Utopia not only depends on futurity; it produces futurity as a space to be described and filled with peace or war or both. Unlike cities in the real world, utopias are absolute singularities, from a Jerusalem that was the geographic center of the world, to the island jurisdiction of Thomas More, to Theodor Adorno ’ s insistence to Ernst Bloch that the utopian impulse is not that of positive reform, but of complete transformation of the totality of what is, up to and including the apparent reality of death. On that last bend sits Fredric Jameson ’ s quote, repeated often by even those it was meant to ridicule, that “ it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. ” But is that even still true? Was it less true at the end of 2008 than now, when, after the storm, we have blithely resumed business as usual and officially wasted a good crisis? Either way, we are most definitely not lacking in imagined ends — capitalist, critical, green, securitarian, sacred ends — and it is this surplus (of utopian ends of this or that) that presents a problem for the City layer. Whatever “ end of history ” began in 1989 and supposedly ended in 2001 (or later again in 2008) was in no way an eclipse of utopia, as some who believe themselves dispassionate pragmatists would have it. The flat earth of digital globalization was nothing if not intensely utopian in its self-image. Cities were adorned with a new brotherhood of obelisks marking this new “ postutopian ” order, predicated on the cargo cult economics of Bilbao effects and affects and punctuated by the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in New York City by that utopian urbanist, Mohamed Atta. His master ’ s degree in urban planning described the segmentation of Aleppo, Syria, into Islamic and Western zones where immunity of the former could be protected from the dangers of the latter, as well as his mortification at the mistreatment of the twin towers of the Gates of Al-Nasr. His utopian security urbanism was to “ sacrifice one set of twin towers to save another. ” <sup>47</sup> This is the problem with a surplus of utopian ends.
What holds for our City layer ’ s urbanism proper? Real progress in design tends to occur in response to an emergency, often a war. Recently design has been asked to choose between two metaemergencies: ecological deterioration and securitization/the War on Terror. Lines are drawn. Use cases are modeled. Budgets are allocated. And now a third, the financial crisis, adds another metaemergency/productive constraint condition against which design can push. The three work in combination and in competition for prioritization, and through them, constraint is not only a set of conditions in which design must struggle; to constrain is itself the design strategy. Already these first two crises, among others, turn our attention to urban interfaces, physical and virtual both, as the critical design points. The realities of climatic, ecological, natural, and energy economies as enabling limits on urban systems stage every point within that system as a transference to be interrogated, subtracted, or optimized. For security, the permanent emergency of potential exceptional violence recasts every partition, aperture, orifice, choke point as a site of discipline for the generalized interior and the immunity of the aggregate urban body. The utopia of security might even be defined exactly as the aspirational notion that the polymorphous (and polyspatial and polytemporal) interfaces of the city can be known and governed in total and as a resolved totality through total images and image instruments. So again, for the normalized exception and the reversible interfacial envelope, it is not the utopian versus the realist but an effluent of multiple utopias, of open utopias and closed utopias, fully operational and co-occupying the same location, totalities on top of totalities. For the City layer, we see that this interlacing of utopias, one involving the other, even through the medium of a single architectural or urban form, as defining its lurches into the future.
The Stack to Come
321