Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space

Extrastatecraft controls everyday life in the city: it's the key to power - and resistance - in the twenty-first century. Infrastructure is not only the underground pipes and cables controlling our cities. It also determines the hidden rules that structure the spaces all around us - free trade zones, smart cities, suburbs, and shopping malls. Extrastatecraft charts the emergent new powers controlling this space and shows how they extend beyond the reach of government. Keller Easterling explores areas of infrastructure with the greatest impact on our world - examining everything from standards for the thinness of credit cards to the urbanism of mobile telephony, the world's largest shared platform, to the "free zone," the most virulent new world city paradigm. In conclusion, she proposes some unexpected techniques for resisting power in the modern world. Extrastatecraft will change the way we think about urban spaces - and how we live in them.

About the Author :
Keller Easterling is an award-winning writer, architect and Professor at the Yale School of Architecture. She is the author of Organization Space (MIT, 1999) and Enduring Innocence (MIT, 2005), which was named Archinect's Best Book of 2005. Easterling is also the author of two essay-length books: an ebook, The Action is the Form: Victor Hugo's TED Talk, (Strelka Press, 2012) and a forthcoming book Subtraction (Sternberg Press, 2014). Her writing and design work will be included in the 2014 Venice Biennale. Easterling lectures widely in the US and abroad and contributes to, among others, Domus, Artforum, Grey Room, E-Flux, Cabinet and Volume.

Review :
This book is a breathtaking journey along the material and immaterial infrastructures that continuously shape contemporary global space. Information flows of financial, legal or military nature congeal into wide arrays of strange "spatial products", extraterritorial "zones" and building nodes. From within the logic of these pervasive systems, Easterling poses the most urgent political challenge facing spatial activists today, and shows how the search for justice must retool to outsmart the immanent violence of Extrastatescraft. I have long admired Keller Easterling's talent for extracting a space, a shape, a marking, from mixes of elements rarely brought together -whether materially or conceptually. In Extrastatecraft she does it at a grand scale, cutting across fields of meaning and of practice. A must read. Extrastatecraft establishes Keller Easterling's growing reputation as the savviest student of postnational spatial and infrastructural forms. Bringing together architecture, coding, digitalization and logistics, she exposes the nervous system of the new logics of domination through information and proposes a cunning counter-politics of humor, discommunication and disguise. A must read for all varieties of critical students of space and sovereignty in this emerging century. An extraordinary guidebook to the politics of infrastructure in the contemporary world, Extrastatecraft is a pivotal and beautifully written excavation of the hidden geographies of globalisation, . 'Free' trade zones, optic fibre networks, credit cards, mobile phones, economic and financial rules... all emerge as charged elements within an often invisible geography that could not be more important. Extrastatecraft works to politicise and expose the prosaic and taken-for-granted hardware of our world. A truly indispensable critique of the twenty-first-century landscapes of turbo-capitalism. (In praise of Enduring Innocence) A dazzling antidote to the reigning pieties about globalization, and should be read by any serious student of global places, flows and forms. (In praise of Enduring Innocence) This is a remarkable work. Keller Easterling has written one of the most original works about the American environment I've ever read. (In praise of Enduring Innocence) A tour de force tour-guide for today. (In praise of Enduring Innocence)