Songdo and Masdar were built with Cisco and IBM as key partners.) Is Situationist cutand-paste psychogeography reborn or smashed to bits by Minecraft? What binds the hyperlibertarian secessionism of the Seasteading Institute, which would move whole populations offshore to live on massive ships floating from port to port unmolested by regulation and undesired publics (Facebook funder Peter Thiel is a key funder) with Archigram ’ s Walking City project from 1967, which plotted for Star Wars Land Walker – like city machines to get up and amble away to greener pastures as needed? For that matter, as models of programmable planets and embryonic Matrioshka brains, how should we weigh Cisco/NASA ’ s Planetary Skin, which, as we know, would blanket the globe ’ s epidermal crust with ubiquitous physical sensors, on one hand, and the Death Star, on the other? For the Death Star, as for the animal brain, many of the most important information processing and mission-critical tasks take place on the outer surface of the sphere — on the skin, not in the core. Palm Jumeirah, Taitlin ’ s Tower, USS Enterprise, the Pentagon, Noah ’ s Ark, Le Corbusier ’ s Plan Voisin, the New South China Mall, Ryugyong Hotel, San-Zhi Pod Village, Sim City, Irvine: it gets harder to keep all these walled megagardens straight.
Just like the City layer does and does not generate new forms of sovereignty as a function of a specific politics of envelopes, both physical and virtual, themselves defined by the reversibility of its interior and exterior, the urban platform is also defined by the reversibility of a design gesture ’ s ultimate effects. The utopian and dystopian will invert one into the other without even switching places! The aspiration to the comprehensive “ content management ” of everything that lives inside its fold drives the City platform to open and close, to centralize and decentralize, over and back again, instituting control though the universality of its interfacial protocols, and vice versa. It may be that the agonistic logics of politics — drawing lines between friend and enemy over and over — make it more difficult to see how the technical achievements of constituencies that we believe we oppose also can form the basis of the real alternative systems we also seek to design. For the geopolitical ruptures of The Stack, we can be sure that reversibility sloshes both ways: if Voluntary Prisoners can become Foxconn, then the Foxconn apparatus-assembly archipelago could also provide the genesis of further inversions and utopian opposites. If it does, would we be able to notice them? The Obama era, you will recall, started with a new vogue for infrastructural investment and governance, but the fashion proved short-lived and easily diverted. The overleveraged early 2000s “ Bilbao effect ” architectural projects were supposed to give way to massive public spending on large built systems that actually did things, but the new New Deal didn ’ t happen. <sup>50</sup> For some bets, attention turned toward compressed natural gas development at the expense of more difficult-to-solve renewable energy sources and systems, and for others to actively preventing infrastructural development of, for example, airport expansion or the Keystone tar sands pipeline from Canada into the United States. For the most part, the new infrastructuralism sought less to mitigate against the risks of algorithmic capital and anthropocenic growth than to update their armatures: think Sir Norman Foster ’ s Beijing Airport (built) versus the North Sea wind farms proposed by OMA (not built). Around the time of Obama ’ s second inauguration, we also received word that Foster had received a most extraordinary commission. His office was asked to work with the European Space Agency to design structures to be 3D-printed on the moon. The prospect of constructing new civilizations from whole cloth on nearby planets and moons has inspired no shortage of utopian schemes, but in this case, that cloth is the moon itself, turned into the printed matter with which off-Earth habitations might be mechanically excreted. <sup>51</sup> Such a project should be called robotic terraforming as much as off-planet urbanism because instead of sending designers and building supplies across the vacuum of space, the mission calls instead for programs (call them what you like: scripts, recipes, algorithms) that would instruct a replicating printer to build up new structures layer-by-layer of lunar soil, and in time fill the sunny southern lunar pole with new airport cities.
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City Layer