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Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space

Public lecture hosted by LSE Cities in partnership with Verso Books

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. In this lecture Keller Easterling drew on her new book ‘Extrastatecraft’ to chart the emergent new powers controlling this space and showed how they extend beyond the reach of government.

Easterling explored 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 proposed some unexpected techniques for resisting power in the modern world.

This lecture was followed by a book signing with Keller Easterling.

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Profiles

  • Keller Easterling

    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 Archinect¹s 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.

  • David Madden

    David Madden

    David Madden is Assistant Professor in Sociology and teaches in the Cities Programme.

  • Suzanne Hall

    Suzanne Hall

    Suzi Hall is Director of the Cities Programme, Senior Research Associate at LSE Cities and Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science.