When people inhabit a city, they situate themselves and are situated through the intersections of infrastructure and technical systems, and the particular domains and modalities of occupation – settlement and work – that are configured by them. At the same time, people are also inhabited by the city, as a kind of possession, endowment, and series of conundrums. People figure themselves out through figuring arrangements of materials, of designing what is available to them in formats and positions that enable them (...) particular vantage points and ways of doing things. What it is possible for people to do with each other is largely a question of what it is that exists between them, and how this ‘between’ can be shaped as active points of reference, connection and anchorage. Infrastructure exerts a force – not simply in the materials and energies it avails, but also the way it attracts people, draws them in, coalesces and expends their capacities. If territory is a bundle of political technologies for measuring, administering and regulating the scope of what it is possible to do in the city, then other inventive political technologies are also at work in the making of urban life. (shrink)

In a modern, calculative world, the techniques of tracking are everywhere in the ascendant. Enhanced by algorithmic procedures and analytics, they have been incorporated into distributed network systems, augmented by new sensing and locationing technologies, and embedded into mobile devices, urban structures and environments. Simultaneously, new practices of tracking and sensing have emerged across the consumer, state and corporate sectors. These practices are amplified in the case of megacities as they strive to keep pace with rapid urban development. All movement (...) is subordinated to a condition of 'calculative mobilization’, whereby the urban realm is understood through the spatialization of algorithmic operations. And yet, due to their unique large- and multi-scaled accumulations of data-enhanced actors and their complex, stratified modes of proximity and interoperable relationality, the particular densities of megacities challenge conventional spatial formats of movement and positioning. This article offers new formats of analysis for these calculative practices and the agential and ontological status of the hybrid urban entities that they register and engender. It also offers new structuring principles and political orientations, which are particularly urgent as we witness the ascendance of 'Spatial Data Infrastructures’ (SDIs) that are often promoted as participatory and inclusive while remaining largely inaccessible, pursuing proprietary aims, and infused with the potential not only to protect and inform but also to violate. (shrink)

This article tackles an old, classical problem, which is acquiring a new epochal relevance with the techno-aesthetic processing of form and substance, expression and content. The field of digital architecture is embarked in the ancient controversy between the line and the curve, binary communication and fuzzy logic. Since the 1990s, the speculative qualities of digital architecture have exposed spatial design to the qualities of growing or breeding, rather than planning. However, such qualities still deploy the tension between discrete spaces and (...) continual curving. In this context, the article suggests the computational coexistence of discrete coding with continual morphing, defying any easy resolution for an aesthetic of continuity or discontinuity, the superiority of the analog or the meta-logic of the digital. The metaphysical dimension of such coexistence needs to include the abstract capacities of experiencing the transition from one state to another as the registering of algorithmic processing. Computation is intrinsic to microperceptions, incomputable quantities deploying the infectious property of the digital code. The article draws on the digital architecture of Greg Lynn to explore whether the computational nature of the digital calculus has the potential to challenge the bifurcation between the biological and the mathematical, the physical and the mental. (shrink)

Utopian thinking, and utopias as a genre, flourished as forms of the imaginary until recently. The emergence of the genre, with Thomas More, emphasizing spatial arrangement and with Louis-Sébastien Mercier invoking future orientation, I argue, is illuminated by placing them next to the economic enclosures of their time. Their utopias, however, closed off both the individual and time from the capitalist changes around them, allowing for little or no variation or expression of self. Thus, their imagined virtuous societies actually sought (...) to foreclose the future and other spaces. The paradox is that capitalist development, with its admitted inequities and horrors, favored an expansive self and vital societies, which carry with them their own virtues. In spite of the ameliorative tendencies of utopias, their limitations, that is, their closed-mindedness, slowly but surely discredited the genre itself. Its place has been taken today by science fiction, futurist studies and the exercise of the imaginary in terms of social science. (shrink)