Extrastatecraft is a study of “infrastructure space”, which Easterling, a professor of architecture at Yale, defines as “the…

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Extrastatecraft is a study of “infrastructure space”, which Easterling, a professor of architecture at Yale, defines as “the rules governing the space of everyday life” – mostly mundane, repeatable spaces such as car parks and hotels, cash machines, suburbs, business parks, satellite communications and electronic devices. Easterling sees urbanism as lying not in buildings so much as in the information layer of the city that determines how people, objects, buildings (and information itself) are organised and circulated. Urban space is delocalised into a “formula” that “replicates Shenzhen or Dubai anywhere in the world with a drumbeat of generic skyscrapers”.

The art of building this infrastructural space is of course “extra-state”: it still involves state planning and law, but is directed by “new constellations of international, intergovernmental and non-governmental players”. In infrastructure space, companies can be as big as governments.

–Jay Owens (hautepop ) Reviews Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space by Keller Easterling for Icon //http://www.iconeye.com/opinion/review/item/11449-extrastatecraft-the-power-of-infrastructure-space (viastacktivism)