working polemic

Hacking Logistical Cities

In an increasingly globalizing and urbanizing world, no other entity in North America has been adept at formatting the urban playing field than logistics.  The latest typologies to emerge from generative iterations are the corridors, zones, ports, and distribution centers.

What makes logistics so successful?  They make, break, and mend the rules.  Its rules are not always the explicit, the best are often implicit.  Not always positive but powerful in their openended ness.  Rules are the inverted, abstracted and extracted image of a city’s actual situation.

Setting up rules is first and foremost a cultural act.  In fact, we read cities by their rules.  Rules are the infrastructure that link the digital and physical with the social city, connecting quality with quantity and latent characteristics to manifest ones.

Rules, thereby and almost unnoticed, are design instruments.  In fact, regarding rules as tools is a valuable urban design attitude.  This departs from wielding the ‘wild’ or visionary dreams that clings to control all.  Better a move towards a non–fatalistic form of control between freedom and coercion.

Architects and planners also make rules, yet we were never to assume the privileged positions of total urban reprogram.  In fact, we are but a discrete set of entities or players exercising agency in the urban playing field-often at the expense of cities.  Logistics understands this.  Planers realize this.  Architects are slow to.  Mimicking the action of Derridean difference, ac endlessly defers its agency across the urban infrastructural network.

If architects play but a part, why bother learning the logic of logistics?  Because we have yet to fully exercise our agency.  Architects bring the variance to the rules.  We collect all streaming urban trajectories to synthesize, project and anticipate via deliverance of our intervention  A hacker’s mentality is in need; one that is reflexive towards the city, logistics, and all other entities that exercise agency on the indifferent yet reflective spatial material: the program.

Acknowledge and understand the logic of logistics.  Impossible to master all the rules.  Architects are better positioned to act among the urban landscape of cities.  Lessons of the rule making abilities of logistics should be studied if we still aspire to play in the newly emerging landscape:  the logistical city.