- Envelope and Apparatus
In order to design with or against any given program, we need to understand exactly how a given interface can construe the User of the City layer as a particular kind of political subject. We start with an interim summary of the varied and dynamic qualities of the urban interface. Platform sovereignty can be a function of how a border or interface addresses one or many Users and their interlocking relationships, while the City layer ’ s physical and virtual interfaces and its architectural edges and envelopes can be equally decisive in their governing methods. As these form a matrix of capture and control, like all precedent models of spatial governance, they also enable new and unpredictable stages for urban performance and need not be computational in order to align the urban environment into The Stack ’ s polyvalent claims on global space. Inside cities, the line, the gate, and the wall separate inside from outside, quasi-private from quasipublic, and generate and direct flows accordingly. Some corralled spaces persist longer than others, fleeting or permanent, and so even as they fix space, urban interfaces may be in motion, however imperceptible their speed. Lines not only shift and perforate; their ability to interiorize and exteriorize is also always reversible, and so even when it does not move, which side is being exteriorized by the other can switch in the blink of an eye: as it orders the landscape around itself, the center might hold, but what it holds may come and go. As computational media prostheticize User mobility, virtual envelopes also slice up and program urban space, but along rather different planes than fixed architectural surfaces do, and they do so with increasingly authority. The mobile device ’ s interface is based on the semiotics of graphical diagrams more than architectural vernaculars, and so it can index and express The Stack ’ s organization of the city as the City layer with greater explicitness than any building-scale morphology, and it can do so on the fly for different Users according to different governing programs. That said, it is only by conceiving the design of both physical and virtual modes of the urban interface at once, either as conflicting or complementary parts of a whole, that we can hope to intervene in their effects with consequence.
City Layer
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