Legibility has become one of the decisive political materials of the contemporary world: not the old legibility of maps, files and administrative grids alone, but a more pervasive condition in which cities, archives, platforms, bodies, cultural forms and logistical chains must be formatted before they can circulate, appear, be governed or be remembered. Lefebvre’s right to the city, as reread by Costes, remains the first pressure point because it refuses to treat urban space as a finished container; the city is a collective production, and the violence of generalized urbanization lies in the way this production is captured by capitalism, segregation and the disappearance of the traditional civic form into a planetary urban condition. Sanaan Bensi and Marullo extend that disappearance through logistics: neoliberalism does not simply occupy territory, it smooths it, translating ports, containers, warehouses, transport systems, labour rhythms and information flows into a rationalized architecture of exchange. Söderström and Datta’s urban data politics gives the same architecture its crisis interface, where dashboards, platforms, war rooms and civil-society tactics reveal that data does not merely describe the city but redistributes authority within it. Jiang and Sperandio place this redistribution inside smart governance, where technical systems can only become politically meaningful when they are held against institutional routines, civic agency, ethical frictions and situated urban differences. Quek et al. formulate the conundrum with particular clarity: city digital twins promise integration, yet technological proliferation often produces fragmented micro-solutions, interoperability failures and proprietary lock-ins; semantic approaches and knowledge graphs matter because they offer not only data transfer, but relation, context and cross-domain intelligibility. Estlund supplies the media-archaeological underside of this condition by showing that online access is structured through HTML, metadata, search engines, social media protocols and optimization manuals; visibility is not a natural reward of quality, but a negotiated position inside gatekeeping infrastructures. Mounier and Dumas Primbault then widen the frame: knowledge infrastructure is a fragile ecology of skills, conventions, software, materials, publics, governance bodies, standards, maintenance and repair, always torn between invisibility as technical support and visibility as public accountability. UNESCO’s report on artificial intelligence and culture adds the cultural threshold of the same problem: AI reorganizes rights, authorship, diversity, heritage, bias and cultural commons by altering the protocols through which culture is encoded, extracted, valued and redistributed. The political question running through these materials is therefore not only who owns the city, the data, the archive, the model or the platform, but who defines the grammar through which they become searchable, interoperable, trustworthy and durable. What once appeared as background support now acts as form; what once appeared as neutral circulation now produces social order; what once appeared as technical access now becomes a public field of conflict. Legibility is not transparency. It is an infrastructural operation, and it always asks who is being made visible, under what protocol, for whose use, and at what cost.
