McKenzie Wark pens a rather a wake up call of a book review on Easterling's new book Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space in which Easterling offers a set of subsidiary metaphors for contemporary infrastructure design: multipliers, switches, and topologies.

"The multipliers include: cars, elevators, mobile phones. The first, the car, was the multiplier that made possible one of the precursor forms of the greenfields city, the greenfields suburb. But “Levittown was simple software.” (74) Its repeated unit-forms were few. Sadly, it may be the case that the United States never quite acquired the higher-order practices of building forms at the next scale. Hence the endless attempts to solve spatial problems with yet more versions of the Levittown software.

The switch is something like an interchange highway. The switch is a macro-order feature compared to the multiplier, shaping where the multipliers can circulate. Topology might designate the art of patterning switches and multipliers into grids and networks for optimal circulation. “Topologies model the ‘wiring’ of an organization. … Just as an electronic network is wired to support certain activities, so space can be ‘wired’ to encourage some activities and routines over others.”

Elsewhere in the article,

"Perhaps the decline of architecture can be mapped onto the design of politics. Or rather its redesign. The architect made buildings which carved out private space against the boundary of a public one that was in the shape of some kind of polis. It was not always a democratic one, but it was a polis that formed the platform for modes of political calculation, consensus and ‘dissensus.’ But does that polis still exist, or do we live only with its spectacle, its simulacrum?

Of particular interest here is a new book by Keller Easterling, calledExtrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. Following Armand Mattelart’s call for a critical history of global infrastructure, Easterling offers three case studies in new forms of built-out power, and some remarkably productive language for thinking about the kinds of built space that might be replacing those of both architecture and politics."

Previously: Mason White interviews Keller Easterling for Archinect in 2006: Urban Slot Machine