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"Infrastructure is not only the underground pipes and wires that control our cities but also the hidden rules for structuring the spaces all around us--free trade zones, smart cities, suburbs and malls. Extrastatecraft charts the rise of the hidden rules that control this "infrastructure space," and shows how it is creating new forms of power, beyond the reach of government. In a series of fascinating case studies, Easterling visits fields of infrastructure with the greatest impact on our world-- tracking everything from standards for the thinness of credit cards, to the urbanism of mobile telephony as the world's largest shared platform, to the rules for the free zone as the most contagious new world city paradigm. In conclusion, she proposes some unexpected techniques for resisting power in a contemporary world"--

Abstract
In the wake of civil rights struggles, a rural area in Southwest Georgia became a global stage for rehearsing some of the world's most provocative experiments with community and land tenure. An interracial intentional community, a Nation of Islam farm, the first community land trust, and a wave of cooperative experiments moving through the South in the late 1960s and 1970s found fertile ground around Albany, Georgia. Reflecting solidarity between the civil rights, Pan-African, Nonaligned, and Tricontinental movements, associations with prominent international activists also linked this area in the US South to decolonizing efforts in the Global South just prior to a neoliberal turn. Within these networks, victims of white supremacy modeled approaches to survival that are now broadly relevant to today's social and climate justice work. The story offers spatial tools and surprising histories to ground and energize a fresh wave of activism that looks to collective forms of urban and rural landholding to address racism, whiteness, inequality, reparations, and climate change.

Keller Easterling is an architect, urbanist, and writer. Her latest book, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005), researches familiar spatial products that have landed in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world. Her previous book, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America, applies network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure and development formats. A forthcoming book, Extrastatecraft, researches global infrastructure as a medium of polity. Ms. Easterling is also the author of Call It Home, a laser disc history of suburbia, and American Town Plans. She has recently completed two research installations on the Web: "Wildcards: A Game of Orgman" and "Highline: Plotting NYC." Her work has been widely published in journals such as Grey Room, Volume, Cabinet, Assemblage, Log, Praxis, Harvard Design Magazine, Perspecta, Metalocus, and ANY. Her work is also included as chapters in numerous publications. She has lectured widely in the United States as well as internationally. Ms. Easterling's work has been exhibited at the Queens Museum, the Architectural League, the Municipal Arts Society, and the Wexner Center. Easterling is a professor at Yale's School of Architecture.

Keller Easterling is an architect, urbanist, and writer. Her latest book, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005), researches familiar spatial products that have landed in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world. Her previous book, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America, applies network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure and development formats. A forthcoming book, Extrastatecraft, researches global infrastructure as a medium of polity. Ms. Easterling is also the author of Call It Home, a laser disc history of suburbia, and American Town Plans. She has recently completed two research installations on the Web: "Wildcards: A Game of Orgman" and "Highline: Plotting NYC." Her work has been widely published in journals such as Grey Room, Volume, Cabinet, Assemblage, Log, Praxis, Harvard Design Magazine, Perspecta, Metalocus, and ANY. Her work is also included as chapters in numerous publications. She has lectured widely in the United States as well as internationally. Ms. Easterling's work has been exhibited at the Queens Museum, the Architectural League, the Municipal Arts Society, and the Wexner Center. Easterling is a professor at Yale's School of Architecture.

The concept of Urban Protocol names a strategy concerning the condition of Athens today. It would serve as an experimental pseudo-methodology that faces the condition of the city. The Urban Protocols are meant to introduce legal temporary occupancies of the abandoned city center that will be accepted and controlled by a municipal authority; the purpose of an Urban Protocol would be to establish cluster-like micro-legislative constructions with communal functions. Urban Protocols are formed as systems of rules. Using a video game terminology we may say that the Urban Protocols are "play-tested" in the city, performed and improved via Internet. The system of rules they represent could be transformed and re-established easily. The Urban Protocol challenges the relation between the city and the Internet; the concept of user would function better for its performance than the one of citizen. Nevertheless its most sophisticated part would have to deal with the relation between user and citizen. Its most challenging legislative part is ruled by the relationship between the Internet and the state; the Internet is understood as the quick functional basis for the formation, installation and function of an Urban Protocol. Architecture seems to propose its own end if we forget its power to produce programs. An uninteresting lessez-faire will be the result of such an idealization of the free initiative. A city was conceived as a system of coexistence and its legislative system is already old. The Urban Protocol could be first and foremost the call for a new legislative phase for the city of the future. Athens is only a good example.--publisher's website