Author: Keller Easterling Publisher: Verso Books ISBN: 1781687803 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
Extrastatecraft is the operating system of the modern world: the skyline of Dubai, the subterranean pipes and cables sustaining urban life, free-trade zones, the standardized dimensions of credit cards, and hyper-consumerist shopping malls. It is all this and more. Infrastructure sets the invisible rules that govern the spaces of our everyday lives, making the city the key site of power and resistance in the twenty-first century. Keller Easterling reveals the nexus of emerging governmental and corporate forces buried within the concrete and fiber-optics of our modern habitat. Extrastatecraftwill change how we think about cities-and, perhaps, how we live in them.
Author: Keller Easterling Publisher: Verso Books ISBN: 1781685886 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 301
Book Description
Extrastatecraft is the operating system of the modern world: the skyline of Dubai, the subterranean pipes and cables sustaining urban life, free-trade zones, the standardized dimensions of credit cards, and hyper-consumerist shopping malls. It is all this and more. Infrastructure sets the invisible rules that govern the spaces of our everyday lives, making the city the key site of power and resistance in the twenty-first century. Keller Easterling reveals the nexus of emerging governmental and corporate forces buried within the concrete and fiber-optics of our modern habitat. Extrastatecraft will change how we think about cities—and, perhaps, how we live in them.
Author: Keller Easterling Publisher: Verso Books ISBN: 1788739345 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 177
Book Description
How to Design the World: Working Without Solutions In Medium Design everyone is a designer. But design, in this case, inverts the typical focus on object over its settings to concentrate on the medium—the matrix space between objects, events, and ideological declarations. It disrupts habitual modern approaches to the world’s intractable dilemmas—from climate cataclysm to inequality to concentrations of authoritarian power. In a series of case studies dealing with everything from automation and migration to explosive urban growth and atmospheric changes, Medium Design offers spatial tools for innovation and global decision-making to challenge the authority of more familiar legal or economic approaches. From this perspective, solutions are mistakes and ideologies are unreliable guides. Rather than the modern desire for the new, designers find more sophistication in relationships between emergent and incumbent technologies. Encouraging entanglement, medium design does not try to eliminate problems but rather to put them together in productive combinations. And in the process of reconceptualizing design, Easterling puzzles over bulletproof powers, Stanley Kubrick, ISIS recruits, literary characters, and iconic activists in the hope of outwitting political deadlocks and offering forms of activism for modulating power and temperament in organizations of all kinds.
Author: Andreas Ruby Publisher: ISBN: 9783944074184 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 421
Book Description
Is infrastructure but the plumbing and wiring of the human environment, or is it the true lifeblood of the spaces we inhabit? Infrastructural systems facilitate the flow of anything from people and goods to resources and information. While engineered to perform specific tasks, such networks also determine the structure of buildings, cities, and metropolitan regions, if not of entire nations and the planet itself.0Taking this critical leverage in consideration, this book calls for expanding and renegotiating the roles of infrastructure not only as a technical, but also as a political, economic, social, and even aesthetic matter of concern for all, claimed not only as the means for achieving more resilient forms of development, but moreover as a right to a sustainable way of life.0Twenty-five essays?by architects, engineers, urban theorists and policy-makers?address infrastructure as ?thing?, ?networked system? and ?agency? respectively in three chapters, which are periodically interspersed by a visual atlas of examples, that playfully celebrate infrastructure through the lens of its spatial qualities.
Author: Keller Easterling Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262550652 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 253
Book Description
How outlaw "spatial products"—resorts, information technology campuses, retail chains, golf courses, and ports—act as cunning pawns in global politics. In Enduring Innocence, Keller Easterling tells the stories of outlaw "spatial products"—resorts, information technology campuses, retail chains, golf courses, ports, and other hybrid spaces that exist outside normal constituencies and jurisdictions—in difficult political situations around the world. These spaces—familiar commercial formulas of retail, business, and trade—aspire to be worlds unto themselves, self-reflexive and innocent of politics. But as Easterling shows, in reality these enclaves can become political pawns and objects of contention. Jurisdictionally ambiguous, they are imbued with myths, desires, and symbolic capital. Their hilarious and dangerous masquerades often mix quite easily with the cunning of political platforms. Easterling argues that the study of such "real estate cocktails" provides vivid evidence of the market's weakness, resilience, or violence. Enduring Innocence collects six stories of spatial products and their political predicaments: cruise ship tourism in North Korea; high-tech agricultural formations in Spain (which have reignited labor wars and piracy in the Mediterranean); hyperbolic forms of sovereignty in commercial and spiritual organizations shared by gurus and golf celebrities; automated global ports; microwave urbanism in South Asian IT enclaves; and a global industry of building demolition that suggests urban warfare. These regimes of nonnational sovereignty, writes Easterling, "move around the world like weather fronts"; she focuses not on their blending—their global connectivity—but on their segregation and the cultural collisions that ensue.Enduring Innocence resists the dream of one globally legible world found in many architectural discourses on globalization. Instead, Easterling's consideration of these segregated worlds provides new tools for practitioners sensitive to the political composition of urban landscapes.
Author: Keller Easterling Publisher: MIT Press (MA) ISBN: 9780262050616 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 209
Book Description
The dominant architectures in our culture of development consist of generic protocols for building offices, airports, houses, and highways. For Keller Easterling these organizational formats are not merely the context of design efforts—they are the design. Bridging the gap between architecture and infrastructure, Easterling views architecture as part of an ecology of interrelationships and linkages, and she treats the expression of organizational character as part of the architectural endeavor. Easterling also makes the case that these organizational formats are improvisational and responsive to circumstantial change, to mistakes, anomalies, and seemingly illogical market forces. By treating these irregularities opportunistically, she offers architects working within the customary development protocols new sites for making and altering space. By showing the reciprocal relations between systems of thinking and modes of designing, Easterling establishes unexpected congruencies between natural and built environments, virtual and physical systems, highway and communication networks, and corporate and spatial organizations. She frames her unconventional notion of site not in terms of singular entities, but in terms of relationships between multiple sites that are both individually and collectively adjustable.
Author: James H. Smith Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226816060 Category : BUSINESS & ECONOMICS Languages : en Pages : 361
Book Description
Orientations -- Prologue: an introduction to the personal, methodological, and spatiotemporal scales of the project -- The eyes of the world: themes of movement, visualization, and (dis)embodiment in Congolese digital minerals extraction (an introduction) -- Mining worlds. War stories: seeing the world through war ; The magic chain: interdimensional movement in the supply chain for the "Black Minerals" ; Mining futures in the ruins -- The eyes of the world on Bisie and the game of tags ; Bisie during the time of movement ; Insects of the forest ; The battle of Bisie ; Closure ; Game of tags: auditing the digital minerals supply chain ; Conclusion: chains, holes, and wormholes.
Author: David Sims Publisher: American University in Cairo Press ISBN: 1617978841 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 560
Book Description
Egypt has placed its hopes on developing its vast and empty deserts as the ultimate solution to the country’s problems. New cities, new farms, new industrial zones, new tourism resorts, and new development corridors, all have been promoted for over half a century to create a modern Egypt and to pull tens of millions of people away from the increasingly crowded Nile Valley into the desert hinterland. The results, in spite of colossal expenditures and ever-grander government pronouncements, have been meager at best, and today Egypt’s desert is littered with stalled schemes, abandoned projects, and forlorn dreams. It also remains stubbornly uninhabited. Egypt’s Desert Dreams is the first attempt of its kind to look at Egypt’s desert development in its entirety. It recounts the failures of governmental schemes, analyzes why they have failed, and exposes the main winners of Egypt’s desert projects, as well as the underlying narratives and political necessities behind it, even in the post-revolutionary era. It also shows that all is not lost, and that there are alternative paths that Egypt could take.
Author: Roger Keil Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 0745683150 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
The urban century manifests itself at the peripheries. While the massive wave of present urbanization is often referred to as an 'urban revolution', most of this startling urban growth worldwide is happening at the margins of cities. This book is about the process that creates the global urban periphery – suburbanization – and the ways of life – suburbanisms – we encounter there. Richly detailed with examples from around the world, the book argues that suburbanization is a global process and part of the extended urbanization of the planet. This includes the gated communities of elites, the squatter settlements of the poor, and many built forms and ways of life in-between. The reality of life in the urban century is suburban: most of the earth's future 10 billion inhabitants will not live in conventional cities but in suburban constellations of one kind or another. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre's demand not to give up urban theory when the city in its classical form disappears, this book is a challenge to urban thought more generally as it invites the reader to reconsider the city from the outside in.
Author: Benjamin H. Bratton Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 026202957X Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 523
Book Description
A comprehensive political and design theory of planetary-scale computation proposing that The Stack—an accidental megastructure—is both a technological apparatus and a model for a new geopolitical architecture. What has planetary-scale computation done to our geopolitical realities? It takes different forms at different scales—from energy and mineral sourcing and subterranean cloud infrastructure to urban software and massive universal addressing systems; from interfaces drawn by the augmentation of the hand and eye to users identified by self—quantification and the arrival of legions of sensors, algorithms, and robots. Together, how do these distort and deform modern political geographies and produce new territories in their own image? In The Stack, Benjamin Bratton proposes that these different genres of computation—smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation—can be seen not as so many species evolving on their own, but as forming a coherent whole: an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new governing architecture. We are inside The Stack and it is inside of us. In an account that is both theoretical and technical, drawing on political philosophy, architectural theory, and software studies, Bratton explores six layers of The Stack: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User. Each is mapped on its own terms and understood as a component within the larger whole built from hard and soft systems intermingling—not only computational forms but also social, human, and physical forces. This model, informed by the logic of the multilayered structure of protocol “stacks,” in which network technologies operate within a modular and vertical order, offers a comprehensive image of our emerging infrastructure and a platform for its ongoing reinvention. The Stack is an interdisciplinary design brief for a new geopolitics that works with and for planetary-scale computation. Interweaving the continental, urban, and perceptual scales, it shows how we can better build, dwell within, communicate with, and govern our worlds. thestack.org
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Author: Keller Easterling
Author: Keller Easterling
Author: Keller Easterling
Author: Andreas Ruby
Author: Keller Easterling
Author: Keller Easterling
Author: James H. Smith
Author: David Sims
Author: Roger Keil
Author: Benjamin H. Bratton