The Stack, as a whole, structures the City layer through the consolidation of urban nodes into megacities and also through the consolidation of both public and private urban systems in megastructures. We ’ ll find that instead of heterogeneous and open interfacial platforms, for their own footprints Cloud platforms prioritize instead urbanscale walled gardens. The megastructure provides a bounded total space in which architectural and software program can be composed by complete managerial visualization; for it, the border, the gate, and the wall bend into closed loops containing vast interiors, sometimes in pursuit of utopian idealization and isolation. The megastructure is an enclave within the city that also holds a miniaturized city within itself, and so the specific and different terms of that miniaturization are the vocabularies of differing utopian agendas, whether explicit or suppressed. Its curation of opacity as both a spatial strategy and an affectation operates not only in and on the skin of its closed physical envelope but also within its capturing claims on the virtual territories of the Cloud Polis. As we ’ ll see, these closures are often interdependent, one closing off a physical site into an artificial island for which the inward bend of the envelope gathers a polity into form and the other cordoning off parts of the electromagnetic spectrum itself as another equally important megastructural territory to utilize. Their geographic secession provides the megastructure one measure of spatial sovereignty, one that begins as a function of autocratic enclosure but can also be leveraged well beyond physical jurisdiction and into the realms of iconic form and charismatic mobilization. The politics of both are utopian and dystopian at once, one never really able to purge itself of the other, always able to flip into the other and back again, depending on where you may be standing and why.
The image of global urbanity as a single contiguous body is drawn at the scale of the whole spherical planetary surface, and we certainly have no shortage of depictions of it, especially at night, as a throbbing weave of life, light, movement. (What telecommunications brand can make it through one fiscal quarter without advertising itself thusly?) It ’ s less clear, however, what this obligatory geographic icon might communicate other than communication itself. Like the Incan geoglyphs of pre-Columbian Chile, does the global urban weave have pictographic content to be read from above, or, like the Earth art and maps of Robert Smithson, does it make a pedagogic point about geological time and perspective? <sup>47</sup> The image of urban neural nets draws more specifically on an aesthetics of logistics (more in this in Interfaces chapter) and from an admiring contentment with network topologies as some final form and format. In such renderings, networks more than cities (and specifically the metanetwork of The Stack) are indeed monumentalized. The pronouncement may be something like, “ We are those who have wrapped the planet in wire. This is the signal accomplishment of our time. Our pyramids are gossamer shaped. ” This image infrastructure tries to capture some important change in the local-global telescoping between anthropometric habitat and the wider urban envelope. The City layer of The Stack itself operates as a massively distributed megastructure and draws on, however obliquely and opportunistically, the reservoir of speculative, even utopian megastructural design projects of years past (built and unbuilt), even realizing them after the fact with a sometimes perverse inversion of their original intent. As discussed in the Earth chapter, in and around the years when the first photographs of Earth were taken from space, speculative architectural design was inspired by the visual scale of the whole Earth as a comprehensive site condition and spawned scores of now canonical megastructure projects. Many proposed total utopian spaces (islands cut off from the rest of the world, per Fredric Jameson ’ s discussion of the utopian genre in science fiction), including, as already mentioned, OMA ’ s Voluntary Prisoners of Archi tecture (1972) and Superstudio ’ s planet-spanning Continuous Monument (1969), while others sought the utopian through the maximal perforation of boundaries by ludic interfaces and absolute grids, including No-Stop City (1969) or Constant ’ s New Babylon (1959 – 1974). The merger of cities into planetary-scale conglomerations was imagined, among others, by Constantin Dioxiadis as Ecumenopolis, a single planned urban form across the whole world, and Paolo Soleri as Arcology, enclosed megacities rising into the lower atmosphere, so large that they constitute their own ecosystems. The impetus for these massive, even planetary-scale architectural propositions may be a positive or negative reaction to the Buckminster Fullerian vision of Spaceship Earth as a single design problem, and attempts to see the whole of society in terms of the whole of space (part of the desire for totality important to Jamesonian utopian desire and dystopian anxiety). <sup>48</sup> The projects provided a link between the grandiose progressivism of high modernity, such as the massive Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna, a neighborhood-sized building from 1930 holding over 1,300 apartments, and ideas for extraplanetary colonies on Mars, dating at least to the late nineteenth century. For many of these, the goal is a wholesale replacement of the modern programmatic order of nested and individuated buildings, cities and states with new models and programs, perhaps along that continuum from strong architectural authority (Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture) or to an open, ludic urban field (New Babylon), for which megastructures serve a new spatial authority more appropriate to a properly global society.
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