The parabolistic history above dramatizes how the City layer also unwinds the well-worn distinction between two ideal cities (reminiscent of Schmitt ’ s land versus sea): one is a city of partitions, permanent centers, and enveloped populations, and the other a city of movement expressed through nomadic landscapes, shifting perspectives, and impermanent networks. For the latter City, the line is an angle of flight, a vector and trajectory. For the former, as it is for Schmitt, the line fixes and differentiates between inside and outside, a distinct boundary membrane that holds together a contiguous polity under voluntary siege, enforcing and naturalizing that polity ’ s lived experience of place. But just as any line is itself reversible (any outside also an inside), these two urban careers of the line are themselves equally as reversible. For the grid, both the line of absolute passage and the line of absolute partition become in practice a means for the expression of the other. Like the young girl – old woman optical illusion, the figure-ground prominence of the inside versus the outside and the grounded versus the mobile flips between one ideal resolution and the other, oscillating wildly and permanently. Its reversibility may be depicted in several other ways too. It could be a Euclidean grid of points specified on a plane, separated by equal distances in the crisscrossing of perpendicular lines, or the grid could just as well be the irregular thistle of pedestrian drifts, switched packets, infinitesimally granular addressees, unexpected sea sludge (and for the City layer, one may be the precondition of the other).
Like any other platform, the urban grid is both descriptive and generative. It both draws a map of its own host situation, providing by its rigidity and predictability both the four-squared coordinates that resolve City blocks and the open channels of circulation around them, making that land legible and available to exogenous agents. In anticipation of how such grids can link cities to other structures of vastly different scales, architecture has anticipated and modeled these sorts of reversible territory and topos in many different ways. For example, around the time of the Apollo 8 “ Earthrise ” photograph, the Italian architects Archizoom, led by Andrea Branzi, were interested in considering an image of the city “ in exclusively quantitative terms, eliminating the qualitative question from the debate. ” No-Stop City, their most recognized experiment toward a “ city without architecture, ” is organized primarily through “ systems of electronic instruments, products, information, and ... componential interior[s]. ” The dominant figure for the project is the minimal inspiration of the line , but less the line of primordial graphical marking than the line that emerges in the normalized repetition of instances into a nodal grid (or in the tonal line that resolves and dissolves in the score of minimalist musical composition or in the arc of a linear statistical tendency, for example). Their abstractions required no fancy computation; rather, the project featured intensely reductive urban grid plans composed partially on typewriters , with periods and commas for nodes and zeros and dashes overlaying these to create formal fields. Later, several mirror box installations presented fleshed-out models infinitely reflected on all sides to generate a similar infinite horizon of the same, reducing all objects within the geometry to recombinant instances of graphed information. Branzi writes that No-Stop City represents a city that is an “ apparently hyper-expressive reality but that is, actually substantially catatonic because it is the result of the infinite repetition of an alienating political system without density. ” <sup>7</sup> For this, the city equals the world, and the world is rendered as a conjunctive grid wrapping a closed informational array within the arrangements of urban totality. <sup>8</sup> One price of this totality is, for some, a “ disappearance of the outside, ” as there is nowhere to escape if everywhere is already gridded. <sup>9</sup> What remains, however, is less an architecture of qualitative symbolization than a spatial politics of addition and subtraction standing in for appearance and disappearance. For this, there is always more than one totality and more than one geography employed, and within the informational geodesies evoked by No-Stop City, the symbolic depth of cities doesn ’ t disappear so much as it itself becomes an interface to and for these totalities . Today the globalization of urban geography engenders a standardized fabric of flows, radically consolidating nodes into a more centralized and hierarchical matrix of continental interfaces, but some objects in motion are all the more free for it. Others are on lockdown, and some switch back and forth on the fly, both fast and fastened down. In other words, just as for hunters and gatherers, platform sovereignty is guaranteed more by what it does and where it does it than by what it is and who it does it to.
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City Layer