Designing Eden:

The future of rule based city-making

Abstract

The omnipresence of the algorithmic gaze is not just easing the capacity to crawl, index, and rank everything according to rule-based praxises but also shifting the dimensions of where, when, and how citizens move or circulate through the urban commons (O'Brien, 2018). In the absence of urban thinkers or participatory planning, these new alterations take place within the invisible peripheries of algorithms. This paper examines the change, and the spatial currencies reconditioned by the interplay of city-making and city-indexing as infrastructure, urban spaces, and built settings become indistinctively itemized. It recognizes that this is an ongoing process that continues to flatten, catalog, and index the physical characteristics of space which produces a virtual inventory of urban proportions subjecting city officials to accelerate the re-privatization, deregulation, and re-colonization of vast territories. It is within these transactions that we see a re-territorializing of the city's context and the uneven usage of spatial distribution underway. In the case of the American city, the range of impact caused by these emerging transactions is seemingly local, but we claim that the dynamics of city- indexing reverberate across different scales extending from local to regional, and national proportions. To depict our work, we choose a comparative method that aims to associate the impact of rule- base praxis with changes at the urban and regional scale. To start, we correlate the re-scaling of territories at a suburban sector in 5ilicon Valley with the re-development plans for downtown Las Vegas. We then linked those actions to the 2017-2018 bids enacted by Amazon and the likely effect it may yield from the northeastern region of the U5A (a zone first identified by Jean Gottmann as a co-dependent megalopolis in 1961 and later coined as BO5WA5H by Herman Khan in 1967) to the Midwest.