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.

Event materials

Audio

Listen to podcast

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

    Suzanne Hall

    Suzanne Hall is an urban ethnographer and has practised as an architect in South Africa. Her research and teaching interests focus on everyday formations of global migration in the context of inequality, discrimination and resistance, particularly migrant economies and urban multi-culture. From 1997 to 2003 her practice engaged with the role of design in marginalised and racially segregated areas in Cape Town. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the 2006 Venice Architectural Biennale, and the 2005 Sao Paulo Biennale of Architecture and Design. She was awarded an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant (2015–2017) for a comparative project on ‘Super-diverse Streets: Economies and spaces of urban migration in UK Cities’, which emerges out of her LSE Cities research project on ‘Ordinary Streets’. She is a recipient of an LSE Teaching Award (2017), the Phillip Leverhulme Prize (2017), the LSE’s Robert McKenzie PhD Prize (2010), and the Rome Scholarship in Architecture (1998–1999). Suzi is author of City, Street and Citizen (2012), and The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City, co-edited with Ricky Burdett (2017).