#extrastatecraft

[noosphe-re]

Picture the places where we live: the parking places, skyscrapers, turning radii, garages, street lights, driveways, airport lounges, highway exits, big boxes, strip malls, shopping malls, small boxes, free zones, casinos, retail outlets, fast food restaurants, hotels, cash machines, tract housing, container ports, industrial parks, call centers, golf courses, suburbs, office buildings, business parks, resorts. In the retinal afterglow is a soupy matrix of details and repeatable formulas that generate most of the space in the world—what we might call infrastructure space.

Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space

[probablyasocialecologist]

ISO harbors or encounters many paradoxes. It is a nonstate actor that advises state governments. It strives for universal impact, but most operate as a somewhat secretive institution with no truly public dimension - no appeal to a citizen who is not also a consumer. It is an overachiever that believes in the superior fitness of its plans, but portrays itself as inoffensive and subservient. Its rather obscure processes are largely unknown to the general public but nevertheless attract a broad consensus - a consensus for a platform that does not originate in a political dialogue. It is treated as an institution more agile than state bureaucracy, and yet it perpetuates layers of procedural ritual and regulation. Its practice of standard making demonstrates that the most easily shared dialogue is the one that is the most meaningless, while its capacity to leverage change in consequential areas related to labor and the environment remains elusive.

Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space

[noosphe-re]

As a site of multiple, overlapping, or nested forms of sovereignty, where domestic and transnational jurisdictions collide, infrastructure space becomes a medium of what night be called extrastatecraft—a portmanteau describing the often undisclosed activities outside of, in addition to, and sometimes even in partnership with statecraft.

Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space

[noosphe-re]

While evidence of infrastructure space within the contemporary city might appear to confirm the death of architecture, perhaps it really only demonstrates that the giant is alive again. Architecture makes unique objects—like stones in the water—while a constant flow of repeatable spatial formulas constructs a sea of urban spaces. Architects and urbanists typically characterize this state of affairs as disempowering, but if architecture was indeed killed by the book, perhaps it is reincarnate as something more powerful—as information itself. Infrastructure space has become a medium of information. The information resides in invisible, powerful activities that determine how objects and content are organized and circulated. Infrastructure space, with the power and currency of software, is an operating system for shaping the city.

Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space

[archi-playground]

Keller Easterling, "Extrastatecraft"

Architect/urbanist/writer Keller Easterling will address the theme of her book, Extrastatecraft (Verso, 2014): repeatable formulas such as spatial products a...

Extrastatecraft Lecture at the Harvard GSD | Keller Easterling

[thinkerthoughtinfo]

[pulkitmogha]

A zone; many-named, unique in economic policy, governed by an extrastate, is the subject of discussion in this post. In the context of economic liberalization, global policy-making, and foreign trade and service, the zone emerges as an enclave of special opportunities of economic gains that seem to benefit all those involved. Seen across scales and sizes, the zone is a collection of urban forms, complete with residential, recreational, commercial, educational and administrative facilities. Space becomes product/commodity. The realm of an extrastate, zone promises politics of its own, often in response (or juxtaposition) to the state authority, the extrastatecraft and the global forces.

The Zone has observed three stages of evolution, that of free trade zones (1500-1930s), manufacturing EPZs (Export Processing Zones in ‘50s-‘70s) and finally the move from manufacture to services in SIPs, EDTs and SEZs for industrial/technological parks (Chen, Xiangming). The creation of EPZs was a mid-twentieth century tool that created global markets of domestic economies. Beginning through free ports across the world; UN policies for developing nations, UNIDO; and as technologies enabled planes, trucks, and industrial corridors inland; the world now sees around 3,500 such zones around the world (2006, grown).

Kandla in 1965 (much before liberalization) became the lesson learnt for drafting the SEZ Act in 2005. The Autonomous society of STPI (Software Technology Parks of India) under the Ministry of Communications and IT in 1991, and Hyderabad and Bangalore emerged. Knowledge parks and industrial townships have emerged since. The DMIC currently runs in the same direction as Malaysia’s MSC did, even so much that the cast of actors remains roughly the same in both instances (McKinsey, LnT, among others). 

My response towards the zone is a mixed one. The zone offers a giant Petri dish of exemptions and economic and legal combinations to enable the best possible exploitation of the zone as resource. The zone is a site for labor abuse, corruption and manipulation. The zone is separate from the state, it is of the extrastate. It has its own regulation. Power, hence, is deregulated. Power is decentralized, localized and not of the state authority alone. There are diverse players and stakeholders which seem to suggest a shift to a future of new societies of control.

Observations in a nutshell after reading Zone. 

Easterling, Keller. 2014. Extrastatecraft: the power of infrastructure space

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[parapoesis]