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Bratton","content":"34. Reversible Grids\n\nAlong with policing reversible partitions, the City also situates signposts and landmarks around which roving bodies might orient their passing. In many respects, for Stack urbanism, mobilization precedes and supersedes settlement. Instead of housing massive inert populations, the City layer is perhaps foremost a platform for sorting Users in transit, who in turn reprogram the urban platform, and through it re-sort one another. Consider, by way of analogy and allegory, the excavations beginning in 1994 that unearthed the G ö bekli Tepe temple near Sanliurfa, Turkey, among the oldest human-made places of worship ever found to date. The dig ’ s stratified layers, one upon another, were set over centuries. The earliest layers date to 9000 B.C.E., the dawn of the Holocene era a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramids, more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape, and 5,000 years before the first proto-states emerged in the Nile and Indus valleys. The temple predates not only formal agriculture but large-scale human settlement, and it is thought that it was a site of worship for numerous hunter-gatherer groups within a roughly hundred-mile radius. The discovery is obviously significant for Neolithic anthropology and has challenged some presumptions about the social and technological capacities of preagricultural societies. For our purposes, this temple as primal scene not only underscores the foundational role of “ theology ” in the centralization of symbolic interfacial authority well in advance of the proto-state, but also for its demonstration of the essential importance of geography, and geo-graphy, or “ writing on the Earth. ” We can imagine (perhaps naively) that for those following game and gathering food, the direction of G ö bekli Tepe , this ancient megastructure, may have been a guiding vector around which unpredictable landscapes were measured. Perhaps its collection of animal images served as an index of possible encounters, its funeral rituals as interfaces to the mysteries of life, and the imagined possibility of triumph in or over death. For unknown reasons, at the beginning of the eighth millennium B.C.E., the entire temple system was deliberately buried under 500 cubic meters of soil, preserving it until its discovery in the 1990s. The temple ’ s establishment and thousand-year career as a homing figure orienting the movements of groups in motion, by proximity, distance, access, and reference, marks an inception of landscape geography as an interface to the world as it is moved through.\n\nZipping back to the present, the City layer may be seen not only as enveloping space into fields of control, but also a return to these elemental functions of passage, direction, and narration. The modern urban surface is striated by regularized voids that provide self-directed passage from one enclosure to the next; we call some of those voids “ streets ” and some of those enclosures “ blocks, ” and we call the generative platform striation “ the grid. ” The grid serves the dual purpose of enclosure and escape noted above. At once, it subdivides urban space into geometric units, each bound by legal and physical membranes, and each also situated along the shore of avenues of linear flight toward other cities over the horizon. The City layer is filled with interfaces shifting between acceleration and enclosure, of both physical objects coursing through congested logistical routes and also data packets shuttled or throttled through glass wire and ambient electromagnetic fields. The urban-scale interweaving of both grids, one literally concrete and the other more delicate if no less heavy, binds the mysteries of our own temples to the spatial interfaces that turn sites into places. With Cloud-devices pointing the way and Apps at hand (or Apps as hand, as discussed in the Interfaces chapter), we hunt for and find our modern itineraries, gather food, tabulate risks, mark passage, manage personal economies of sovereignty and alterity, and make tribute to the cycles of synthetic time and governance that give shape to the landscape. <sup>6</sup>\n\nCity Layer\n\n149","previous_page":148,"next_page":150}