Fox Fellowship Lecture Series: Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space

Keller Easterling
Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space.
Keller Easterling is an architect, writer, professor, and director of the Master of Environmental Design program at Yale University. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure networks as a medium of polity.
Architects and urbanists have joined journalists, social scientists, lawyers, economists, artists, and others in exploring rampant forms of global development. Formulaic, repeatable spaces—from networks of free zone world cities to distended urban peripheries—introduce some of most radical changes to this now hotter, wetter globalizing world. These spaces and the powers that preside over them have often become political superbugs, surviving against all odds to generate unchecked concentrations of power, extremes of inequality, and climate cataclysms. Spatial practitioners, as perplexed as any who explore these conditions, may nevertheless offer to the allied disciplines some forms with which to design—to actually manipulate that physical world.