Another geodesign problem for the City layer with which we are concerned, then, is not the protection of indeterminate space from this sort of excessive defense mechanism, but the extension and expansion of platforms of openness, not because it would be nice but because it is necessary to the ultimate goal of robust, designable governance of urban platforms. This requires a model of the User that is constitutionally diverse and well tuned to the computationally active urban interfaces in which it is situated. That model would be guaranteed more by the continuity of urban networks, blending into planetary boulevards, than by cartographically delineated parliaments. Its potential depends on the viable universality of whatever base-unit interfaces it can build on, and whatever intelligent agent, human or nonhuman, of that urban political geography would engage them. Buttons? Borders? Ballots? Buildings? Still just these interfaces? One of these becoming another? In the worldliness of migrant labor, migrant capital, migrant information, migrant cultures, migrant languages, migrant standards of legal rights and itinerant universalisms, the specific standards of (national) citizenship ( jus sanguinis, “ right of blood, ” and jus soil, “ right of soil ” ) cannot carry the same guarantee of determination as they may have under different regimes of relative motility operated by nations tied to land and states woven to nations. These citizen statuses may be a matter of life and death for some, but are they still inadequate foundations from which to scale the model geopolitics of the User going forward. Furthermore, any inadequacy is measured not only against hypermobility, but against positions of agency no longer exclusive to humans and the political traditions of humans, occupied by the overlaid populations of Users and Addresses for whom we now design. Such are the cities, and the City layer.
The Stack to Come
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