02 Reading
De Landa’s book traces the relationships that exist within processes and the production of systems, while aligning to the structuralist conditions of social, economic, and spatial development. As Neil Brenner has noted more recently, the boundaries that define the urban from the rural, disappear through rural “extractive” processes that situate and embed in the urban system. However, it is curious to see that de Landa considers the Industrial Revolution a “self-sustaining” “assemblage”, acknowledging that this was largely dependent on a variety of input points along its trajectory (i.e., the extraction of materials and bodies from the “undeveloped” or rural space to the “developed” or urban), and as such, appears to function outside the traditional closed-feedback loop system. On noting that the “ladder of progress” can be likened to the “bifurcations”, would it be possible to interpret non-linearity as having the greatest capacity to “survive” in “branched” transitions? In this case, do “bifurcations” denote the stability of a system’s structure?
Nabian et al detail how movement and activity can reshape spatial processes. Data, as they outline in the “Wikicity Rome” project, can be synthesized into a tangible and environmentally observable “substance”. Crowd-sourced data, as they note in both the “Los ojos del mundo” and the “Trash | Track” projects explore the data mesh of social and cultural behaviors. To follow the concealed web of waste in Seattle, citizens were provided “tracking tags” to collect data on how trash navigates the public waste system. This investigation is similar to the research work completed by the Unknown Field Divisions as they track cargo networks via a container ship. Both of these projects work to uncover invisible infrastructures that communities, as in the case of the Seattle “Trash | Track project” rely on, but have simultaneously untethered from the public realm. Nabian et al present opportunities for citizens to be engaged in how data presents urban activities and the possible “hidden patterns” that emerge.