In order to move beyond the ontological set up of capitalist modernity and coloniality – the system of parts and wholes that produces and upholds whiteness – we first have to start with the basic question: who is the 'we' I have been using so far? To address this, three preliminary re-framings of so-called orthodox Marxist discourse are required. First, social formations like race and gender are not secondary to those of class, but are co-constitutive. Second, what Spivak calls Marx’s 'urbanist teleology' must be challenged: 'sustainable underdevelopment' (aka systemic accumulation by dispossession) in so-called rural country is the very condition of possibility for capitalist development, especially in the form of recurring spatial fixes in response to crisis.[1] Third, for this reason, relations between subjects, production, and reproduction – from reproductive labours to reciprocal relations to land – must decentre Western notions of developmentalism, metropolitanism, and cosmopolitanism, including the primacy of the liberal nation-state as the primary unit of sovereignty.

Taken together, these three correctives require the centering of Indigenous, anti-racist, queer, and feminist Marxist approaches and historical perspectives. Indigeneity is not a universal condition – which would be grounded in racist and/or fetishistic stereotypes – but a differentiated material foundation from which modernity itself emerged and is sustained.

This is not to renounce a class-analysis of processes of capitalist development; on the contrary, it is to provide a framework to adequately undertake it. With platform urbanism, we are talking about the ways in which monopolistic capitalist corporations are contributing to the extinction of the biosphere as well as accelerating the global automation and/or displacement of labour, with little or no regard for their effects. These processes are designed through instrumental modes of architectural and urban expertise, folding together their (our) liberal consciences in the name of 'research and development'. In Spivak’s words:

Access to global, in spite of digital idealists, is not a certainty here. It is not prepared to be taught what it cannot know – how not to control top-down.

The distance in kind between the top (World Economic Forum and Columbia University), bottom (the largest sectors of the electorate – 'citizens!' – in Africa and Asia), and hapless middle (undocumented immigrants) makes the task of the teacher complex. The international civil society – confusing equality with sameness and thus denying history or teaching income-production and thus serving capital, is useless. Here one invokes the complicity – folded-togetherness – of fundraising radicals and the corporate world. Of Research and Development.[2]

Yet reversing this infrastructure, top-down to bottom-up, is not enough. (This is why Spivak calls for a non-teleological 'epistemological performance' – a performative transformation of subjects’ relations to and with knowledge, thus enacting different material relations – rather than crude positivistic 'techniques of knowledge management.') Co-option often takes this approach, reifying both superficial identitarianism as well as proto-fascistic nationalisms and the capitalist nation-state form.[3] Instead of simple reversals, it is necessary to understand the articulated links between production and reproduction, and more specifically, between modes of production and modes of federated sovereignty.[4] In this sense, we must be concerned with the relation between economy and jurisdiction across overlapping struggles for hegemony, rather than narrow distributional struggles within particular sectors or polities.

Historically, modern architecture made itself functional to the hegemony of capitalist growth through a particular narrowing of its tools and ways of figuring the world. In Fanon’s vocabulary, it 'compartmentalised' the relations between production and reproduction, thus obfuscating colonialism.[5] In the U.S., architecture was made to be instrumental in exclusively economic terms, by intensifying the class relations inherent in the hegemony of capitalist growth (via 'research and development'), thereby silencing the material conditions of jurisdiction – colonial relations – on which it occurred. Modern architects were key agents in the operationalisation of basic 'intellectual technologies' like automation and standardisation so that individual companies competing within the building and real estate markets could achieve higher efficiencies and profits. At the same time, imagined at a pan-industrial scale, these architectural techniques also suggested that a rationalised system of architectural design and construction – such as The Architectural Center – could effectively represent the secular mechanics of national growth writ large. Thus, for its apologists, modern architecture provided a medium to show how techno-economic integration, labour mobilisation, market specialisation, and spatial decentralisation were seemingly inevitable, quasi-universal processes, seamlessly connecting the micro with the macro: the individual worker or entrepreneur and the dynamics of the global market itself.

However, analysed from perspective of jurisdiction, these same dynamics in the U.S. naturalised the massive displacement of Indigenous, racialised, and working-class populations, both spatially – from rural sites to industrial and urban centers – as well as politically, by undermining forms of self-government. This is how architectural discourse and practice intersected the high point of 'research and development' between the 1930s and 1960s. Leading modernist architects like Walter Gropius and contemporary architectural theorists like Sigfried Giedion did not entirely ignore these displacements and decentralisations, but instead of addressing them critically, they sublimated them into an architectural discourse on modernist 'regionalism' that reworked architectural technologies to naturalise a seemingly inevitable transition from rural to urban life, and from non-capitalist societies to capitalist, 'post-industrial,' modernity under the hegemonic aegis of the nation-state.

Thus, what is at stake in hegemonic representational systems, including the idea of a 'platform urbanism,' is the architectural articulation of capitalist development not just as a political-economic technology of secular growth, but more profoundly, as a colonial or decolonial epistemology of land and labour. The real question is: how do architectural and urban systems that claim to reconfigure the part and the whole – data and the city; the subject and society – not become functional to the systematic displacements inherent to capitalist growth and the reproduction of the historical nexus between capitalism and colonialism? If history tells us anything, it is that the price of modernity is too often displacement, dislocation, and literal or figurative social death. For those keen to survive this brutal system on the system’s own terms, the imaginary, perfectly-assimilated migrant becomes the spectral subject which they must, but cannot, become.

In this sense, we should interrogate platform urbanism as a paradigmatic crystallisation in the longer historical arc of monopoly capitalism. When considering monopoly capitalism’s drive to consolidate extraction, production, and consumption – the total environments of colonial mining towns, for example – we need to pay attention to how they come to be designed as 'infrastructures of dependency,' or systems through which labour and land – particularly Indigenous land and migrant labour – become re-constituted as 'factors of production' and then alienated, in the sense of being radically displaced, physically and epistemically, between central productive 'cores' and supporting 'peripheries' that remain artificially marginalised and underdeveloped.[6]

Key to disrupting these systematic displacements is understanding their operations within hegemonic theories of capitalist markets. According to neoclassical economics, productivity growth requires three complimentary dynamics to be managed by technocratic experts and to be implemented by state-sanctioned professionals, such as architects. First, the total dis-embedding of 'factors of production' (labour, land, and capital itself in the form of money, machinery, or techno-scientific knowledge) from their local, 'embedded' and 'embodied' contexts, as a precondition for their marketisation.[7]Secondly, coordination policies to connect markets and make them more seamless and efficient, both geographically and in terms of information; a set of jurisdictional 'interlocks' forged by harmonising distinct regulatory regimes, collecting market data, and sharing databases across sectors, leading to a coherent picture of 'the economy' as an externalised object in its own right.[8] And finally, continuous policies of investment in research and development to stimulate technological change, with the state and corporations often working together to enhance productivity – most clearly, for example, in research geared toward military projects.

However, when centering Indigenous life and land, infrastructures of surplus extraction pose questions of emancipation in terms of decolonisation, rather than in some abstractly universal sense. They foreground the relation between nationality, race, and class at the level of (decolonial) sovereignty rather than (capitalist) property – or in classical political terms, at the level of Imperium rather than mere Dominium.[9] Property relations, in other words, are here more clearly about politics and jurisdiction than about economics and technology – or about the cultural dimensions of these phenomena. These dimensions need to be co-articulated; they do not exist separately. [10] Thus, as a lens to historicise something like 'platform urbanism,' this frame eschews the disciplinary conventions and periodisations that often fetishise U.S. techno-architectural innovation and American exceptionalism, from the 1930s, through the Cold War and into the Trumpist present. [11]Rather, in the words of Joanne Barker, the history of corporate and state power in the U.S. is 'more effectively understood in relation to ongoing Indigenous struggles against jurisdictional and territorial dispossession than within its more popular frame of reference to the Great Depression.'[12]

Projects of Native assimilation or accommodation to U.S. rule, like those from the New Deal that inspired The Architectural Center, were thus not only tools of a rising (if minimal) social-democratic welfare state. In concrete ways, they showed how changes in the nature and scope of architectural expertise were part and parcel of an infrastructure of dependency and neo-colonial interpellation – dispossessing or dislocating Indigenous, racialised, and working-class populations, then assimilating them through specific biopolitical enclosures to assist in their urban transition – or else be cast as a subaltern 'excess' unregistered by modern historicity. For assimilated Indians and white workers, states and corporations offered socio-economic adjustment policies. In contrast, for resistant Indigenous and racialised peoples, displacement acquired a quasi-ontological quality – a kind of jurisdictional limbo. For such a spatio-temporality to be created – subjects always-already caught before the law and outside of history – Indigenous and racialised life had to be construed and constructed as either a primitive archetype or as a residual quantity to be relocated and reformed. For this reason, in settler-colonial states capitalist hegemony is founded on a series of constitutive exclusions: material and discursive gaps that artificially partition the relation between economy and jurisdiction. In Eve Tuck’s haunting words:

Returning to the past—its gaps …

My stories are not a rejoinder, not a correction in the way that you have been thinking all along. My stories are evidence that your thinking has gaps. And worse, acts like it doesn’t. I’m not trying to convince you of anything different.[13]