When monopoly power is threatened by organised resistance, automation becomes an existential response. Automation offers a way of deactivating historical struggles for social change because, in theory, it may prevent the need for labour’s socialisation in the first place.[1] In the context of platform urbanism as an extractive industry facing potential opposition, what may be automated is not just productive labour, but the reproductive relations of environmental and social care that have hitherto made those places viable for life in the first place. When capitalist platforms are implanted in places with resistant Indigenous polities, they will always constitute a form of neo-colonial domination.

For this reason, any emancipatory theory of platform urbanism must equally ground itself in struggles for decolonisation. This means bringing in relations to land as more than merely symbolic or 'cultural,' which involves asking what is required for 'its' maintenance – in it 'its' own terms. Listening to rivers, mountains, and birds might not be in the architect’s or planner’s modernist toolkit, but it should be. Indigenous peoples have epistemologies that we need to respectfully learn from. In other words, we must centre the labour of social reproduction (Indigenous knowledges, economies of care) through the co-articulation of jurisdiction and production: what are the decision-making entities and how do they obtain legitimacy not only for humans, but for the non-human world too?

Capitalist platforms automate work to potentially undermine both these dimensions: labour becomes machinic in a negative sense, to automate jobs away and protect corporations’ bottom-line, while logistical power replaces the arduous work of weaving sovereign legitimacy with – rather than against – the land. Through these two specific bypasses, capitalist platform urbanism may sidestep accountability altogether. Through automation, the problem of labour’s assimilation to the singular jurisdiction of capitalist hegemony within the nation-state form is uprooted at the source: companies’ scalability and profits encounter no translation issues, no frictions, making the non-correspondence of sovereignty and property in settler colonial states irrelevant. Thus, not only is labour eliminated, but even the very need to constitute racialised and other populations excluded from the social contract (such as Native Americans) as workers. To all intents and purposes, these subjects may thus remain structurally outside any jurisdiction. In specifically urban terms, 'sustainable underdevelopment' is precisely a form of spatial underinvestment and neglect from which capitalist corporations eventually profit. Detroit here is a good example, as are the hundreds of Native American reservations in the U.S. that have been artificially excluded from productive investment.[2] With this 'hard power' strategy, capital monopolists, and by extension, U.S. hegemony, don’t even require complex cultural strategies to dispossess and proletarianise; they can just replace the complicated political relations of production and jurisdiction with purely logistical ones.[3]

Though decolonial struggles are necessarily incommensurable as each Indigenous polity has its own particular historical, geographic and cultural conditions, in certain contexts (such as the U.S.) they all face the same colonial administration, making it possible – and necessary—to organise pan-Indigenous platforms of resistance. Native counter-hegemonic struggles are not new.[4] Native American nations established connections with other international experiences and theories of colonialism since World War I, while the emergence of an Indigenous critical discourse on decolonisation – and corresponding institutions – began to take shape during and after World War II, spurred by New Deal policies that sought to assimilate Indigenous polities within U.S. sovereignty, as well as parallel post-colonial experiences and discourses developing at the same time in other parts of the world.[5] Thus, before the emergence of the radical American Indian Movement in the late 1960s, Indigenous struggles in the U.S. were contained through a particular mode of liberal 'recognition' that forced a brutal choice on racialised and Indigenous subjects: opposition meant radical excess, survival meant radical integration. The archetypical imaginary subject thereby produced was the fully-integrated migrant rather than the autonomous and self-governed Indigenous polity.[6]

In architectural terms, this took the form of a particularly forced synthesis between Indigeneity and the discourse of modernisation. As Sigfried Giedion claimed in 1954, this dialectic required a new label which he termed the New Regional Approach: a synthesis of modern architecture’s internationalism of the 1920s – an architecture which 'hovers in mid-air, with no roots anywhere' as represented by De Stijl’s experiments with abstract planes – and the environmental and cultural specificities of 'primitive' and 'Eastern' cultures, thus encompassing 'both cosmic and terrestrial considerations.'[7] Via this synthesis, modern architecture would be able to continue its never-ending process of change and development, while becoming 'humanised' through the authentic ways of life of Indigenous peoples and traditions.

Giedion’s account Orientalised Indigenous peoples rather describing any specific polity. Furthermore, the hurried synthesis elided the question of what a decolonial sovereignty – rather than one of rhetorical recognition and capitalist assimilation – would look like. If regional modernism embodied the concrete juridical form and epistemic structure of neocolonial productivism and mass-consumption, caught in a hall of mirrors between techno-economic and humanistic imaginaries, the over-extended logistical networks of the capitalist monopolies that governed structural disinvestment in Indigenous jurisdictions were both a more specific and a more generalised target. After all, logistics is merely a multiplier of land and its relations, and the history of Indigenous struggles offers multiple lessons on how to resist land occupation – such as infrastructural blockades of pipelines and other parts of the extractive apparatus. The material routes between parts and systems are, in fact, full of discontinuities and opportunities for disruption.

In this sense, the historicity of decolonial sovereignty needs to be understood as neither less formal nor more embodied than that imagined by regional modernity. Rather, as Fanon would say, it can only be grasped 'in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content.'[8] In its attempts to secure a hegemony made of parts-and-wholes, as well as the historical modes of effective counter-hegemonic resistance, architecture mediates this process through the organisation and distribution of resources and epistemologies – not merely illustrating, but also designing, 'jurisdiction.'

What would platform urbanism look like if it was grounded in the variegated historical specificity and grounded normativity of actually-existing communities, including sovereign Indigenous polities? As we have covered in these posts, it would first have to acknowledge its own geographic and epistemological limitations: not platform urbanism, but platform urbanisms. Secondly, it would have to acknowledge the implicit teleology of Western developmentalism and capitalist growth that is inherent in the notion of urbanisation as synonymous with socialisation. Learning to socialise with non-human others is a condition of possibility for any anticapitalist, anti-hegemonic platform. Finally, it would have to contend with the inherent tension within the notion of 'platform' itself as a magically transcendental synthesis of difference and multiplicity. How does the platform empower rather than flatten geopolitical, epistemic and ontological differences?

The focus on difference cannot be reduced to yet another liberal paradigm of global 'governance' ruled by the tenets of techno-economic integration for capitalist growth, with 'platforms' merely taking on the role of companies. But if the decolonial promise of platform urbanism as an anticapitalist infrastructure is to be taken seriously, it must also not shy away from the problems of articulation and commensuration that they inevitably entail. Rather than serving to entrench the incommensurability of different worlds – upholding unrealistic, autarchical fantasies – decolonial platform urbanisms would need to be designed as logistical armatures for a universality that is in fact a pluriversality: a world of many worlds.[9] If decolonial platform urbanism isn’t going to be an oxymoron, but a technological infrastructure for the pluriverse, it needs to be considered as a type of interface between different worlds: the architecture for a new kind of global diplomacy.

These different worlds include existing and as-yet-unrecognised geopolitical entities, specific ecologies involving complex webs of relationships between the human and the non-human, and forms of knowledge that exceed the narrow modes sanctioned by capitalist modernity. A decolonial platform urbanism would have to be able to structure the relations between these different dimensions, protecting the integrity of each while offering resilience to the whole in a material sense, as a kind of military apparatus against the predations of empire and capital. Versions of this type of collaborative political technology already exist in the long tradition of Indigenous diplomacy and resistance, as well as in different kinds of anticapitalist governmental traditions, from Murray Bookchin’s 'confederal municipalism,' to the Zapatistas’ autonomous cooperativism. [10] These are all experiments in thinking globality without domination for a more socially just and biodiverse world. As Jean Cohen has theorised, federations are the key political form respecting this complex articulation, offering a realpolitik based on 'the idea of a plurality of autonomous self-determining and self-governing (sovereign) political communities and international relations.'[11]

Decolonial platform urbanism would not simply use technological fixes to anxiously synthesise the global with the local, as the myth of modern regionalism sought to do. It would serve as the logistical framework for actively organising against empire and capital, thereby also actively reproducing non-exploitative social relations to and with the land.