The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 160 页

1. Force Finding Function Finding Form

As already suggested above, too much of our actually existing Stack urbanism is naive and fragile, obsessed, for the time being, with the optimization of doomed municipal arrangements and designed by marketing departments to be sold to urban managers who don ’ t actually control what they think they control. This is to be expected, to a certain degree, from a smart city discourse built on enthusiasm for simple fixes and broken urban politics, but again there is still potential in what has gone wrong. The Stack already sees the city as one layer in a larger totality, and not surprisingly, several contemporary schools of thought conceive of designable urban space as a function of delimited totalities, plotting how to rearrange every square meter of a zero-sum geographical pie always threatened by a creeping ocean (real and figural). For some of these indirect descendants of No-Stop City, the city is modeled as a dense material and logistical equation within a receding horizon of data. Urban territory and graphical statistics are morphed into towers of intensive quantitative mass, sometimes representing programmatic adjacencies, sometimes graphical indexes of relative sums, sometimes formal profiles, and usually some mountainous and brightly colored combination of these all at once. ¹⁷ But such architecture may confront more problems raised by the mutual design of quantified space and programmatic narrative than it resolves. In all but a few cases, the dysfunctional relationship between database and narrative ends in a stalemate, two symbolic forms able to communicate only by awkward irony. We can still acknowledge impasses as lessons: the contrived statistical normalization of unlike kinds of urban Users demonstrates just how difficult it is to design urban interfaces for so many demanding occupants of the same location. ¹⁸ Even as certain totalizing ambitions of the City layer, those that see space as a closed set of universal modules of production and consumption and cities as spreadsheets waiting for the right formulas, are doomed to self-cancellation, perhaps the contradictions of this approach illuminate other paths. ¹⁹ Cities are also media for rot. Smart cities are also dumping grounds, platforms for human warehousing, telelabor dormitories, floating prison ships, entropic megaslums, spontaneous war zones, colonial settlements and encroachments, contested archaeological dig sites, fabled ruins, periodic abandonments, dead malls, sleeping cranes hovering over skyscrapers on pause, and similar things that defy easy tabulation and calculation. We see that the global composite platform City isn ’ t filled up by one total informational model but by the overlapping and superimposition of multiple models, multiple totalities competing for air, life, and dominion, and as their juxtaposition comforts some, it discomforts others. By design or by accident, they are all City-level expressions of The Stack.

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City Layer