Extrastatecraft
The Power of Infrastructure Space
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Extrastatecraft is the operating system of the modern world: the skyline of Dubai, the subterranean pipes and cables sustaining urban life, free-trade zones, the standardized dimensions of credit cards, and hyper-consumerist shopping malls. It is all this and more. Infrastructure sets the invisible rules that govern the spaces of our everyday lives, making the city the key site of power and resistance in the twenty-first century.
Keller Easterling reveals the nexus of emerging governmental and corporate forces buried within the concrete and fiber-optics of our modern habitat. Extrastatecraft will change how we think about cities—and, perhaps, how we live in them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Easterling (Organization Space and Enduring Innocence), an architect and Yale professor, offers an intelligent, even revelatory examination of the invisible "rules governing the space of everyday life," the "operating system" of the built environment that she has coined the "infrastructure space." Analyzing the development and effects of free trade zones, broadband distribution, and quality control standards, she draws on Marshall McLuhan's maxim "the medium is the message" to consider what an infrastructural matrix is "doing rather than what it is saying." The book aims to uncover how corporations bypass governments and exert power through urban architecture's hidden "software" in insidious ways that often contradict its benign and banal public face. Easterling challenges architects and urban planners to reconsider their modus operandi and follow the example of James Oglethorpe, who founded Savannah, Ga., in the 18th century not with a master plan, but rather by establishing a flexible protocol that "modulated the relative proportions of public, private, open, and agricultural space." Controversially and entertainingly, she also urges social justice and environmental activists to increase their effectiveness by manipulating infrastructure space. This task can be accomplished using "techniques that are less heroic, less automatically oppositional, more effective and sneakier," such as gossip, compliance, comedy, misdirection, and distraction. Easterling's fresh, lucid thoughts on the true function of public space have resulted in a scholarly but surprisingly accessible book.