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.

Keller Easterling is an award-winning writer, architect and Professor at the Yale School of Architecture. She is the author of Organization Space and Enduring Innocence, which was named Archinect’s Best Book of 2005. Easterling is also the author of two essaylength books: an ebook, The Action Is the Form: Victor Hugo’s TED Talk and a forthcoming book Subtraction. 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.