Platform Urbanism and Its Discontents

Platform Urbanism and Its Discontents edited by Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer

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Contents

Access Is the New Capital

6 Foreword and Acknowledgements

41 Helge Mooshammer and Peter Mörtenböck

9 Helge Mooshammer and Peter Mörtenböck Platform Urbanism and Its Discontents

in Conversation with Sandro Mezzadra 53 Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió Decolonial Platform Urbanism 63 Louis Moreno The Presence of the Past in the Platform, or, the Cultural Logic of Absolute Rent 73 Benjamin Gerdes Trending toward Teargas 83 Peggy Deamer Cooperatives, Platforms and Architecture 93 Peter Lang Access Platform Thinking Access Making Access

Contents

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City on Demand?

The Collapse of Scale

107 Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer

171 Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer

in Conversation with Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman 119 Alan Wiig Platform Urbanism during a Pandemic: Three Vignettes 131 Scott Rodgers and Susan Moore

in Conversation with Stephen Graham 185 Ross Exo Adams On Breath 193 Pedro Gadanho

#saveourcinema

Flatforms

On Our Way!

Stay Home Matrix

Hi, My Name is Charlotte

Digitally-Aided De-Growth

Solidarity and Samosas I Will Delete You 141 This Machine Kills The Final Phase of Platform Urbanism: A Podcast by This Machine Kills 149 Leo Hollis The A to Z of Platform Urbanism 157 Maroš Krivý Platform Urbanism and Sociotech­nical Imagi­naries Platform: Taking the Metaphor Seriously Socialist Cybernetics

Contents

197 Mona Mahall and Asli Serbest Homes of the Internet 209 Gerald Nestler and Sylvia Eckermann Against Platform NonTransparency: A Politics of Resolution for Renegade Activism​

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The Platform Is My Boyfriend

Monuments of Circulation – ‘I’ Is Everywhere

219 Slutty Urbanism

281 Tom Avermaete

Glitches from the Pandemic – Three-Act Play 229 Ofri Cnaani Measures of Closeness: The Contactless Condition 239 Lucia Babina Glorious Times 247 Orit and Tal Halpern Singularity Rebellion 257 Andreas Kofler Death as Timeline Event 265 Ignacio Valero The Tears of Freud: (Un)Heimlich COVID, Vectorialist Techno-Feudal Platform Overlords, Emotariat Automata

Contents

The Places, Pulses and People of Platform Urbanism 289 Bernadette Krejs Ideals of the Home 297 Jochen Becker The City as Data Factory: Notes on Tech Urbanism 311 Douglas Spencer Bearing Capital: Platforms, Performance and Personification 321 Owen Hatherley On Owning a ‘Burner’ Bloggers Rest Home Obsessed with Its Own Image In the Flotation Tank The Shielding List

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Data Is a Relation Not a Property

The Future Is Public

335 Tiziana Terranova

389 Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer

In the ­Shadow of Platform Urbanism: ­Beyond Utility and Towards the Institutionalisation of Technosocial Desires 341 Matthew Stewart Beyond the Mountain Lies Another Animated Monsters, Vampiric Platforms Calculating Machines 349 Into the Black Box Collective From Urban to Platform (and Return): Emerging Time-Spaces 361 Daniel Cardoso Llach Unsettling Placelessness 371 Matias Viegener No Fate but What We Make 383 Ravi Sundaram Paper Histories and Bio-Political Subjects?

in Conversation with Saskia Sassen 397 Vyjayanthi Rao 2020: Platform Is Everywhere Platform is Public: Citizen Distribution Systems Manifestations Maintenance Art: Museum as Pantry 409 Jonathan Massey Learning to Live Together 415 Gabu Heindl Infrastructure, Not Platform Intergenerational Alliances Intersectional Solidarity in Contemporary Housing 425 Fairwork Project This Is Not A Platform 439 Edgar Pieterse Inhabitation of Tensions Learning through Unintended Consequences Activating Potential

455 Appendix

Contents

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process of editing this book. For months, Carmen worked tirelessly in tandem with all contributing authors to ensure that this book could come to a timely completion. While devoting faultless atten­ tion to every detail, she always kept a calm and firm eye on the overall ambitions of this endeavour and gracefully shepherded everybody involved toward reaching this common goal.

Another crucial stalwart in bringing this multi-stranded project to a fruitful conclusion has been our copy editor and trans­­ lator Joe O’Donnell. As with many of our other books, he has helped to clarify the key arguments of the contributions assembled in this book with great care and a much appreciated sensibility regarding their idiosyncrasies and specific modes of narration. We are truly grateful for having been able to bring him on board again.

The visual beauty of the book you are holding in your hands right now is the great achievement of the graphic designers from Bueronardin. It has been an absolute joy to see how Christof Nardin and Jakob Mayr have been able to connect the wide variety of different contributions in such a captivating as well as meaning­ ful way.

Last but not least sincere thanks are due to nai010 Publishers and their director Eelco van Welie, who has welcomed this project with such open arms and inquisitiveness. His boundless passion for exploring novel issues and topics and his unending support have been indispensable for the realisation of this book.

Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer, May 2021

Orit and Tal Halpern

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Peter Mörtenböck & Helge Mooshammer Platform Urbanism and Its Discontents Imagine you are a member of an exclusive club. Life is easy, since members of your club enjoy a wide range of privileges. From tuning into personalised news feeds to catching up with friends and family, from sorting out your bills and business affairs to arranging your next trip, from ordering food and fashion or lifestyle items to planning your education, professional career, or retirement, all you need to do is access a relevant platform, and from there on things basically work by themselves. It’s taken a while to get to this point but you have worked hard to earn your membership. Slowly but steadily you have built up a personal profile, a carefully curated history of activities which can be used as collateral when applying for further membership benefits and upgraded services. You have even subscribed to an online investment platform, which means you also have a nominal share in the providers of these privileged services and thus support the club’s foundations while profiting at the same time.

In terms of its set-up and architecture, this club admittedly relies on a complex symbiosis between logistics, technology and infrastructure, yet its experience is effortless. All of its services are embedded in data-sensing environments and enhanced by artifi­ cial intelligence, enabling them to automatically synchronise across different devices and platforms. Through these magical mergers, they create a seamless, holistic universe, accessible with the tip of a finger, from the comfort of your bedroom or wherever else you choose to be. It’s like living on an all-inclusive island, which you would never want to leave. With every conceivable desire catered for, there is no need to worry about how these privileges are actually made possible, or what the world behind your interface, where the goods and services you benefit from are actually produced, might look like. Welcome to life in the platform city!

Then, one day, you wake up to find that you are in the wrong club. For whatever reason, the city you live in has changed a few con­­­ tractual arrangements with its service providers. Now your current club membership is no longer recognised as a valid basis for in­­ vesting you with the rights and privileges accorded to other citizens.

Suddenly you find yourself locked out of crucial parts of your everyday routines. You can’t access any of your accounts, you can’t communicate, you can’t deliver work or secure daily essentials, and you also can’t even register anywhere anew. The tricky thing is that, over time, all your privileges have become intertwined: your existing privileges are the basis on which you are granted new ones.

With membership credentials being constantly checked electron­ ically and in real time – if one link breaks, everything fails.

So, what will you do? Try to become a member of a different club and start earning new privileges from the bottom up again?

If completely dropping out of such a tiered benefit system is not an option, will you kick off the foundation of a new club yourself ? Or Platform Urbanism and Its Discontents

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better still, initiate an entirely new membership scheme, one that completely disrupts the way benefits are earned and revolutionises what it means to be a valid member of society? In other words, how will you respond to this new society based on technologically advanced membership systems? Will you see the ‘age of platforms’ as yet another, perhaps even more sophisticated and insidiously internalised mode of individual incarceration or as a harbinger of unbounded connectivity, enabling us to create environments responsive to both individual desires and collective aspirations?

As a matter of fact, digital platforms have become a ubiquitous feature of everyday life, especially in urban environments where human population densities are greater and new practices of mo­bil­ ity are forged that reflect the deepening heterogeneity of labour in the digital economy. 1 Whether we are in need of a ride or a meal or require someone to run a small errand for us, platforms have become the go-to-partner to sort things out. As digital information-­ sourcing and processing technologies, platforms help us to activate networks of exchange and support. The vast informational, eco­ nomic and urban infrastructure they have been able to harness and create is likely to facilitate more and more attempts to mobilise groups of people to interact on these platforms, to generate data and, as a result of these activities, to enable additional business sectors to emerge.

The enormous capital value of these quickly growing hybrid infrastructures and the global competition to establish monopolies in the new value-added chain has initiated numerous changes in terms of social and spatial interaction. In the field of architecture, it is already evident that investment in real estate is in many cases based less on the sales value of an object than on its service value, which is territorially ‘installed’. Increasing emphasis is being placed on the structural integration of services, via which digital plat­ forms seamlessly merge with the tissue of the city and the city itself is made into a comprehensively steerable platform. This shift of focus from architecture as commodity to architecture as service is indicative of the changing constellations of property and rent in which digital platforms are being accorded a key role. Their carefully protected stock of new hybrid infrastructures – modular and scaleable building blocks lent character by architectural vocabulary – shifts attention from the speculative production of urban form to the logistical design of ways to extract rent.

Space, time and money are the key coordinates in these data-­­ processing operations. They regulate the forms of access, parti­ cipation, role design, and privilege allocation. Hence, for platform urbanism the key resource to be exploited, cultivated and developed is not just the hardware of the city and its built environment but the entire software of urban life itself. Everyday life has become the site of an increasingly conflict-laden encounter of the local with the global power of platform capitalism. 2 The conflictual urban geog­raphy of the platform can be understood in terms of ‘flexible spatial arrangements,’ 3 the operations of which are constantly ­re­­pro­grammed by means of digital technologies as soon as they Orit and Tal Halpern

1 Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2013), 85.

2 Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017).

3 Lizzie Richardson, “Coordinating the City: Platforms as Flexible Spatial Arrangements,” Urban Geography 41, no.

3 (2020): 459–461.

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encounter resistance. This flexibility places greater or lesser require­ ments on the different participants in such a system, disadvan­ taging above all those groups of people – couriers, drivers, tutors, gardeners, cleaners – whose on-demand labour is supposed to help others achieve more independence and enjoyment. 4 The con­ tainer villages that have sprung up in many major cities are a visual symbol of this idea of boundless connectivity and flexibility (for the few) – as well as concrete hubs for ‘creative’ work, dwell­ ing and well-being. Together with the flood of open, ‘multifunctional’ zones of encounter which are beginning increasingly to shape the design of working landscapes, consumer worlds and urban spaces, they have become an embodiment of innovation, spontaneous action, and en passant moves – a haunted version of Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood’s 1961 Fun Palace, multiplying and spreading across the world.

4 Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham, The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019).

Julius Taminiau Architects, Startup Village; Benthem Crouwel Architects, Equinix data centre; Science Park Amsterdam, 2018 Platform Urbanism and Its Discontents

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Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer in Conversation with Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman

Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, UCSD-CASA Community Station, 2019 Bottom-up

Citizenship

Distribution

Informality

Labour

Solidarity

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Accounting for Race and Whiteness within the Platform City A large Black Lives Matter street mural was recently painted onto Oak Street, near Union Square in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Unlike more prominent Black Lives Matter murals on larger, more trafficked streets in the area, this one stands out specifically because of its installation in response to racist graffiti on an adjacent home displaying a Black Lives Matter sign in its yard.

A local news blog wrote: On a neighborhood Facebook group, residents pondered what to do. Someone suggested they paint Black Lives Matter on to the street. ‘I think everybody thought that was a great idea,’ Sokol said. ‘There’s a small sign of racists over here; we can come back with a response 100 times bigger, so that’s what we’re doing.’ 17 Since the start of the pandemic, my work-from-home, routine walk around the neighbourhood often takes me down Oak Street.

Unlike the connectivity markers discussed above, the yellow paint of this Black Lives Matter mural conveys a call for racial justice that does not need a telecommunications network, smartphone or app developer to process and interpret the message, even if the block’s residents used their Facebook group to decide on a course of action. The declaration that Black Lives Matter transcends the upgrade cycles, devices and digitisation of the platform city, even as conversations about racial justice proceed through social media and other platform technologies. As 2020 comes to a close, the calls for racial justice across the United States and around the world demand support, recognition and representation, including but not limited to street murals, or indeed social media posts.

This vignette was drafted during the lead-up to the 2020 United States’ presidential election and completed in the weeks after.

The year was not over, and yet was already marked as one of the most consequential in the nation’s – and indeed the world’s – history. The elections were largely framed around the current president’s (mis)handling of the COVID -19 pandemic and the protests for racial justice erupting out of the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, amid the deaths of many other Afri­ can Americans. Both the pandemic and the protests were wrapped up in the politics of ethno-nationalism and white supremacy enflamed by the current president and his supporters. Considera­ tions of urban technology such as those offered in this book rarely foreground race and whiteness as part of our contemporary am­bitions to understand the platform city. But just as the Black Lives Matter protests were often organised through social media platforms and smartphones distributed through the crowd, so were the counter-­ protests against racial justice and against a public health-driven, science-based ap­proach to managing the pandemic, whether these protests took place in cities or not. The cellular infrastructure, data centres, and ubiquitous computing technologies that produce platform urbanism are wrapped up in wider, societal struggles for

Alan Wiig

17 https://eu.wicked local.com/story/ somerville-journal/ 2020/09/29/residentspaint-black-livesmatter-on-streetsacross-somerville/ 114641476/

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recognition, respect, equity, and justice, and we would be remiss not to recognise as much here, today.

As Ruha Benjamin’s Race after Technology 18 makes clear, the platform city only contains that which platform technology cor­­­­pora­tions deem profitable based on decisions largely made by white engineers and programmers. Even though the city is more than platforms, and what is not immersive within platform apps and its infrastructure is still present, to be outside the plat­form implies less visibility, less awareness, less value. The platform city builds more platforms but does not or cannot account for that which remains outside the platform itself. I make this point not to call for the platform to be the place where racial justice might be actual­ ised, but instead to recognise that the platform city is tied up in wider, societal struggles that cannot be solved by upgrading an app or installing a faster network.

18 Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2019).

Black Lives Matter street mural, Union Square, Sommerville, Massachusetts, 2020 Platform Urbanism during a Pandemic: Three Vignettes

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In some ways KX looks like another example of media driven gentrification. But if so, it doesn’t quite fit the traditional model.

London’s media and cultural quarters tended to take shape in­cre­ mentally, often around squares such as Fitzroy Square (art and design), Leicester Square (theatre and cinema), Soho Square (film and television), Golden Square (advertising), or Hoxton Square (arts and new media). KX ’s symbolic hub, Pancras Square, is more carefully planned and orchestrated, its addresses laid out with attention to symbolic (and saleable) value. The architecture of the wider development is well-judged, too, with subtle (and not-so-­ subtle) nods to industrial heritage. The restaurants, bars and shops of KX are a carefully curated mix of higher status chains, bou­ tique shops and notable second locations of well-known London institutions, such as Honest Jon’s record store, or Lina Stores Italian food products.

KX is quickly becoming London’s home to platform compa­ nies, but is it also its own kind of platform? Something akin to how Benjamin Bratton describes digital platforms, pulling together disparate elements into an umbrella space of value-generation? 1 ‘KX ’ may be easy enough to dismiss as just another tasteless place brand, but it is more than an offhand moniker. It comes out of an elaborate place-branding strategy, one clearly aiming to establish spatial coherence, identity and value. More than a mere name, it is a suite of design elements, deployable within and across environ­ ments: signage, logos, online apps using ‘KX ’ as well as ‘Kings Cross’. The developers have even taken to publishing both a neigh­ bourhood newspaper, KX Quarterly, and the more learned KIOSK, a collection of ‘neighbourhood essays’. Whether this approach to assembling a new neighbourhood aligns in some functional way with the qualities, ideals and requirements of digital platforms remains an open question. But KX does appear to embody a kind of platform-ready regeneration.

Scott Rodgers and Susan Moore

1 Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.

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Google UK Headquarters under construction, Kings Cross, London, 2019

Gasholders, apartments built into relocated and reconstructed wrought iron gasworks frames, Kings Cross, London, 2020 On Our Way!

Pancras Square, symbolic hub of the King’s Cross regeneration area, London, 2020

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J B Jereme Brown J S Jathan Sadowski E O J Edward Ongweso Jr

This Machine Kills: A podcast about technology and political economy /// Agitprop against innovation and capital /// Hosted

by Jathan Sadowski and Edward Ongweso Jr., produced by Jereme Brown /// Hello friends and ­enemies J S In our last episode, we described the first two phases in this three-phase analysis of the urbanisation of technology capital.

We described the first phase as the oversight of urban governance, where city leaders, particularly elected officials and bureaucrats, were provided with new techno-political systems of governance labelled as ‘smart solutions’. These ‘smart solutions’ were used to make the city more entrepreneurial, more efficient, and more effective in ­ really trying to empower the government to act as a tech company, or a platform. And this led us to the second phase of platform urbanism, which is more concerned with bypassing the government altogether, overtaking the state and overtaking the operation of city services and publics goods. Through this, they try to construct this new techno-economic infrastructure, which city inhabitants have to live through.

Now it’s time to get into the third phase, perhaps the final phase if things go their way.

The third phase is building off of this logic that runs through the first and second phase, a logic that is driven by this crisis nar­ra­tive.

And these are crises that cities have been facing for decades, whether it’s an economic and budgetary fiscal crisis, or a mate­ rial infrastructural crisis, or

This Machine Kills

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a crisis of politics and legitimacy, as in, a crisis of democracy.

Tech companies expend a lot of energy building up these crises to then sell the solutions for them. And we can see this definitely happening in this third phase, which is really focused on the own­­ ership of urban space. This phase is still coming into being.

We’re still in the earliest stages of this transition, but it’s happening fast. Planetary plat­ forms like Alphabet and Amazon have reached this point where they possess the power and the desire to do more than just provide services or consult on managerial changes. They see value in owning and developing urban space of their own, kind of following in the footsteps of previous forums of capital that saw city building as their calling.

We are entering into a third phase that goes beyond smart urbanism and beyond platform ur­­ banism, as we might call it, and to a form of corporate sovereignty. What brought me to this thinking were the simultaneous events of Sidewalk Labs in Toronto back in 2017 and the Amazon’s HQ ‘sweepstakes’, which they were rolling out around the same time. These events represented different, but very si­ ­ milar kinds of ways of approaching this ownership of space and sovereignty over territory. ­ In the case of Sidewalk Labs Toronto, they were essentially trying to turn a sector of a Toronto waterfront district called Quayside into this kind of like Googletopia; a Google run smart city. I remember a 2015 article in the Wall Street Journal about Sidewalk Labs before anyone had ever heard of it and before they started planning in Toronto, The Final Phase of Platform Urbanism

and this article talked about how Sidewalk Labs was on a mission (blessed by Eric Schmidt) to look for sectors of cities that were kind of run down, with outdated infrastructure, in the midst of fiscal crises.

So, looking for weak prey on the Savannah, the idea was that they could pounce and create something like Sidewalk Toronto.

In other words, Sidewalk Toronto didn’t come out of nowhere. The whole impetus behind the creation of Sidewalk Labs was the extraction of profits by gentrifying urban areas faced by crises.

Now the failure of Sidewalk Labs in Toronto does not mean that this phase has failed. We need to understand it as a trial balloon, a shot across the bow. They were learning how to do this.

They were learning what it takes and they were surprised at the level of pushback and resistance.

And they’re going to learn from that. And now Google is trying to do the same exact thing, just copying and pasting the same proposal for Toronto and San Jose for their new campuses.

And it is through these campuses which these big tech ­ companies are building that they are inching their way into this third phase, whether it’s the Apple spaceship/donut, Facebook’s Menlo Park, or Google’s Mountain View. These campuses are the baby steps into doing something more than creating these compounds.

E O J In our current era, there’s not really a protocol or a manual for a city letting a company just carve out a section of a city, which needs to come with all sorts of negotiation. Like what lands are they allowed to use? What

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Thinking Access In today’s Guardian, 06/10/2020, in his article ‘­Robert Rinder: “Law is Meaningless Unless Everybody Has Access to It”’, Patrick Butler writes: ‘His views come tumbling out, from street homelessness (it is hard to think of a more poignant example of [social] failure) to the dire lack of social h ­ ousing,­the shortsighted dismantling of legal aid, and the complexity of the benefit system (one gets the creeping sense that it is made as challenging as p ­ os­sible for those who need it to be as easy as pos­sible).’1 Rinder is a barrister and onetime TV judge who switched his life’s work to become a Shelter Am­bas­­ sador. But Rinder’s complaint brings up a poignant point. The shift that is taking place to bring all the processes of housing, human services, and legal aid onto government online platforms, should, it would be assumed, be able to simplify processes, allow­ing increased access. But instead these online platforms often have the opposite effect of screening out or removing candidates.

All these services were once brought to you in person, inside an office building, in waiting rooms, places where you could chat with others and exchange information. A drab atmosphere, peeling paint and uncomfortable seating were the standard fare for everyone. Now, however, with everything online, it’s difficult to reproduce these socially mixed environments ... with the pandemic, these online functions are being reinforced. The little chat-­bot at the bottom of the page is all that is left, I guess.

In his ground-breaking book, The Medium Is the Message: An Inventory of Effects, published in 1967, Marshall McLuhan observed:

Peter Lang

1 Patrick Butler, “Robert Rinder: ‘Law Is Meaningless Unless Everybody Has Access to It’,” The Guardian, 6 October 2020.

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Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are in­visible.

The ground rules, pervasive structure, and over­all patterns of environments elude easy p ­ er­ception. Anti-­ environments, or counter situations made by artists provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly. The interplay between the old and the new en­vironments creates many problems and confusions.

I can't access Amazon Prime!

Thinking Access

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ACT NO.2 I KNOW MY BIRTHDAY

(Morta enters) MORTA: Hi! My name is Morta. This is the 126th day I’ve ­ stayed at home since the COVID -19 outbreak. My best and only companion in the real world is my cat. Her name is Voca, an ­ 11-year-old ginger lady. Like most young urban creatives, I work from my home studio. I do yoga and meditation with Apps. My daily grocery trip works perfectly with online purchase platforms. What is great about living in the city centre is that delivery fees are incredibly low. I really enjoy this ‘stay local and consume global’ lifestyle!

Although not being able to go out is a bit sad, with FaceTime, Messenger video calls – I toasted to friends with good French wine. Yes, I’ve indulged myself with good quality food since travel and going out are temporarily impossible.

I am actually busy just by staying in my apartment. I have subscribed to Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime video. Half of them are paid for by my company, so why not?!

How do I manage my platform-hopping life? My house secre­ taries do actually, namely Siri and Alexa (I called them ‘Si’ and ‘Ale’). They help me with everything. (beeeeeeeeeep) MORTA: Oh! It’s time for lunch! I often forget to eat when I get into work, Siri helps me to remember. Hey Siri! Please stop the alarm. Hey Siri! Please search for ‘best lunch for yogi’.

SIRI: There are 310 results for ‘best lunch for yogi’. Please choose.

MORTA: For god’s sake… okay, hey Siri! Please search ‘Salad bowl for yogi with avocado’ SIRI: Here come results for ‘Salad bowl for yogi with avocado’ (Morta checks on screen) (Looks back to the camera) MORTA: I’ve been ordering organic food from the online grocery platform. You know, the best thing about algorithms is that once you’ve started using them, Facebook and Instagram automatically recommend other similar online grocery platforms to you. I’ve tried many of them. I’m a supporter of local products (#supportyourlocal). I know avocado isn’t local but it tastes so good …

(Opens the fridge, takes out avocado and other things) MORTA: Alexa! Can you tell me why avocado tastes so good?

ALEXA: According to Wikipedia … (starts reading) MORTA: Damn it! (with mashed avocado on her hands) The most annoying thing with avocado is that you never know how ­ exactly ripe it is from the outside. I’ve told myself to get an avocado cutting tool 20 times. Alexa! Stop reading!

Slutty Urbanism

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Search for ‘avocado cutting tool’.

(Bing! from phone) MORTA: Who’s that?! Don’t you understand I’m trying to make my lunch salad? Hey Siri! Read the message for me.

SIRI: Here is the message from Telegram: ‘Ola pinky slutty, do you want to have some cyber fun with me?’ Sent from Tiago445 at 12:47.

(Alexa is still reading about avocado cutting tools…)

MORTA: What? I don’t know this person or account. Hey Alexa!

Mark the message as spam. (Alexa stopped) Hey Siri! Mark the message as spam. Alexa! You can continue.

(Morta cleans her hands) (Alexa still reading about avocado cutting tool options) MORTA: (Check the phone) Oh no! Actually I do know the person.

I just don’t remember his account. His name is James, why does it use this weird account name? Um … he’s my … online sex buddy. He lives in Brazil and with the time difference we do things at unusual times. But actually it makes things a bit more exciting. I am going to un-spam the message and see what’s going on …

ALEXA: According to users’ reviews, this avocado cutting knife got voted the most highly recommended …

(Morta still stares at her phone, with one hand ­ stirring her salad) MORTA: Okay, the spam mistake is fixed. I am gonna send him a message. Maybe the salad can wait, but I have to add this avocado thing to my shopping list. Alexa! Thank you, ­ please add this one to my shopping list. I think there are also a pair of yoga pants, one pack of cat litter sand, and bleach on the list as well. Right? Please confirm.

(Bing! Tiago445 sent a message) ALEXA: I’ve added it to your weekly shopping list. Your shopping list now has … on it. Do you want to check out now?

MORTA: (Staring at phone and typing back Tiago445) Oh yes, why not! Um … okay I need to get my gadgets for the game with James ready. But wait, Alexa! Do I get a free return for this ­avocado tool?

ALEXA: If you use Klarna, you can pay in two weeks after you receive your package. And you get a free return during this time.

(Morta busy running around) MORTA: Great! Alexa! Please choose the Klarna payment.

(Bing! Klarna verification: entering your birthday) MORTA: 14th October 1994 (Bing! Klarna: technical error, please choose other ­payment) MORTA: No way! I know my birthday. What’s wrong with it? ­ Glitches from the Pandemic – Three-Act Play

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Tytus Szabelski, This Facade Is a Lie (Situational Approach #5), Amazon Fulfillment Center KTW1, Sosnowiec, Poland, 2020

Jochen Becker

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The City as Data Factory: Notes on Tech Urbanism

318

Amanda Levete Architects, MAAT , Lisbon, 2018

Douglas Spencer

319

As the Left Communist thinker Jacques Camatte presciently noted, capitalism had in the 1970s already set about recreating its appearance in communal form, projecting an image of the organ­­ ­ic harmonisation of capital and humanity absent all antagonism and contradiction. In its new guise, argues Camatte in ‘Marx and Ge­­ meinwesen’, capital proposes to replace religion as the connective tissue holding humanity together: the ‘community of capital’.

What capitalism offers with one hand, though, it is compelled by force of circumstance to withdraw with the other. The intensi­ fication of exploitation, the exacerbation of inequalities over the course of the long downturn, bring about correspondingly inten­ sified levels of resistance that, in turn, provoke intensified levels of repression. Any humanised image of capital as community is shattered by the near omni-present spectacle of state-sanctioned violence, the all-too-visible gulf between affluence and poverty, the abject failure to address a climate emergency whose effects are disproportionately borne by the most vulnerable.

It is from this situation that the possibility of other forms of community, other relationships to identity and appearance are recovered. The hyper-individuated and entrepreneurial form of being presented to us as natural fact in capitalism is manifestly a trap, a means to pin us to an identity surveilled and recorded in its every interaction and transaction, monitored and evaluated in everything it produces, every task it performs. The uprisings cur­­ rently proliferating across the globe are, on the contrary, marked by a tactics of dis-identification. Masks are worn and faces painted in the hope of outmanoeuvring the algorithms of facial recognition technologies. From Hong Kong to Portland, Paris to Moscow, Barcelona to Beirut, protestors sport the anonymising V for Vendetta mask of Guy Fawkes, or paint over their features in imitation of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker. While this is, on one level, a tactics of eva­­ sion designed in response to twenty-first-century technologies of surveillance, it also resonates with a deeper history of class strug­ gle, with the names of Robin Hood, Ned Ludd and King Mob, in which individual identity is not only cast off for tactical reasons, but so as to positively identify with and embrace a collective form of being. It is not only the symbols, the character masks of resistance and revolt, that are shared, but the values these col­ lectively personify. The practices and performances of resistance that take their place in the streets and squares of the city signal the ­realisation – however momentary – of solidarity, of forms of com­munity that capital cannot even imagine. The architecture of the ­plat­­form has been designed to service a neoliberal imaginary, a unity-­­in-isolation of entrepreneurial subjects. It remains to be seen if, or how architecture might instead contribute to the realisation of other possibilities of being together.

Bearing Capital: Platforms, Performance and Personification

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In the Flotation Tank Mark Fisher hated the idea of ‘box sets’ – ­sitting through your own carefully curated version of television, where you would watch only works of high quality, which you would then discuss with your circle, like Victorian gentlemen keeping up with the latest serialised novel. What he favoured was a model of television that was, perhaps perversely, both experimental and deeply centralised, which he imagined to have existed on BBC2 in the 1970s and Channel 4 in the 1980s and early 1990s, and even, occasionally, on BBC1 and ITV (again, whether it did exist is not really relevant).

The model was a Dennis Potter serial that took Brecht, surrealism and class con­ flict into millions of private houses, or the moments on Top of the Pops when some­ one would crash into it, ‘storm the real­ ity studio’ and be talked about in thousands of play­grounds the next day. A lot of the culture he would write about on his blog K-Punk was the last dregs of this mode of broadcasting where a sizeable propor­tion of the population would tune in all at once, and where people making a cup of tea in the advert break would cause power surges on the electrical grid – reality TV, asinine celebrity game shows and talent shows, football.

It isn’t because of Mark’s strictures that it took me until early 2020 to actually buy a subscription to a provider of television.

I hadn’t had a TV licence from around 2004 until then, and hadn’t the need for one – why, when there’s the internet? And any tele­ vision I’d watch would be on DVDs, either purchased or shared, watched in my own time, discussed on social networks (and, usually, it would be American TV). Like millions of others I finally buckled and bought a ‘smart’ television box at the start of the coronavirus lock­ down. One effect of this is that I very quickly ended up watching a lot more television. Along with the ‘burner’ described in the first post, I’ve tried to have a regime where I don’t use the internet at the weekends and evenings – it being im­portant to have a time where I don’t stare at a lit screen, and where the temptation of going onto the all-day discourse trap of Twitter is at a safe distance. The evenings and weekends would involve watching not films, not reading, but watching – what? Well, what has happened is a process of regression, where I’ve found myself consuming almost en­tirely the sort of culture that I would have watched as an 8-yearold or a 13-year-old, if I’d had access to an almost infinite archive.

What has that meant in practice? Mainly, avoiding anything to do with Britain (and to a lesser extent, the USA) and watching almost exclusively Japanese cartoons and Korean dramas, with Owen Hatherley

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­ ny­thing that could possibly remind my partner and me of the things a that are happening outside the confines of our block of flats abso­ lutely avoided. Events in the United Kingdom in the last few years, coming to a horrifying head in the horrendously dirty December 2019 election, have been hard to take, especially if you have been politi­ cally active (as I have, in a small way). That this was followed with an astoundingly poor response to the pandemic was a further kick in the face. So, nothing to do but hide. And that hiding has been com­ pletely in East Asia, which may also be fucked up, but fucked up in a completely different way, thereby blocking the otherwise constant bad thoughts about the place where I live and the direction it’s going in. Like so much of the experience of ‘lockdown’, it has been like being in a sensory deprivation tank, where the outside world is kept out as much as humanly possible, with the effect that you end up on a journey of introspection and infantilisation.

The Japanese programmes I have watched started with their new iterations on Netflix, obviously, but over the last few months have gradually ended up being on YouTube channels devoted to mecha animations from the early 1980s. The reason why I find these so endlessly watchable, these interchangeable episodes of giant robots, metallic cities, cheap animation, strange colours and lurid back­ drops, is precisely because they were the material of my childhood – dubbed into English, simplified and given tacked-on morals as The Transformers, Voltron, Robotech (I’ll only watch the subtitled versions of these, though – it’s the image, not the text I want here).

These made their way to British televisions via the US, where they were the direct result of Ronald Reagan’s deregulation of TV advertis­ ing, which meant that programmes could be made solely to sell toys – The Trans­formers were randomly chosen Japanese toys given ‘characters’ by comics writers employed by a toy manufacturer, which were then animated in Asia and subsequently full-spectrum ­marketed to western children, with no obvious join between the ­programme and the adverts for the toys that ran in between.

Watching this stuff now, every morning, I’m pulled back into a system that existed when I was 5 years old, in 1986: Japanese robots, animated in Korea, named, marketed and copyrighted in the USA, would appear in your terraced house or council flat in the form of moulded plastic toys made in Taiwan and Macau and deliv­ ered by container ships to the giant Toys-R-Us by Southampton docks, in my hometown. Because of this, I’ve started to realise that my childhood dreams were manufactured by Toei animation in the early 1980s, and that they came to me through the ministrations of Ronald Reagan. While Play for Today and The Singing Detective were being watched by the teenage Fisher, I was hooked on extended toy advertisements. The social democratic culture he was raised on has only ever existed for me as a tale told by someone else, with its evidence only being BFI DVDs and YouTube channels.

In the Flotation Tank

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Platform urbanism is the latest expression of the Internet industry’s relentless drive to capture the digital culture of participation for the purposes of capital accumulation. Already in the early 2000s, after the dotcom stock market crash of 2001, the organic intellectuals of Silicon Valley were spreading the message that harnessing users’ participation was an essential component of any successful business strategy in a new economic environment shaped by an abundance of information and a scarcity of attention.1 The movement from virtual communities to the social web, and then from the web 2.0 to social media and platform capitalism, has thus been a process of progres­ sively consolidating a model that combines an extractive approach to monetisation based on data mining with a governmental approach based on algorithmic regulation to managing the behaviour of networked populations. 2 On the one hand, then, platform capitalism has renewed and extended the power of what Romano Alquati called ‘valorising information’ – a concept that Matteo Pasquinelli has recently suggested can be considered as forming a link between the cyber­ netic notion of information and the Marxist theory of value.3 In his militant co-research on the Italian I.T. corporation Olivetti in the early 1960s, Alquati defined valorising information as the infor­ mation that moved through the circuits of the industrial factory, produced by and around workers themselves, which was subse­ quently channelled vertically by management and turned into ‘control information’. Thus, following Pasquinelli, one can see such valorising/control information today (such as metadata) as having been systematically harvested by networked Turing machines in ways that bring together the powers of dead capital (machines) and living capital (both waged and free labour) in new infrastructural assemblages of value extraction. If industrial capital’s discovery of valorising information acknowledged that the living labour involved in the assembly line also produced a surplus of information that could be channelled upwards towards management and fed back downwards onto the production floor, then platform urbanism extends this extractive process to what Italian autonomists called ‘the city as social factory’ by turning it into a series of speculative assets.

This has not caused the disappearance of industrial labour.

On the contrary, the latter has now become yoked to what, with Gabriel Tarde and Maurizio Lazzarato, we might call the economic psychology of the techno-social brain – that is, the quantifiable collective flows of beliefs and desires algorithmically coded through social plugins such as like, share, or rate and re-worked by A.I. programmes and systems.4 This is apparent in the case of Amazon, which yokes the harshest forms of industrial – that is, mechanical and de-humanising – labour in its warehouses and supply networks to an economic psychology of evaluations, ratings, preferences and purchases all organised by machine-­learning algorithms and parametric software architectures.5 As in the Fordist factory, such economic organisation also implies a governmental mode of power. This may be based on what Tiziana Terranova

1 Tim O’Reilly, “What Is Web 2.0: Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software,” O’Reilly. com, 30 September 2005. See also Tiziana Terranova, “Attention, Economy and the Brain,” Culture Machine 13 (2012).

2 See Antoinette Rouvroy, “The End(s) of Critique: Data Behaviourism versus Due Process,” in Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology, eds.

Mireille Hildebrandt and Katja De Vries (London: Routledge, 2013), 143–67. Also Tiziana Terranova, “Securing the Social: Foucault and Social Networks,” in Foucault and the History of Our Present, eds. Sophie Fuggle, Yari Lanci and Martina Mazzioli (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

3 Matteo Pasquinelli, “Italian Operaismo and the Information Machine,” Theory, Culture and Society 32, no. 3 (2014): 49–68.

4 Maurizio Lazzarato, Puissances de l’invention: La Psychologie Économique de Gabriel Tarde Contre l’économie Politique (Paris: Les Empécheurs de enser en rond, 2002).

See also Anne Helmond and Carolin Gerlitz, “The Like Economy: Social Buttons and the Data-Intensive Web,” New Media & Society 15, no. 8 (2013): 1348–65.

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one could call the post-digital concept of the social, which grasps the social as an informational medium of transmission while recording it as a dynamic computational model. Digital social networks are the medium through which information propagates – modulated by social topologies formed either by conscious or nonconscious connections, depending on whether they are gener­ ated by the act of ‘adding a friend’ or following on social media, or through automated nonconscious patterning: the clustering of profiles around a specific product, places visited, flats rented out, films seen and so on.6 In as much as they need to support the daily interactions of large numbers of heterogeneous users such as clients and workers, platform capitalism, and especially platform urbanism, also need to develop specific kinds of governmental technologies. These technologies aim to affect conducts or behav­ iours by means of behaviourist-inspired techniques of incentivising and disincentivising, rewarding and punishing behaviour, which make possible the ultra-stability of very large systems supporting enormous quantities of communication and interaction.7 Such techniques redesign what Caribbean theorist Sylvia Wynter, taking up Frantz Fanon, describes as the sociogenic principle or the process of sociogenesis as a specific level of individuation distinguished from the phenotypical genesis (affecting the species) and onto­ genesis (affecting the individual). 8 If sociogenesis depends on, without being reducible to, the mobilisation of the physiology of the brain and its chemical mechanisms specifically for the constant reproduction of social identities and hierarchies, then the post-­digital social provides the new conditions for the genesis of the social by means of something that might be called algorithmic hyper-socialisation.9 Platform urbanism as represented by companies such as Airbnb, Uber and WeWork (but no less so by companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and others) also techno-colo­ nises urban space – a process whereby private corpo­rations subtly and stealthily appropriate governmental functions to redesign the social life of the cities for the purposes of capital ac­­cumulation.

This involves a range of processes and approaches that are justi­ fied in the name of the principle of utility value (that is, the satisfac­ tion of customers). Platform urbanism includes: ­Airbnb’s commer­ cial enclosure of residential properties in the histo­rical ­centres of tourist-ified cities in ways that make such properties unafforda­ ble for local inhabitants10; the replacement of public transport with fleets of private cars for hire; the possible movement towards a world of purely online shopping culture and rider-delivered com­ modities, which would spell the final end for local businesses; and the relocation of erotic and sentimental encounters away from physical spaces and towards dating apps. Redeploying the calcula­ tion techniques invented by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in his solution to the puzzle of Königsberg’s bridges in 1736, plat­ form capitalism models the city (and the social) as a tangle of pos­ sible computable routes to find the best deal for anything.

In the ­ S hadow of Platform Urbanism

5 Luciana Parisi, Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

6 N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Chicago, IL : Chicago University Press, 2017). On the difference between mechanical cooperation and collective intelligence see Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).

7 For an early, Lacanian reading of such biochemical mechanisms see Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). For a more recent analysis focusing more on surveillance see Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2018).

8 Sylvia Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon. The Puzzle of Conscious Experience of ‘Identity’ and What It’s like to be ‘Black’,” National Identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America, eds. Mercedes Durán-Cogan and Antonio Gómez-Montana (New York and London: Routledge, 2001): 30–66.

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Patent by Amazon, 'Wearable RFID Devices With Manually Activated RFID Tags,' figure 3, 2015 Matthew Stewart

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Animated Monsters, Vampiric Platforms Marx famously described capital in gothic terms, a ghoulish horror show composed of phantasms, vampires, werewolves and animated monsters feasting on the flesh of labour. In this system Franken­ stein’s monster is out of control and driven through the ‘grotesque corpus’ of capital. Bodies and brains have become mutilated into commodities. A werewolf-like hunger for surplus labour describes the extension of the working day in the nineteenth century. Phantasmal bodies stalk the world while their master sleeps.

Marx uses gothic imagery here as a rhetorical device to describe the lived experience of capital. But what if platforms were described in similar terms and as part of the same animated monster? The focus of platforms is an almost vampiric commodification. A techbro-revived Nosferatu devours data to feed on the living, mechanises dead labour and is at times driven by inordinate sums of venture capital. Workers and users of platforms become inorganic parts of a monstrous apparatus capable of limitless rejuvenation.

More specifically, vampiric platforms can be seen as creating new vistas of commodification by violently generating layers of management and additional bureaucracies within existing hierar­ chies through technoscience. Ursula Huws, Professor of Labour and Globalisation, has shown how, historically, successive waves of commodification involve a cycle of job destruction and replacement.

Commodification becomes driven through economic breakdown and subsequent accumulation that extends capital’s scope, including new processes of standardisation, new technologies and an enlarged global reach. Referencing the development of car manufacturing, Huws illustrates how this process works: ‘The invention of motor cars displaced workers from c ­ oach-­­ building but created jobs in car manufacture. As car manu­ facturers substituted mass production technology for ­manual labour, jobs were lost in car-making but created in the ­production of services needed for mass production – ­layers of management, design, research and development, accounting, record-keeping, advertising, marketing, finance and ­in­­­­­surance, legal services. These in turn were indus­t ri­ alised and commodified, again displacing clerks, managers, accountants, etc, but creating new jobs in information technology, computer-assisted design, call centres, financial management.’

In the current wave of commodification through platform logic this becomes further directed towards functions previously in the domain of the state (a process that has been described as ‘automated neoliberalism’2). An obvious example would be Alphabet (Google), which, after devouring an inordinate amount of everyday software systems while creating new hierarchies within advertising, print, digital media and countless other industries, turned its blood lust to urban planning with its Sidewalk Toronto proposals. Here, appeals to take over segments of municipal urban planning from a Toronto

Beyond the Mountain Lies Another

2 Kean Birch, “Automated Neoliberalism? The Digital Organisation of Markets in Technoscientific Capitalism,” New Formations 100–101 Bureaucracy (February 2020): 10–27.

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Hilary Koob-Sassen, A Metabolism for Infrastructure Investment, 2015

Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer

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change, not necessarily a major change, but put together, enough of a change to make a difference in the right direction.

organising that has taken place regarding the recent elections … Yes, this was not platform urbanism per se, but there were ­ definitely all kinds of elements, the most visible one being the raising of funds on the part of leftist activists and such.

H M ‘We’, as users and consumers, are directly implicated in the de­­­ velopment of platform urbanism, because we participate willingly, P M due to our individual needs We guess this brings us back to and aspirations. In more mundane the question of the interrelationterms, it is quite evident that ship between personal agency all platform-based urban services, and institutions, including those at their core, rely on our co-­ meant to enable democratic, production: what we contribute as fair and just forms of co-existusers – our activities, our ence. One of the characterisdesires, our lives – is one of the tics of platform urbanism is ar­­ main resources that fuels the guably a blurring of different growth and longevity of platform spheres that renders the intimate operations. Our project for the realm of personal relationships Biennale seeks to (a) articulate a and subjectivities marketable, recognition of this essential interlinking economic, cultural moment of co-production, and (b) and social domains. If we were to based on this recognition, claim embrace a platform age of socio-­ responsibility and the right to political organisation, might have a say in the future unfolding this lead us to advocate critical of platform urbanism. How do ‘user politics/activism’? How you think we need to deal with our would we need to deal with the own implication in the proli­ indeterminacy inherent in such feration of platform urbanism? If rhizomatic formations of subjecarticulating a set of demands tive interest, precisely with could be a way forward, what would regard to the quest for a new urban these demands be? ethics? What should the archi­ tecture of such new cities look like, if this is a question S S of architecture at all?

Yes, I am with you on the effort to enhance/gain recognition.

But it would precisely stand out S S and be to your advantage to This is not an easy subject … it make sure that as many as possible is something I want to explore. understand your version of platAt this stage, my take is that em­­­ form urbanism. And here you could brac­­ ing a ‘platform age of add a fairly robust list of socio-political organisation’, as cases where platform urbanism is you put it, is in my reading a not commercialised. I also process, and as a process it will think that the non-commercialised go through a range of diverse versions will expand, because manifestations/incarnations. And we need more and more of this type I do think there will always be at of collaboration. I think you see least some who want to use these elements of this in the intense platforms and/or develop new types in Conversation with Saskia Sassen

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Transporting rations by auto-rickshaw in Sathenagar, Mumbai, 2020

Typical ration kit, 2020 Vyjayanthi Rao

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Platform Is Public: Citizen Distribution Systems Beginning in early April, a fortnight after Mumbai went into strict lockdown, I started receiving a daily WhatsApp message from my research partners, who live in a self-built settlement in NorthEast Mumbai. Their ward is notorious for scoring the lowest marks on the city’s Human Development Index and is dense with pre­ carious self-built neighbourhoods as well as new project housing built by private developers to accommodate slum-dwellers displaced by new infrastructure projects. AbdouMaliq Simone and I have argued that these are districts inhabited by ‘urban majorities’. Majorities are unstable and constantly transforming coalitions generated by a multitude of practices and configurations of paying attention and operating in concert. 2 We remark upon the proliferation of agonistic collectives, inventing practices of being together in cities across the globe, particularly visible during this pandemic year. These ways of being together and interconnecting across the volatile and destructive conditions engendered by contemporary capitalism underpin the vital labour of social reproduction.

Lockdown messages kept coming through the months, a pro­lif­ eration of names and things circulating through digital space, amplifying the real relief that the emerging alternate Public Distribu­ tion Systems were providing to locked-down citizens.

On the 78th day of our relief work, we conducted training of 65 nurses on Covid 19 and ventilation, supplied 31 dry ration kits, 30 PPE kits, 10 N95 masks, 3 hygiene kits, food for stray dogs, food for a camp of 35 and 10,700 cooked meals. 3 Anil Bilal Lara Anita Jameela The ‘ration card’ is an almost sacred document that allows access to the public distribution system, enabling households to purchase grains, oil and sugar at a subsidised rate. But it is prized even more for its ability to serve as proof of domicile, that is to say proof of having lived in the city of Mumbai at a particular moment in time. COVID -19 predictably overwhelmed the system, and in many informal neighbourhoods, lockdown was absolute, with no one being allowed to move in or out, even of their lanes. The lane (patti in Marathi) is the building stood on its side. DIY infrastructure serves to deliver water and electricity and to carry away debris form the central spine or service core of the lane. Shacks (zhopdas in Marathi), some more and others less permanent, proliferate around the edges of the lane and butt up against the backs of the shacks in the adjoining lanes. Without movement into or outside these lanes during lockdown, the ration card was rendered useless.

Within days, however, an alternative distribution system emerged with individuals sourcing money and support from friends, neigh­ bours, politicians and anyone who could give to provide ration kits to households along these lanes. Distribution often took place at night to keep things orderly. Lists were created and meticulously maintained to ensure that those whose rations were about to run out could be called over for their next kit. Food, medicines and femi­ nine hygiene products were distributed by those already seasoned in Platform Is Public: Citizen Distribution Systems

2 AbdouMaliq Simone and Vyjayanthi Rao, “Counting the Uncountable, Revisiting Urban Majorities,” Public Culture 33, no. 2 (2012). See also: AbdouMaliq Simone and Vyjayanthi Rao, “Securing the Majority: Living through Uncertainty in Jakarta,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36, no. 2 (2012): 315–335.

3 The summary is typically followed by a specific list such as this: 9. 11 dry ration kits in Sathenagar, through Govandi coordinated by Jameela Begum. Kits given to a family of person recovered from Corona and 10 to families of daily wage earners …

11. 800 cooked meals in Chandivali through Gurudwara in Versova with the help of Chhitra Subramaniam and Gunmeet coordinated

by Ayyub Patel …

12. 1300 cooked meals through our community kitchen in Mandala run by @Umarbhai …

14. 800 cooked meals through our community kitchen in Cheeta Camp run by @rehan

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What really matters?

So the challenge remains: what matters most is not just imagining the potentiality of platform urbanism but working towards its ­materialisation as part of a larger societal transformation project.

In shorthand form, I want to draw on the useful visualisation of the institutional, discursive, regulatory and cultural layers that con­ stitute the machinic reproduction of the city as proposed by Alastair Parvin.8 He captures succinctly the entangled nature of urban imag­­ i­nar­ies weighed down by inherited belief systems and as a result trapped by a specific cultural imaginary which legitimises pre­dom­i­ nant institutional systems. Unless one is able to trace the reasons why certain ‘innovations’ will not take off through such a sys­ temic reading, it will be near impossible to find traction for the kinds of alternatives intimated before. Moreover, it will be difficult to discern the tactics and strategies needed to undo the status quo and instantiate credible alternatives. Where does this leave us practi­ cally? What kind of politics is called for?

Experimentation Labs can play a powerful role in the aggrega­ tion of actors across various societal institutions to work in an exploratory manner on tracing the systemic dimensions of a given problem area such as public housing or public transport. These processes will need time and a transdisciplinary ethos to ensure that all kinds of knowledges – professional, tacit, activist, aca­ demic – are validated, considered and cross-pollinated.9 Furthermore, specific sites in the city that are emblematic of the problem should be focussed on as test cases to explore and try out aspects of a grand alternative. All along the way the key will be narrativising the experiments and enrolling as many publics as possible because that serves as a form of accountability and creates a space for other innovations to enter the frame. Unless new modes of working arise from radically open and accountable learning processes that carry some form of societal legitimacy, it is unlikely that contex­ tual innovations will indeed become a future norm, even if the poten­ tial is palpable. Universities and other knowledge brokers have a key role to play in figuring out new alignments and epistemic com­ munities that need to be forged to drive urban innovations that can be both radical and inclusive. Whether our existing universities have the foresight and appetite to play this role is an entirely different and terrifying question.

Edgar Pieterse

8 See Alastair Parvin, “We Need New Operating Systems.

Whose Job Is That?” accessed 6 January 2020, https:// alastairparvin.medium. com/we-need-newoperating-systemswhose-job-is-that37421656a2e9.

9 For a useful primer on regulatory experimentation, see: Dark Matter Lab, Legitamacities: Toward a Network of City-Based Regulatory Experimentation Labs (London: Dark Matter Laboratories, 2019).

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Lighthouse prototype, Cape Town, 2021

Interlocking systems that constitute the city, Alastair Parvin, Open Systems Lab, 2021 Activating Potential

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Editors

Contributors

Peter Mörtenböck is Professor of Visual Culture at the TU Wien, Co-Director of the Centre for Global Architecture and Research Fellow at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His current research is focused on the architecture of the political community and the economisation of the city, as well as the global use of natural resources, urban infrastructures and new data publics.

Ross Exo Adams is Assistant Professor and Co-­ Director of Architecture at Bard College. He is the author of Circulation and Urbanization (Sage, 2019) and has written widely on the intersections of architecture and urbanism with political geography and envi­ ronmental humanities. His research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Royal Institute of British Architects, The London Consortium, Iowa State University and The MacDowell Colony.

Helge Mooshammer is an architect, author and curator. He conducts urban and cultural research in the Department of Visual Culture at the TU Wien, is Co-Director of the Centre for Global Architecture, and Research Fellow at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has initiated and directed numerous international research projects focusing on issues relating to (post)capitalist urban economics and urban informality.

Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer have curated the Aus­ trian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021 exploring the phenomenon of platform urbanism. Their latest book publications include Informal Market Worlds: The Architecture of Economic Pressure (edited with Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, nai010 Publishers, 2015), Andere Märkte: Zur Architektur der informellen Ökonomie (transcript, 2016), Visual Cultures as Opportunity (Sternberg/MIT Press, 2016) and Data Publics: Public Plurality in an Era of Data Determinacy (Routledge, 2020).

Editors

Tom Avermaete is Professor for the History and Theory of Urban Design at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. His research focuses on the architecture of the city. He is an editor of OASE Architectural Journal and co-editor of the new series Bloomsbury Studies in Modern Architecture.

Recent book publications include, among others, Architecture of the Welfare State (with M. Swenarton and D. van den Heuvel, 2014) and The Global Turn: Six Journeys of Architecture and the City, 1945–1989 (with M. Sabatino, 2021). He has curated many exhibitions, including In the Desert of Modernity (Berlin, Casablanca, 2008 and 2009) and Lived-In: The Modern City as Performative Infrastructure (Antwerp, 2017).

Lucia Babina is a cultural activist focused on sustainable ways of cohabitation and coexistence. Her work reflects on the current global inequality and injustice by means of collective and artistic processes. She is a founding member of Cohabita-

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 Appendix

Image Credits nai010 publishers is an internationally orientated publisher specialized in developing, producing and distributing books in the fields of architecture, urbanism, art and design. www.nai010.com Available in North, South and Central America through Artbook | D.A.P., 155 Sixth Avenue 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10013-1507, tel +1 212 627 1999, dap@dapinc.com Available in the United Kingdom and Ireland through Art Data, 12 Bell Industrial Estate, 50 Cunnington Street, London W4 5HB, tel +44 208 747 1061, orders@artdata. co.uk Printed and bound in Belgium ISBN 978-94-6208-615-9 NUR 648 BISAC ARC001000, ARC010000

11, 15, 19, 24, 29 Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer 53 Hagley Library, Wilmington, DE , USA ; Archive of the American Iron and Steel Institute 61 Instagram Feed of @kumeyaaydefense againstthewall 73 Handout image 77 Elisabeth Marjanovic ­Cronvall 83 Dae In Choi 93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104 Peter Lang 107, 113, 118 Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman 120, 122 Alan Wiig 127 Troy Carle 129 Alan Wiig 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139 Scott Rodgers and Susan Moore 150 William H. Whyte 153 Lahti213, CC BY -SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons 163 Slovak National Gallery 164, 165 Gorazd Čelechovský 185 TV JAM , Oregon 189 W. E. Collins Inc. 197, 198–199, 200, 204, 206 Mona Mahall and Asli Serbest 209, 216 Gerald Nestler and ­Sylvia Eckermann 230, 235 Ofri Cnaani 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 253, 254, 255, 256 Tal Halpern 260 Andreas Kofler 262 The Peter Hujar Archive 265, 268, 270 Ignacio Valero 273 Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons 274 Tate, CC BY -NC -ND 3.0 275 Ignacio Valero 276 Ignacio Valero and ­Daniel Lorenze 278 Daderot, public domain 281 Chris Batson, Alamy 287 Iain Masterton, Alamy; David Bleeker, Alamy 289 Maria Groiss and ­Bernadette Krejs 292 Maria Groiss and ­Bernadette Krejs; Instagram feed @lizmariegalvan 293 Instagram feed @jessannkirby 297 metroZones 306–307 Tytus Szabelski

308 BvsA archive 309 HOGRE & DoubleWhy, ­public domain 311, 318 Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer 322, 325, 326, 328, 331 Owen Hatherley 341, 343, 343, 346 European Patent Office 349 Ilaria Depari 361 Javier Argota SánchezVaquerizo, Code Lab 363, 364 Ira S. Lowry, RAND Corporation 366 Daniel Cardoso Llach 368 Javier Argota SánchezVaquerizo, Code Lab; Daniel Cardoso Llach and Andres LombanaBermudez, Code Lab; Jinmo Rhee, Code Lab 371 Laura Parnes, Praxis Films; James Cameron, Columbia TriStar 375, 381 Laura Parnes, Praxis Films 382 Tonje Hessen Schei, Flimmer Film 383 Pallavi Paul 394 Hilary Koob-Sassen 397 Prem Krishnamurthy 399 Rajesh Vora 400 Shankar Mote; Jameela Begum Eathakula 402 Rosa Salane 407 Christian Coronel 412-413 Justine Allenette Ross, University of Michigan 415 Alejandra Loreto 421 GABU Heindl Architektur 425 John Phillip Sage 427, 430, 432, 434 Fairwork Project 444 Andy Mkosi, ACC ; Alexia Webster, ACC 447 Indlu Urban 451 African Centre for Cities 453 Edgar Pieterse; Alastair Parvin, Open Systems Lab