Intensely Infrastructural: Shelter for Nomadic Subjects

'Intensely Infrastructural' seeks to question the self-reinforcing 'pan-humanist' logic behind a contemporary spatiotemporal condition I decide to name the Seamless Paradigm – an urban, capitalist economy founded on the ethos of smooth, transnational circulation of bodies, goods and ideals. Despite being a modus facilitated by and generative of a typically postmodern, neoliberal reorganisation of capital, this urbanistic dictum is not a late 20th century phenomenon, but an ever ongoing material-discursive project, following the steps of the likes of Cerda and Saint-Simon. Naturally, a well-developed mobility network is capable of breaking centre-periphery dichotomies, redistributing capital, providing just-in-time, around the clock goods and services and rendering accessible a greater variety of spaces for a greater variety of people – theoretically enabling everyone to 'choose' their lifestyle. However, the deterritorialisation of internal boundaries always entails a reification of external ones; something of which, to mention one example, the migration politics of the European Union is a clear example – its policies struggling to adapt urban territories to the increased flux of asylum seekers and intra-european economic migrants; an influx which which, although perceived as a threat to the European Project, is facilitated by its very own hypermobile raison d'etre Furthermore, transit space is not something to 'enter' and 'exit' - ”you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic” - and all mobile societies require intense synchronisation, monitoring and control - modulation - of bodies and spaces. The project argues that we ought to remain aware and weary of the effects of the positive feedback loop of interiorising forces and hypermobile ideals, on subjectivity in general, and the built environment in particular. As a response, 'Intensely Infrastructural' suggests a permanent intervention for (con)temporary needs for shelter as well as future civic desires of ever more mobile subjects, located in Strasbourg, one of three administrative centres of the European Union, historically defined by a binational identity, and currently in possession of France's most sophisticated multi-modal transportation infrastructure. Wedged between vast train and road systems, and set within the long stretch of artificial slope – glacis - that marks the previously fortified western boundary of the city, the intervention attempts to rearticulate this residual boundary condition, currently defined by technologies of mobility and defense, as a relatively autonomous ”processual ecology”, consisting of factors which affect and are affected by the Seamless without being immediately involved in its system – an 'immanent outside' . Unlike the systemic environment of the Seamless Paradigm, which quantitatively defines its singularity through interior-exterior relations, the immanent outside is defined qualitatively, through the very surplus, externalities and contingencies brought about by the Seamless. By locating, articulating, appropriating and intensifying the immanent outside, the project seeks to provide a facilitating environment for growing truly ”nomadic subjects” willing to not only consume space through vectorial movement, but to produce it by staying put; to change not simply their habitat, but their habits.