (7).

For example, Viguié highlights the remarkable resistance of off-grid domestic heating technologies to their marginalization by self-proclaimed modern network alternatives. Dufour describes the contested and significantly slow process of elimination of organic waste composting in the Paris region. Coren argues that the major driver of the hegemonic expansion of “grey” sanitation infrastructure in Providence, RI, was a “negative driver”. In other words, it should not be understood as the victory of a superior technology, or technological system, over inferior ones (however defined), but that the crises “solved” through the expansion of grid-base sanitation

were the unintended consequences of narrow fixes to prior problems. One day’s fix, in other words, produced the next day’s crisis in a pattern that repeated across many different, seemingly separate arenas. (Coren, p. 57)

## PAST FUTURES AND FUTURED PASTS: EXPLORING THE UNREALIZED EXPANSION OF OFF-GRID TECHNOLOGIES BEYOND THE MODERN IDEOLOGY OF THE NETWORK

In this section, we consider what was lost through the marginalization of off-grid technologies, not only at the time when other options were chosen and other paths taken, but also into the future, through the closure of some future paths or possibilities due to the expansion and lasting supremacy of grid-based systems. Addressing this question involves a degree of

counter-factual history. Indeed what was lost was not always immediately visible at the time when decisions were made; it involves some hindsight and it requires to explore how things could have evolved if different decisions had been made.

Counter-factual history is becoming increasingly popular, or at least legitimate (see, e.g., Deluermoz, Singaravélou, 2016), as the need to “reopen” and actively pluralize (our) social futures—in other words: to think outside the box of impending climate (or nuclear...) doom—is getting more pressing. Indeed, building on a growing acknowledgment of counterfactual history and the associated body of works (see Ferguson, 1999 for a pioneering contribution), Hartog (2017) invites to consider “the possibilities of the past that could not occur” as a way to “nourish the future” and “to escape presentism by restoring circulations between the past, the present, and the future” (p. 51). This also resonates with Baschet (2018), who invites (our) “worlds always worried about paths to be traced [...] to find inspiration in the unaccomplished dreams of the past”.

Viguié (this issue) highlights the cultural dimension of the “resistance” of traditional, vernacular domestic heating technologies to the expansion of modern grid-based heating, and their persistence into the twenty-first century in spite of manifold industry and regulatory pressures to the contrary. Wood heating shows particularly strong resilience, even though it does not obviously respond to (as least the last two elements of) the triple modern imperative of “comfort, convenience and cleanliness” (Shove, 2003). That technology, and especially “technology in use” (Edgerton, 2006), has a cultural dimension is no novelty, but historical research could provide crucial insights on contexts in which off-grid, and thus arguably “antimodern”, technologies persisted and on what would have been needed for other off-grid technologies (or the same technologies in other contexts) to similarly persist.

Dufour (this issue) argues, after other environmental historians, that a fundamental implication of the (slow and conflictive but now nearly complete) elimination of industrial composting of organic waste is that it has severed the “organic link” between cities and the surrounding rural spaces, hence allowing the emancipation of urban development in a given location from the carrying capacity of the “bioregion” in which it is located. And indeed a world of bioregions would have been very different from the “planetary urbanization” described in Brenner (2014)—how different is what a more systematic counterfactual history of urban development might help figuring out.
Coren (this issue), as to some extent Dufour and Viguié, emphasizes one important characteristic of grid-based infrastructures: they invisibilize material flows, and hence the pressures exerted on resources and on the environment at all scales. By doing so, they have facilitated the continuous increase of such pressures. Coren mentions several examples in this respect. Conversely, then, could it not be argued that green infrastructures, by showing material flows, would have supported a more moderate use of resources and more limited pressures on the environment?

DISCARDED PASTS:
REASSESSING AND REAPPRAISING MARGINALIZED OFF-GRID ALTERNATIVES FROM TODAY'S (AND TOMORROW'S) PERSPECTIVE

Current research interest in so-called off-grid technologies is mainly the result of a renewal of these technologies as a response to, especially, growing concerns regarding climate change. It is remarkable that most technological processes involved are by no means new technologies. Within the energy domain, for example, some are centuries or even millennial-old (anaerobic digestion, wind power...); others have been well-known for decades (solar PVs, solar thermal, even heat pumps...). And the basic processes underpinning most so-called "green infrastructure" or "nature-based solutions" developed to cope with stormwater runoff management can be safely described as pre-technological (consider for example the list quoted in Coren, p. 58). The intentional use by human societies of many, if not most, of these technologies and processes amply predates the development of modern grid-based systems from the early nineteenth century.

In the current context, the key issue is therefore to define the conditions under which the technologies adapted to contemporary challenges could be developed at relevant scale. Common wisdom holds that as the costs of the crises generated or accentuated by incumbent grid-based systems, alternative or hybrid "responses" will emerge. The contributions to this themed issue strongly invite to question this narrative, by highlighting the many ways grid-based systems develop and persist to the detriment of more heterogeneous sociotechnical "delivery configurations" (Jaglin, 2014), in spite of no obvious techno-economic superiority—not to mention environmental cost-effectiveness. Reversing the perspective, these historical studies may also shed valuable light on contextual conditions

and public policies that may help untie the hegemony of grid systems.

Viguié's study provides such insights on a meta-analytical level, so to speak. By foregrounding heating appliances, his analysis reveals how appliances play a key role in the dynamics of practices: how they emerge, persist, evolve and mutate (see also Shove, 2017; Coutard, Shove, 2019). From a "practitioner's perspective", then, the characteristics of appliances (and what it takes to attend them) are probably more significant and "practice-shaping" than their grid, hybrid, or off-grid character. Of course, the two aspects are generally dependent from one another, but there is a degree of variability that should not be overlooked in public strategies or policies aiming at the transformation of practices—arguably a key dimension of the evolution of societies' metabolism.

Dufour concludes his study with a disturbing statement that may prove quite valuable from a "discarded past" perspective. Industrial composting facilities for organic domestic waste, he argues, not only resisted the expansion of the grid-based waste management system essentially relying on waste dumping and incineration; they also facilitated, or "accompanied" it. Indeed, he suggests,

> in a few decisive years, [the composting industry] helps to convert rural and suburban areas in the Paris region to the organization of collective [waste] management across large inter-municipal territories populated by tens or even thousands of inhabitants. [...] Although on a limited scale, little centralized, [...] the network's industrial system is in place, and so is the dependence upon this system. (Dufour, p. 45)

This echoes long-held views that, rather than emerging from nothingness (or, at least, from a non-networked reality), technological networks generally derive from, and rely on, pre-existing networked forms of organizations (Offner, 1993). Beyond that, however, it suggests to reverse the perspective and ask, how could a shift from a grid-based to more heterogeneous networked organizations (cf. the notion of "second-order large technical system" discussed above) be facilitated when they are deemed desirable.

Coren (this issue) invites to circumvent the problems raised by the obduracy of grid systems. Indeed, he notes, "for many reasons, the socio-hydraulic design of the city cannot be easily undone. There are ways to disconnect from it, however". His article underlines that the recent (re)development of "green
infrastructure" provides added value beyond the issue of storm-water management: deliberate disconnections from the grid may, if sufficiently numerous, challenge the grid system itself (see Vannini, Taggart, 2015). But, as Coren notes, it does not solve all problems; and it often comes with a cost that should not be ignored.

Hence the three articles gathered in this themed issue point to different ways of strategically challenging the hegemony of the grid, when it is deemed desirable: starting from appliances and the practices they are enrolled in; facilitating the shift from grid to other, more heterogeneous networked forms of organization; designing and actively promoting disconnection schemes. Historical research can provide valuable insights on which contexts or conditions allow or invite such strategies, the ways they can be implemented, the issues they raise, and how these issues may be addressed.

## GRID SYSTEMS AND MODERNITY

Finally, the contributions to this themed issue speak to the broader issue of the relations between infrastructures and modernity. It is now well-acknowledged that infrastructure systems are both a factor and an expression of the modern condition (for an early general discussion, see Edwards, 2003; for a critical examination of the (modern) "promise of infrastructure" and its shortcomings, see Anand et alii, 2018; see also Jarrige et alii, 2018). In particular, infrastructure systems have been key in advancing and shaping modern futures, by supporting, in particular: the growing power of modern nation-states (Mann, 1984; Mayntz, 1995; Mukerji, 2010); the establishment of modern standards of "comfort, cleanliness and convenience" (Shove, 2003; Edwards, 2003; Shove, Trentmann, 2019); the future-proofing of financial profits on an unprecedented scale and the rise of modern financial institutions (Mitchell, 2020); and, last but not least, modern imaginations (Nye, 1992; Larkin, 2013).

The three articles in this special issue add to this literature by foregrounding, in particular, the hegemonic drive of grid infrastructure development. Coren (this issue) gives a convincing account of the development of the "grey" sanitation infrastructure in Providence (RI) as "driven by a pattern of crises met by solutions that ultimately generated new crises, in each case complexifying, and paradoxically naturalizing, the use of water as flush and carriage for waste; and reifying the classification of free-flowing water—i.e., stormwater—as a nuisance,

hazard, and liability" (Coren, p. 51). Dufour (this issue) shows how the development of energy grids (both gas and electricity) in the Paris region resulted in, and to some extent required, the elimination of organic waste composting facilities and infrastructures (which, indirectly, will aggravate the dependence of the region's agriculture on energy-intensive chemical fertilizers (8)). And Viguié (this issue) highlights the fierceful (but only partially victorious) fight of self-proclaimed "modern" grid-based energy systems against more "traditional" heating technologies and devices (9).

Taken together, the three articles hence advance our understanding of the economic, political, and ultimately cultural factors that have sustained the primacy of grid-based infrastructure systems: the accumulation of profits, the concentration of industrial or (and) political power, and the confidence in these systems' ability to emancipate local (and national) societies from their pre-modern dependence on their immediate environment and on the natural environment more generally, implicitly framing nature as an unconsequential "ultimate sink" (Tarr, 1996) or as the "infrastructure of infrastructure" (Anand et alii, 2018, p. 8). We all know too well now that this confidence was misled; our three authors show, or recall, that many stakeholders already knew, and for some deplored, the growing hegemony of grid systems all along this tumultuous, and still ongoing, history.

## A Personal Reflective Statement on the Concept of the Networked City

Joel Tarr, December 2022

In the 1970s and 1980s, Gabriel Dupuy and I became known in the area of urban studies and history for our work on the history of urban technological networks, noted by the publication in 1984 (in French) and then in 1988 (in English) of the "Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America." This brief essay offers perspectives on why Gabriel and I became advocates of the idea of the networked city and includes suggestions as to why we had not been more observant of exceptions to the rise of the networked city.

In doing research on street lights and manufactured gas networks several years ago I was startled to discover that there were many cases of the co-existence of off-grid or
non-networked street lights functioning in numerous American cities. These cities in most cases also possessed manufactured gas piped networks that fueled their street lights. Additional research revealed that similar patterns of a mix of on-grid and off-grid street lights existed in European cities. Further research suggested that many exceptions to the concept of the networked city existed and needed to be explored. Why Gabriel and I began studying the rise of the networked city but neglected the importance of these off-grid systems as exceptions may be of interest to scholars in the field.

In the 1960s and 1970s American history witnessed the emergence of two new fields: urban history and the history of technology. This was followed in the 1980s by the emergence of the field of urban environmental history. These fields also developed in Europe, but at a somewhat later date. One would have expected that there would have been natural linkages between these fields but it would be almost two decades before an interactive relationship of studies between the city and technology developed. That is not to say that individual authors had not written important works on urban technologies, but such works were scattered and no cohesive body of scholarship on the city and technology or on networks had emerged. Why then had Gabriel and I come to embrace and become advocates of the importance of the concept of the networked city? The answer lies in our exposure to fields that involved both engineering and cities rather than a focus on a single discipline and our grasp of the importance of the relationship.

In 1967 I joined the faculty of Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh. I was an urban historian in the new field of urban history, teaching and doing research on urban politics but in the early 1970s I began interacting with civil engineers on both transit systems and their impacts and the evolution of sewer or wastewater systems. In 1974 I received an award from the National Academy of Sciences in a variant of the new area of technology assessment—this subject was known as Retrospective Technology Assessment. My project involved the examination of the evolution of urban wastewater systems and was projected to produce knowledge about past technologies that could inform current decisions in sanitary engineering. My publications from the research in wastewater systems or sewers drew the attention of Gabriel Dupuy, then Director

of the *Institut d'Urbanisme de Paris* (IUP, University of Paris XII). Gabriel had been trained as a civil engineer at the Ecole Centrale de Paris and had doctorates in Mathematics from the University of Paris VI and in Social Sciences from the University of Paris V. He had studied both transport and sewer systems—the urban technical systems I was also interested in. Although trained as an engineer Gabriel's first job was in urban planning. His work on transportation networks and sewer systems made him aware that the network concept could be applied to a range of other urban service technologies. Thus, for both Gabriel and myself, the study of transportation networks and sewer systems in cities drove our understanding that cities depended on a range of networks for their operation.

Together Gabriel and I organized an international conference on the networked city with funding from CNRS and the National Academy of Sciences. The conference was held in Paris in 1983 and scholars presented papers on a range of urban networks in American and European cities with publication of the papers in French and English. From this conference and the publications emerged a wide application of the concept of the networked city (Dupuy, Tarr, 1984; Dupuy, Tarr, 1988).

Writing in 2001 in their study of *Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition*, Steven Graham and Simon Marvin commented, “cities moved towards the ‘modern infrastructural ideal’ of providing uniform infrastructures largely through technical networks.” Recent critiques, however, of the infrastructural ideal of the fully networked city as discussed by Graham and Marvin, argue that it obscures and overlooks the persistence of older infrastructures as well as their reconfiguration, rescaling, and adjustment. Thus, rather than smooth transitions from one network infrastructure to another, a mix of old and new services in areas such as water supply, wastewater, storm water, gas supply, and street lighting areas are present in numerous cities.

This critique applies to Gabriel's and my espousal of the concept of the networked city put forth in the early 1980s. We had overlooked many of these variations that were later noted by critiques of the work of Graham and Marvin. Captured by the rationality of the concept of the networked city we overlooked the variety of different paths that cities in different countries and cultures followed in
providing services to their citizens. Many of these were off-grid services and today off-grid systems of a variety of types are being experimented within cities throughout the world, especially in the Global South. We have now moved away in a range of directions from the concept of the technological networked city.

Olivier Coutard est socio-économiste, directeur de recherche CNRS au LATTS. Ses recherches portent sur la gestion et la régulation des services en réseaux (fourniture d'eau et d'énergie, transports urbains, télécommunications), les réformes dans ces secteurs et leurs implications sociales, spatiales et environnementales. Il s'est notamment intéressé : aux relations entre les réseaux d'infrastructure et les dynamiques d'intégration ou de fragmentation urbaine ; aux pratiques de mobilité et d'automobilité des individus, ménages et groupes à bas revenus ; le développement et l'universalisation des services en réseaux ; l'accès aux services essentiels des ménages précaires ou insolvables. Il travaille actuellement sur les politiques énergétiques urbaines et les enjeux urbains des transitions énergétiques ; sur les transformations de l'organisation des services urbains, en particulier la remise en cause des grands systèmes techniques, le développement de configurations sociotechniques alternatives et les enjeux politiques de la « ville post-réseaux » ; et sur les infrastructures et temporalités collectives. olivier.coutard@enpc.fr

Benjamin Bothereau est docteur en histoire des techniques (EHESS, 2018) et ingénieur diplômé de l'École centrale de Lyon. Il est actuellement postdoctorant au Centre Alexandre Koyré dans le cadre du projet ANR FabLight, à l'intersection de l'histoire de l'art, de l'histoire des sciences et des techniques et de l'informatique. Ses recherches portent sur la nuit urbaine et l'éclairage public (XVIIIe-XIXe siècles), à la croisée de l'histoire environnementale et de

l'histoire des techniques, pour penser le(s) territoire(s) du nocturne, et plus largement les questions environnementales associées à l'aménagement urbain et au gouvernement de la nature dans la ville. bbothere@hotmail.fr

Until June 2022, Joel A. Tarr was the Richard S. Caliguiri Professor of History with joint appointments in the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management and the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. He studies the environmental history of cities and the history and impact of their technological systems. He is particularly interested in using history to understand contemporary problems. In 2008, the Society for the History of Technology awarded him its highest award, the Leonardo da Vinci Medal, presented to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the history of technology. In 2014 the American Society for Environmental History awarded him its Distinguished Service Award for 2015. He served as president of the Public Works Historical Society in 1982-83 and as president of the Urban History Association in 1999.

Jusqu'en juin 2022, Joel A. Tarr était le professeur d'histoire Richard S. Caliguiri, nommé conjointement à la H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management et au Department of Engineering and Public Policy de l'université Carnegie Mellon. Il étudie l'histoire environnementale des villes ainsi que l'histoire et l'impact de leurs systèmes technologiques. Il s'intéresse particulièrement à l'utilisation de l'histoire pour comprendre les problèmes contemporains. En 2008, la Society for the History of Technology lui a décerné sa plus haute distinction, la médaille Leonardo da Vinci, remise à une personne ayant apporté une contribution exceptionnelle à l'histoire des techniques. En 2014, l'American Society for Environmental History lui a décerné son Distinguished Service Award pour 2015. Il a été président de la Public Works Historical Society en 1982-1983 et président de l'Urban History Association en 1999. jt03@andrew.cmu.edu

## NOTES

(1) Or, more accurately, to remove them from the sight of the groups benefitting from the services provided by these infrastructures.

(2) The Argand lamp is an oil lamp invented in 1780 by Aimé Argand, brighter than earlier lamps, due to a more complete combustion of the candle wick and oil. Its main innovations are a circular wick and a glass chimney. Very popular before the 1850's kerosene lamps.

(3) Nicolas Clément-Desormes, *Appréciation du procédé d'éclairage par le gaz hydrogène du charbon de terre*, Paris, Delaunay, 1819, p. 33-41, cited by (Fressoz, 2012, p. 18). « Supposons que l'éclairage au gaz ait été le premier connu, qu'il soit partout en usage, et qu'un homme de génie nous présente une lampe d'Argand ou une simple bougie allumée.

Que notre admiration serait grande devant une si étonnante simplification ! »

(4) « *Les Parisiens seront peut-être étonnés en apprenant qu'il y a encore 1,539 réverbères à l'huile* », La Presse 6 août 1871, Sous série DB, période 1800-2000, coupures de presse, archives de Police de la Ville de Paris.

(5) « *Établissement de 700 réverbères au pétrole* » Sous série DB, période 1800-2000, coupures de presse, archives de Police de la Ville de Paris. *Article du Siècle*, 1872.

(6) With notable exceptions (see, e.g., Fontaine et alii 2013).

(7) The underlying idea that dominant historical narratives are historical narratives from the point of view of the dominant groups has raised substantial controversy, at least in France, and
we do not wish to enter this debate. We use the expression “counter-history” here in a more casual way, to reflect whether historical research centred on marginal(ized) technologies foreground elements of knowledge that the (often heroic) history of the development of large technical systems tends to ignore or neglect.

(8) More generally, the economic, environmental, political, and ultimately cultural importance of fossil fuels as dense

sources of energy in advanced industrial societies cannot be overestimated. See, for example, Tim Mitchell’s fascinating interview in *Tracés* (Mitchell et alii, 2018).

(9) Other authors had document the no less fierceful fight between grid-based infrastructures (see, e.g., Mustar, 1987 and Berlanstein, 1991 on the competition between gas and electricity companies in Paris).

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