Archizoom’s No-Stop City theorises an endless, uniform urban field where architecture dissolves into infrastructure, exposing capitalism’s spatial logic.

Archizoom Associati’s No-Stop City (1969–72) constitutes a seminal act of critical architecture, wherein the city is reconceptualised not as a composed artefact but as an infinite, isotropic field governed by the logics of production and consumption. Emerging from the Italian Radical Architecture movement, this project radicalises modernist tendencies toward standardisation by extrapolating them to their terminal condition: a continuous, climate-controlled interior where distinctions between centre and periphery, public and private, architecture and infrastructure are entirely effaced. The visual material on page 1 foregrounds this ambition through the depiction of a boundless gridded plane labelled “climatic universal system,” while subsequent pages reveal repetitive modular layouts and interior scenes populated by interchangeable objects, emphasising the seriality of space and life . Within this paradigm, architecture ceases to produce meaning through form; instead, it becomes a neutral support for consumer behaviours, mirroring the homogenising tendencies of late capitalism. The meticulous plans on pages 2 and 4 illustrate an urbanism devoid of hierarchy, where circulation, habitation, and production are subsumed into a single infrastructural matrix, while the staged interiors on page 2 ironically dramatise the absurdity of limitless flexibility and choice within a system of total uniformity . As a case study, No-Stop City does not propose a buildable utopia but rather a dystopian mirror, exposing how modern urbanism, when driven by market rationality, tends toward spatial indifference and existential monotony. Ultimately, Archizoom’s project operates as a theoretical extreme, revealing that the disappearance of architectural form is not liberation but the culmination of a system in which space itself becomes a commodity, endlessly reproducible and devoid of qualitative distinction.

Primitive Accumulation, Reproductive Labor, and the War on Women * Silvia Federici and the Feminist Critique of Capitalism

Silvia Federici revisits the birth of capitalism through a feminist Marxist lens, arguing that the violence inflicted on women’s bodies—especially through witch hunts, reproductive control, and domestic exploitation—was not peripheral but foundational to the formation of capitalist society. In Caliban and the Witch, she challenges Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation as a pre-capitalist event, reframing it instead as an ongoing process of accumulation by dispossession that targets the commons, women's labor, and reproductive capacities. Federici insists that unpaid reproductive labor—the daily work of sustaining life, raising children, and maintaining households—is not external to capitalism but its hidden engine, enabling the wage labor system to function without compensating the reproductive base it depends on. The historical witch hunts, she argues, were not remnants of feudal superstition but state-organized strategies to suppress female autonomy, herbal knowledge, and communal resistance, clearing the way for a compliant labor force and patriarchal social order. In later works like Revolution at Point Zero and The Patriarchy of the Wage, Federici connects this expropriation to contemporary struggles over the privatization of basic resources, showing how institutions like the IMF and World Bank continue colonial logics by enclosing land, water, and even genetic material. Her advocacy for reclaiming the commons as spaces of collective reproduction positions feminist resistance not only as critique but as world-making praxis, rooted in care, cooperation, and the refusal of capitalist logic. By centering women’s labor and bodies in the history of capital, Federici demands we rethink exploitation from the kitchen to the plantation, and organize accordingly.

reproductive labor, primitive accumulation, capitalism, witch hunts, feminist marxism, commons, body politics, unpaid labor, colonialism, global expropriation, gendered violence, accumulation by dispossession, neoliberalism, Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch