A decisive point of entry into where she reframes contemporary urbanism as a system of information rather than a repertoire of forms. For Easterling, the real architecture of the global city resides not in iconic buildings but in the repeatable formulas of free zones, logistics corridors, broadband cables and special regimes that operate beyond democratic oversight. These infrastructures behave like active protocols—spatial software—that script behaviours, economies and governance. Her notion of infrastructure space exposes how power circulates through standards, incentives and managerial templates, producing territories that are highly controlled yet formally banal. Instead of heroic design, she proposes an architectural intelligence attuned to latent potentials, weak signals and the capacity to manipulate dispositions rather than objects. In this sense, Easterling’s work becomes a hinge for any contemporary canon: it shifts attention from form to urban operating systems, from static masterplans to the dynamic, infrastructural undercurrents shaping collective life.
