{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","uuid":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","normalized_title":"thestackonsoftwareandsovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","isbns":["9780262029575"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":517,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/The%20Stack%20On%20Software%20and%20Sovereignty","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/search"},"page":{"printed_page":162,"pdf_page":178,"physical_index":178,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"1927eddd02b3c55ea296dcebf31f054a870da051564a8229d15ffae66c51e5a9"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"For the moment, parametricism and related programs have won one circumscribed battle to represent early twenty-first-century supercontemporary style for airport cities, but architecture in general has badly lost the war for the design of urban space. The two are at least correlated. Instead of design studios, management consultants — McKinsey, Morgan Stanley and Halliburton to Cisco, Siemens and IBM — are winning the city-making game, and they have rather different design interests in the flows of algorithmic capital and its spastic valuations of land, energy, information, and human capital. They too can be said to render the City layer as an imprint of the layers above and below, and they possess equally deliberative mechanisms to structure urban systems accordingly. Their topological imaginary, however, is not the folded surface but the calculative grid, and any disinterested alien intelligence would observe that today most efficacious “ parametric ” urban design software is Microsoft Excel. In effect, management consultant – driven design has dislodged architecture and traditional urbanism from the prime seat of authorship over urban form, as new built space becomes a formfinding by-product of speculative space-use and site-cost simulations. Their methods pull data-driven design from deeper strata of The Stack, telescoping descriptive and prescriptive algorithms set in motion in the Cloud layer and building their local franchises into urban (or “ urbanish ” ) investments. <sup>21</sup> Their spatial-systems economics often outpaces legal codification, leveraging an arbitrage of gaps in formal building code and zoning (but as well, from such gaps generative accidents of interfacial sovereignty also hatch themselves). Their portfolios can be measured in millions of square kilometers, but it seems that the quantity of officially futuristic cities is inversely proportional to the quality of their futurism. New “ totalistic ” (not really totalitarian) smart city initiatives from global information technology companies have borne real fruit for those offering them, often finding clients in sovereign capital funds or in sovereign governments directly. <sup>22</sup> They also are in no way allergic to collaboration with (or subcontracting to) globally known architectural design firms. This mix of “ real ” architects and urbanists with consultants and IT systems architects and administrators is neither intrinsically offensive nor automatically fortunate, but it does alter the relative tabula rasa on which synthetic megacities are built. No more Brasilia or Tsukuba Science City; now we have variations on J. G. Ballard ’ s Super-Cannes: Masdar (Norman Foster, Partners, et al.), Skolkova (Cisco et al.) Songdo City (Cisco, IBM, et al.), KAUST (IBM, HOK, et al.), and on and on. <sup>23</sup> These Moon-bases on Earth are spliced from Soviet science cities, Silicon Valley campuses, Orange County gated communities, and a mutual understanding between political despotism and technological innovation. They are what cities look like in the shadow of airports, Special Economic Zones, and “ sustainability mandates. ” Some of these would redefine city-states as carefully policed service platforms, and for this, their urban-planning expertise relies on CRM (Customer Relationship Management), DRM (Digital Rights Management), server virtualization, end- User usage metrics, object synchronization across multiple devices and device synchronization across multiple data objects, at least as much as it does on architectural design, and often not at all on things that are normally thought to make interesting cities interesting. <sup>24</sup> Like all Ballardesque metropoli, these cities are “ post-interesting, ” which is itself interesting. Contrary to parametricism ’ s claims, figural virtuosity is subordinated to building forms that are recognizable and ad hoc, popular and stupid, but amenable to the real estate metrics that outvote other politics of the envelope. A partial list of these benchmarks includes both the sensible and the sinister: on-site carbon footprint minimization, energy and water management, replaceable and recombinant building materials, perimeter gate security, civic control contingency planning, bombresistant membranes, crowd circulation administration, tightly curated digital signage, assigned parking spaces, account credit-issuing recycling bins, and, for some, separate public entrances for citizens, tourists, women, unclean animals, and service staff. <sup>25</sup>\n\n162\n\nCity Layer","previous_page":161,"next_page":163}