Keller Easterling

Infrastructure is not only 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.