Most are interested not only in drawing new legal lines for self-interested benefit, but also in building the armature of occupation that will enforce those lines and give their physical boundaries the force of law. These initiatives thereby spawn their own exceptions. China has several important urban jurisdictional anomalies, such the special status of Hong Kong, Macau, and the Shanghai foreign concessions, and more recently, its urbanization has been steered somewhat by a strict distinction between urban and rural systems and populations, most clearly symbolized by the houkou license system, which also generated a huge population of internal “ illegal aliens. ” The growth of new cities, almost from scratch, but mostly on top of where old ones stood a few years ago, drew on the fungibility of enforcing this credentialization of infrastructural access. Elsewhere, a new kind of tabula rasa urbanism is seen in the charter city movement, as evangelized by New York University economist Paul Romer. The city remains a crucial site for challenges to traditional spatial models of sovereignty and innovation in what might augment or displace them, and Romer has advised plans for a “ charter city ” in Trujillo, Honduras, one administered by the courts of Mauritius and, in principal, open to qualified persons who may choose to reside there. Here individual sovereignty is derived from the access to and use of a common urban infrastructure network more than autochthonous genealogy. Such schemes are certainly not without the dystopian potential of the absolute capitalization of habitat, but at the same time, in the delinking of transient sovereignty from fixed geography, they also contain an important kernel of utopian potential for geodesign invention, one that instead of eradicating place would reestablish it anew for a network society. <sup>26</sup> One hopes so, but the more immediate context of contemporary sovereignty markets would seem by appearances to tilt toward privatopias.
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The Stack to Come