- City as Layer
Now that humans are a majority urban species, it is time to reevaluate what real, finalinstance sovereignties can be derived from a city ’ s (or all cities ’ ) surfaces and interfaces. To do so means to situate the City as an interdependent layer within The Stack, and thereby the management of urban networks within global information and energy Clouds. These infrastructures produce the fragments from which platform sovereignty is identified, codified, and enforced across scales, from the intrapersonal to the interfacial and the transcontinental. In contrast to conceptions of the political as a discursive realm transcendent of the physical urban polis itself, platform sovereignties emerge less through legislative birth canals than through the irregular but consistent access to public and private hardware. The layer is not encapsulated by legal boundaries but is spread throughout a global composite City for which any one metropolis is a localized instance of global economies of mobilization and partition. That composite is ultimately built not only of many different cities, but also grids of optical networks for photon exchange, energy grids for electron exchange, and concrete grids of object placement and displacement, which together link city clusters into geographical hierarchies. Any one grid situates actors according to its particular matrices, its own history, momentum, alliances, contradictions, and the overlapping of two grids might work to multiply those situations or at times to stereoscopically resolve them into one. (This is discussed further in the User chapter.) As part of the City layer in The Stack, each of these grids might be activated individually; more likely, they are combined by some functional equivalence whereby the Cloud layer below and the Address layer above connect to the grids in ways that are agnostic as to unique relative durability, history, or character of each. That is, within The Stack, glass, steel, power, and data (and their grids) may all look the same to the layers above and below. At the same time, more specific User relations are arranged by any of the interfacial surfaces of the urban fabric (not only buildings and roads, but also those energy, hydration and data grids), all of which prioritize differently how a city is open or closed to different people and purposes. The reversibility of platform sovereignties will often play out through the computational automation of interfaces into and out of these grids.
City Layer
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