infrastructural city

2025-in-review

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It’s strange to measure every year against a concept developed by a science fiction writer, but William Gibson’s line “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed”1. has been my north star for my recent year-in-review essays. Gibson meant that the future was unevenly distributed by class: the wealthy receive high-tech healthcare while the world’s poorest live in squalor—though one might ask which of these is really our future. Yet the quote has been repeatedly misread as a claim about time andspace: that the future arrives somewhere first, perhaps unseen, while the rest of the world catches up. But this misreading is more productive than Gibson’s intent. Gibson’s critique of inequality is fair enough, but we all know this, decry it, and go on about our business. The misreading, on the other hand, is a theory of historical change.

With the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, a temporal rift opened, shattering the post-Covidean present. But many tried the early tools, encountered hallucinations, read articles about slop and imminent environmental ruin, and reasonably concluded there was nothing to see. By 2025, a cursory examination of news in AI would have assured them that AI had proved a bust. OpenAI’s long-awaited updates disappointed, and the company flailed, turning to social media with Sora, a TikTok clone for AI. Meta seemed to abandon its efforts to create a competitive AI and instead turned to content generation for Instagram and Facebook, something nobody on earth wanted. Talk of a bubble started among Wall Street pundits. The hype-to-disappointment cycle is familiar, and the dismissals were not unreasonable.

But again, the future isn’t evenly distributed, and if you don’t know where to look, you would be excused for believing it’s all hype. Looking past such failures, 2025 was actually a year of breakneck progress. Anthropic’s Claude emerged as the most capable system for complex tasks, Google’s Gemini became highly competitive, while DeepSeek and Moonshot AI proved that China was not far behind. More significant than any single model was the emergence of agentic AI—systems that can take on multi-step tasks, act, navigate filesystems, write and execute code, and work across documents. Claude Code was the year’s groundbreaking innovation. While “slop” was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year, “vibe coding”—using agents to write programs—was much more important. Not only could programmers use them to accelerate their work, it also became possible for non-programmers to realize their ideas without any knowledge of code, a radical change in access I explored in “What Did Vibe Coding Just Do to the Commons?”.

By any first-world standards, at least, these tools are remarkably democratic and inexpensive. A basic Claude subscription costs about as much as a month of streaming, and even the $200 maximum usage account costs less than a monthly car payment. For many, however, the barrier is not price but something deeper—a resistance approaching revulsion. These tools provoke fear in a way that earlier technologies did not. It’s not the apocalyptic dread of the doomers or the Dark Mountain sensibility that apocalypse is near. Rather, it’s a threat to the sense that thought itself is what makes us distinct. The unevenness of the future is no longer about access; it’s now about willingness to engage.

As a scholar, thinking about the very short term is strange for me. I have always been suspicious of claims that radical change was upon us. I would rather align myself with the French Annales school concept of la longue durée, as defined by the great Fernand Braudel, the long-term structures of geography and climate. Faster than that were the medium-term cycles of economies and states, while he dismissed the short-term événements of rulers and political events as “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.”2. Events, he wrote elsewhere, “are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion.”3. The real forces operate beneath, slowly, often imperceptibly.

Curiously, Braudel himself embraced technological change in his own work. In the 1920s and 30s, he adapted an old motion-picture camera to photograph archival documents—2,000 to 3,000 pages per day across Mediterranean archives from Simancas to Dubrovnik. He later claimed to be “the first user of microfilms” for scholarly historical research.4. His wife Paule spent years reading the accumulated reels through what Braudel called “a simple magic lantern.”5. Captured in 1940, he spent five years as a prisoner of war and wrote the entire first draft of The Mediterranean—some 3,000 to 4,000 pages—from memory. Paule, meanwhile, retained access to the microfilm and notes in Paris, and after the war, they reconstructed the text, taking his manuscript, verifying it and adding footnotes and references from the microfilm.6.

In 1945, the same year Braudel was liberated, Vannevar Bush published “As We May Think,” in which he imagined a device he called the “Memex”: a mechanized desk storing a researcher’s entire library, indexed and cross-referenced, expandable through associative trails.7. The vision remained speculative for decades. Now the world’s archives are being digitized; AI systems translate, summarize, and search across them in seconds and can translate any language. To take one example, earlier this year, I used Google’s Gemini to translate the Hierosolymitana Peregrinatio of Mikalojus Kristupas Radvila Našlaitėlis, a sixteenth-century pilgrimage narrative from an online scan of the Latin first edition. The result is not a polished scholarly translation, but a working text that allowed me to gain a good sense of a text that was previously unreadable to anyone without proficiency in Latin or Polish (the only language into which, to my knowledge, it had been translated). The role of the intellectual is being transformed—not replaced, but augmented in ways Bush could only sketch. This feels like something other than foam.

How to account for such a rapid shift? Manuel DeLanda offers one answer in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. Working in Braudel’s materialist tradition and drawing on Gilles Deleuze and complexity theory, DeLanda describes how flows—of trade, energy, and information—accumulate and concentrate until they cross a threshold, undergo a phase transition, radically reorganizing into a new stable state. But here is the key insight: intensification is la longue durée. The accumulation of flows that began with the Industrial Revolution—or perhaps with writing, agriculture, or even symbolic representation itself—is the deep structure behind our era. Steam, electricity, computing, the internet: each was a phase transition within a longer arc of intensification. Cities accelerate such processes, as Braudel showed, concentrating capital and labor until new forms of economic organization emerge—Venice, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, each becoming sites at which the future arrived first. Such conditions are not opposed to la longue durée; they are the moments when intensification crosses a threshold.

The continued pace of change this year underscores that there has been no return to equilibrium. But this has been accompanied by unprecedented resistance to technology, appearing as simultaneous terror at its apocalyptic nature (in jobs, if nothing else) and dismissal as useless, especially in Gen Z. A January 2026 Civiqs survey found that 57 percent of Americans aged 18–34 view AI negatively—more than any other age group. Curiously, the seniors category, which now includes most boomers, was the least resistant to AI, followed by Gen X and older millennials, all groups that grew up seeing radical societal and technological changes.8. It seems paradoxical that the smartphone generation recoils from the tools of the future. To understand this resistance means understanding the mentalité that shaped it—what Braudel’s successors in the Annales school called the collective psychology formed through lived experience.9. For Gen Z, that formative experience was network culture—both a successor to postmodernism and a form of collective psychology I did not fully understand at the time. Writing on network culture in 2008, it seemed to me that social media promised connection; instead, it brought division.10. The networked self was indeed constituted through networks, not merely isolated in postmodern fragmentation, but the fragmentation was now collective. Networked publics built barriers against one another, creating what Robert Putnam called cyberbalkanization: retreat into a comfortable niche among people just like oneself, views merely reinforcing views.11. Identity wars and mimetic conflict flared across filter bubbles that amplified outrage and tribal scapegoating as both MAGA and wokism built toxic online cultures. QAnon and a thousand other conspiracy theories propagated through Facebook groups and YouTube recommendations. Young men drifted into incel communities where loneliness became ideology and livestreaming mass shootings was celebrated. Influencers built their empires on hatred—Hasan Piker framed Hamas’s October 7 massacre as anticolonial resistance while Nick Fuentes celebrated mass shooters as vanguards of race war and civilizational collapse.

Nor did this just fragment culture—it exacted a massive psychic toll, as social contagion spread new forms of self-harm and mental illness. During the pandemic, teenage girls began presenting tic-like behaviors—not Tourette’s syndrome, but something researchers termed “mass social media-induced illness,”12. spread by TikTok videos about Tourette’s rather than any actual disease. The pattern was unprecedented but not unique. Eating disorders spread through thinspiration hashtags. Self-harm tutorials circulated on Instagram. The platforms that were supposed to bring us together instead spread desires, disorders, and identities through pure social contagion—and with them, violence and polarization. A generation that grew up inside this experiment—that watched it reshape their peers’ bodies, minds, and identities—is right to be skeptical of the next technological promise.

In 2010, it seemed like network culture had a good chance of becoming understood as the successor to postmodernism. Bruce Sterling and I were engaged in a kind of dialogue about it online. He predicted that network culture would last “about a decade before something else comes along.”13. And he was right, as I acknowledged in my 2020 Year in Review. By then, network culture was exhausted, and with the Covidean break, it seemed time for something new. In 2023, I taught a course at the New Centre for Research & Practice to try to broadly sketch the emerging era. It’s still early and hard to fathom, like trying to understand postmodernism in 1971 or network culture in 1998, but it’s clear that if postmodernism was underwritten by the explosion of mass media, network culture by the Internet, social media, and the smartphone, then the current era is shaped by AI.

But if Gen Z, scarred by the effects of social media, has been reacting with deep fear and anxiety, Sterling how epitmozes the other reaction, dismissal. In the most recent State of the World, for example, he derides AI-generated content as “desiccated bullshit that can’t even bother to lie.” He compares the vibe-coding atmosphere to an acid trip, mocking the professionals who utter “mindblown stuff” like “we may be solving all of software” and “I have godlike powers now.” For Sterling, AI can produce nothing but slop. Now Bruce has always had a healthy skepticism toward tech claims, but I can’t help but think of Johannes Trithemius, the fifteenth-century abbot who wrote De Laude Scriptorum just as Gutenberg’s press was spreading across Europe—defending the scriptorium against a technology he could not see would remake the world.

There are even deeper, more existential fears, and I’ve spent the past year addressing them on my blog, in the process laying the foundation for a book on the topic: AI as plagiarism machine; AI as hallucination engine; AI as stochastic parrot, mindlessly repeating what it has ingested (Sterling’s critique); and AI as uncanny double, too close to us for comfort. As I explain, the discomfort arises not from the machine’s otherness but from its likeness: a mirror held up to processes we preferred to believe were uniquely ours.

It’s no accident that I published these essays on my blog. As far as my personal year in review goes, this was very much the year of the blog. I have no plans to ever publish in an academic journal again. Why would I? Who would read it? Why would I want to publish something paywalled, reinforcing the walled gardens of inequality that academia is so desperate to maintain—even as it proclaims itself the champion of open inquiry and democratized knowledge? Academia has become the realm of what Peter Sloterdijk called cynical reason: rehearsing the tropes of ideology critique while knowing the game is empty and playing it anyway. This revolts me.

But for almost ten years now, since the shutting down of the labs at Columbia’s architecture school, I have been content to write from the position of the outsider, something I reflected on in “On the Golden Age of Blogging”. That essay was prompted by a strange comment from Scott Alexander, who lamented on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast that he had personally made a strategic error in not blogging during what he called the “golden age,” imagining that “the people from that era all founded news organizations or something.” The golden age he remembers is a fiction, as golden ages often are—and he gets the stakes entirely wrong. Evan Williams founded Blogger in 1999, sold it to Google, co-founded Twitter, then created Medium, which convinced hapless readers pay to read slop long before AI slop was ever a thing. The early bloggers who sought professionalization found themselves absorbed into the worst of the worst, writing for BuzzFeed, peddling nostalgia listicles that rotted psyches.

There was, however, a golden age for me, and I miss it: the architecture blogging community circa 2007—Owen Hatherley, Geoff Manaugh, Enrique Ramirez, Fred Scharmen, Sam Jacob, Mimi Zeiger (whose Loud Paper was less a blog and more a zine, but a key part of the culture), and others. We inherited from zine culture an informal, conversational tone and the will to stand outside architectural spectacle. But ArchDaily and Dezeen commercialized the form, shifting from independent critique to marketing and product. Startup culture absorbed architectural talent.

Blogging was powerful precisely because we had no stakes in it—we owned and controlled our means of intellectual production. The golden age of blogging is not in the past; it is now. After years of proclaiming I would blog more, in 2025, I really did. I wrote over 83,700 words on varnelis.net and the Florilegium—essay-length pieces on landscape, native plants, AI and art, architecture, infrastructure, politics, and tourism. My only regret is that my presidency at the Native Plant Society of New Jersey consumes so much of my thinking about native plants that little remains for writing. But the time will come, and if nothing else, my investigation of the Japanese garden aesthetic should point in the future direction for my writing on landscape.

I also continued to make AI art, or to be more precise, what I called stochastic histories. A major project was a substantial reworking of The Lost Canals of Vilnius, a counterfactual history in which, after the Great Fire of 1610, Voivode Mikalojus Radvila Našlaitėlis rebuilt the city with Venetian-style canals, complete with gondoliers, water processions, and a hybrid “Vilnius Venetian” architecture. As research, I used Gemini to translate Radvila’s sixteenth-century Latin pilgrimage narrative. AI, like photography or film, is what you make of it. Film is perhaps the better analogy—anyone can make a video. Making something worthwhile is another matter entirely. In December, I also completed East Coast/West Coast: After Bob and Nancy, a generative restaging of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s 1969 video dialogue using two AI speakers.

There were other substantial essays, too. In “Oversaturation: On Tourism and the Image”, I finally put down on paper something I had wanted the Netlab to address while at Columbia, but that proved too dangerous for the school to support. Universities cannot critique the very systems of overproduction they depend upon for survival. Publish or perish and endless symposia nobody is interested in are the academic versions of overproduction, but more than that, any architecture school claiming global currency cannot afford to offend either other institutions, like museums, that give it legitimacy, or, for that matter, the trustees that fund both. As I point out, tourism has always been mediated by imagery; take Piranesi’s vedute or the Claude Glass. Grand Tourists always had representations at hand to interpret their direct experience—but a new crisis point has been reached with both overtourism and the overproduction of images. Algorithmic logic now reorganizes cultural geography around “most Instagrammable spots,” making historical significance secondary to content potential. The Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto is the case in point—a 1,300-year-old shrine that Instagram made famous and that has now ceased to serve as a religious site due to the influx of visitors. The Japanese have a term for this: kankō kōgai, tourism pollution. Tourism has become the paradigm of contemporary experience—the production of imagery without cultural meaning; everything feeds the same algorithmic mill. Even strategies of resistance get metabolized—slow travel becomes a hashtag, psychogeography becomes an Instagram guide.

The Bilbao effect, which was a major driver of oversaturation, was itself a product of globalization. Hans Ibelings coined “supermodernism” in 1998 to refer to the architectural expression of Marc Augé’s “non-places,” an architecture optimized for the perpetual circulation of bodies and capital. It was the architecture of network culture, of the Concorde and the Internet. Koolhaas diagnosed its endgame in his 2002 “Junkspace“—”Regurgitation is the new creativity”—and then, tellingly, stopped writing. Today, network culture is long gone; nationalism is on the rise. The Internet is a dark forest now14. while the disconnected life is on the rise.15 The most exclusive resorts now advertise no Wi-Fi, no cell service, no addresses—only coordinates. Disconnection has become the ultimate luxury, sold back to the same people who built the infrastructure of connection. More cities are alarmed by the effects of overtourism than desire to attract tourists. In the US, new architectural proposals appeal to a retardataire aesthetic—Trump displaying models of a triumphal arch inspired by Albert Speer and marking a triumph of nothing in particular in models in three sizes (“I happen to think the large looks the best“), a four-hundred-million-dollar ballroom modeled on Mar-a-Lago, an executive order mandating classical architecture for federal buildings that Stephen Miller explicitly framed as culture war.

Yet both Bilbao and MAGA are spectacle, architecture-as-branding. But the Bilbao effect is imploding. No city believes anymore that a signature building by a starchitect will transform its fortunes. The parametricists have nothing left to say. Parametric design promised formal liberation—responsive, site-specific, computationally derived—but what it delivered was the most efficient, ugliest box. If the promise was the blob, the reality is the “5-over-1”: wood-frame residential floors stacked on a concrete podium with ground-floor retail, wrapped in a pastiche of brick veneer, fiber cement panels, and that obligatory conical turret element meant to signal “we thought about this corner.” As for AI-generated architecture, it is merely boring—giant sequoias hollowed out as apartment buildings, white concrete towers with impossible cantilevers, and lush vegetation sprouting from every surface—the same utopian fantasy rendered a thousand times over. These are renders of renders: AI trained on architectural visualization produces visualizations that are utterly disconnected from any tectonic reality. A new generation may emerge in response to new needs, but for now, the discipline has lost its cultural purchase. Architecture, for us, is a thing of the past.

The art world, too, has slowed. Museums are putting on fewer shows, shifting from aggressive schedules to longer, more deliberate exhibitions—or simply cutting programming as budgets tighten.16. The frantic pace of the Biennale circuit has exhausted dealers and collectors alike; smaller fairs are folding, and even the major ones feel like obligations rather than events. Galleries that survived the pandemic are now closing quietly, without the drama of a market crash—just a slow bleed of foot traffic, sales, and cultural attention. There is no new movement, no emergent critical framework, no sense of direction. The market churns on—auction prices for blue-chip artists remain high, collectors still speculate, art advisors still advise—but the sense of cultural mission has dissipated. What remains is commerce without conviction, a field that has forgotten why it exists beyond the perpetuation of its own economy. The institutions that trained artists for this field are collapsing alongside it.

As enrollment dwindles, design schools are collapsing—not merely contracting, but ceasing to exist. Most recently, the California College of the Arts announced in January 2026 that it would close after the 2026–27 academic year17., the last remaining independent art and design school in the Bay Area. It follows a grim procession: the San Francisco Art Institute (2020), Mills College (2022), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (2023), and Woodbury University’s acquisition by Redlands and subsequent adjunctification—a fate that has methodically undone so many schools as faculty become contingent labor and institutions into hollow administrative structures run by well-paid, cost-optimizing consultants.

There is personal resonance for me in this. Simon’s Rock College of Bard, which shuttered its Great Barrington campus in 2025, was where I studied for my first two years before transferring to Cornell—a pioneer of early college education that offered a radical pedagogical experiment in what learning could be beyond conventional schooling. I arrived there straight from high school, as did my good friend and colleague Ed Keller; clearly, something interesting was in the water back then. Simon’s Rock made the development of young minds its central mission rather than an incidental focus of brand management or endowment growth, and its alumni list is impressive for such a small school. It has an afterlife at Bard, but it’s an echo at best.

The difference between these institutional deaths and simple market failure is this: they are not being replaced. When a retail business fails, another may open elsewhere. When a school closes, there is no succession. The market offers no alternative. Instead, what remains are the corporate university satellites—for-profit programs nested within larger institutions (like Woodbury’s absorption into Redlands), stripped of autonomy, their faculty reduced to precariat, their curricula bent toward what can be measured and marketed. The art schools that survive do so by transforming into something else: luxury finishing schools for wealthy families or research appendages to larger universities, where “design thinking” becomes another management consultant’s tool. The pedagogical mission—to create conditions where students might develop serious aesthetic judgment, where they might encounter genuine problems and be forced to think through them—is not merely challenged but impossible. The closure of these schools does not signal a failure of art education; it signals that the very idea of art education as something valuable in itself has been liquidated.

This hollowing out of cultural institutions is not incidental to the political moment—it is one of its hallmarks. Politically, most people have checked out. This is not 2017, when each provocation demanded a response; the outrage cycle has given way to numbness. In “National Populism as a Transitional Mode of Regulation”, I argued that Trump, Orbán, Meloni, and their ilk represent not a return to fascism but something new: the authoritarian management of declining expectations. National Populism correctly identifies that neoliberalism’s promise of shared prosperity has failed, but it channels legitimate grievances toward scapegoats rather than addressing the technological displacement actually causing them. This is its tragic irony: the National Populist base—workers made obsolete by neoliberalism and unable to participate in AI Capitalism—finds its legitimate anger directed into a movement that accelerates the very forces rendering them superfluous. Their value to capital lies in political disruption rather than economic production; they are consumers and voters, but no longer needed as workers. National Populist leaders offer psychological compensation—dignity, recognition, transgressive identity politics—rather than material improvement. The apocalyptic tenor of populist culture, its end-times thinking and conspiracy theories, provides a framework for populations sensing their own economic redundancy.

The alliance between tech billionaires and populist leaders is unstable. AI Capitalism requires borderless computation and global talent flows; nationalist protectionism contradicts these at every turn. Musk, Thiel, and Andreessen have aligned with the movement to dismantle the regulatory state, not because they share its vision but because populism serves as a useful battering ram against institutional constraints. Once those barriers fall, the movement and its human-centric concerns can be discarded. National Populism, as I conclude, is not the future—it is a political interlude, a transitional mode that will not survive contact with the economic forces it has helped unleash.

If National Populism is transitional, is there a positive vision that can replace it? In “After the Infrastructural City”, I responded to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance, perhaps the most influential book of 2025, which argues that America’s inability to build is a political choice, not a technical constraint. Their solution: streamline regulation, invest boldly, build more. It’s a compelling vision—and a necessary corrective to decades of paralysis. But Abundance shares a curious blindspot with Muskian pronatalism: both assume we need more people. Musk preaches that declining birthrates spell civilizational collapse; Klein and Thompson build their vision on populations that will mysteriously arrive to fill what’s built, perhaps by immigration. Neither accounts for the possibility that AI changes the equation entirely—that a smaller population, augmented by intelligent systems, might not be a crisis at all. Populations are already shrinking across much of the developed world. What I call “actually-existing degrowth”—not the voluntary eco-leftist kind, but the unplanned demographic contraction now underway in Japan, Korea, and much of Europe—is coming for the United States too. Declining birth rates, aging populations, and regional depopulation: these are not future scenarios but present facts.

This doesn’t invalidate the Abundance agenda; it redefines it. Abundance cannot mean building more for populations that will not arrive. It must mean building better, adaptive, intelligent infrastructure for smaller, older societies. AI, rather than merely destroying jobs, can help navigate this transition: smart grids, autonomous transit, predictive healthcare. The opportunity is real. Managed shrinkage, done well, can mean more livable cities, restored ecosystems, higher quality of life. The question is whether political leaders can articulate a vision of flourishing within limits—or whether nostalgia for growth will leave us building for a future that never comes.

Against the exhaustion of institutions, against the hollowing out of architecture and art, against the closure of the schools that trained people to imagine, the blog remains. It may not be much, but it is one independent voice outside the collapsing structures around me. I wrote over 83,000 words this year. I made art. I thought through problems that matter to me with the help of AI, which provided me with tools I could only have dreamt of merely a year ago. Today, I uploaded hundreds of thousands of words from my essays to a directory in Obsidian so that Claude could draw connections between them (see here for just how one can set this up).

The future is already here—it just isn’t evenly distributed. Some are afraid or are still pretending AI isn’t happening. Phase transitions are uncomfortable. They are also where the interesting work gets done. One makes of one’s time what one makes.

1. William Gibson, quoted in Scott Rosenberg, “Virtual Reality Check Digital Daydreams, Cyberspace Nightmares,” San Francisco Examiner, April 19, 1992, Style section, C1. This is the earliest verified print citation, unearthed by Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations.

2. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 21.

3. Braudel, The Mediterranean, 901.

4. Fernand Braudel, “Personal Testimony,” Journal of Modern History 44, no. 4 (December 1972): 448–67.

5. Paule Braudel, “Les origines intellectuelles de Fernand Braudel: un témoignage,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 47, no. 1 (1992): 237–44.

6. Howard Caygill, “Braudel’s Prison Notebooks,” History Workshop Journal 57 (Spring 2004): 151–60.

7. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic Monthly 176, no. 1 (July 1945): 101–8.

8. Civiqs, “Do you think that the increasing use of artificial intelligence, or AI, is a good thing or a bad thing?,” January 2026, https://civiqs.com/results/ai_good_or_bad.

9. The concept of mentalités emerged from studies of phenomena like the witch trials, where beliefs and fears spread through communities in ways that could not be reduced to individual irrationality. For an overview of mentalités as a historiographical concept, see Jacques Le Goff, “Mentalities: A History of Ambiguities,” in Constructing the Past: Essays in Historical Methodology, ed. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 166–180.

10. Kazys Varnelis, “The Rise of Network Culture,” in Networked Publics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 145–160.

11. Robert Putnam, “The Other Pin Drops,” Inc., May 16, 2000.

12. Kirsten R. Müller-Vahl et al., “Stop That! It’s Not Tourette’s but a New Type of Mass Sociogenic Illness,” Brain 145, no. 2 (August 2021): 476–480, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34424292/.

13. Bruce Sterling, “Atemporality for the Creative Artist,” keynote address, Transmediale 10, Berlin, February 6, 2010.

14. Yancey Strickler, “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” 2019, https://www.ystrickler.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet/. See also The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet (Metalabel, 2024).

15. “Trend: Not Just Digital Detox, But Analog Travel,” Global Wellness Summit, 2025, https://www.globalwellnesssummit.com/blog/trend-not-just-digital-detox-but-analog-travel/.

16. “The Big Slowdown: Why Museums and Galleries Are Putting on Fewer Shows,” The Art Newspaper, March 10, 2025, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/03/10/the-big-slowdown-why-museums-and-galleries-are-putting-on-fewer-shows.

17. California College of the Arts, the last remaining private art and design school in the Bay Area, announced in January 2026 that it would close after the 2026–27 academic year. See “‘Nowhere Left to Go’: As California College of the Arts Closes, So Does a Pathway for Bay Area Artists,” KQED, January 13, 2026, https://www.kqed.org/news/12070453/nowhere-left-to-go-as-california-college-of-the-arts-closes-so-does-a-pathway-for-bay-area-artists.

After the Infrastructural City. On Abundance

by

In 2008, we published The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles. Our goal was to understand the metropolis through the lens of its underlying infrastructures. Rather than focusing on architecture or urban planning in isolation, the book examined how large-scale infrastructural systems—water, transportation, electricity, telecommunications—shaped urban form, social dynamics, and ecological relationships. By exploring Los Angeles as a paradigmatic modern city, the aim was to reveal how infrastructure, once the defining driver of urban growth and modernity, had begun to produce systemic crises and profound political impasses.

Infrastructure formed the core of Los Angeles’s identity—indeed, infrastructure was the city’s secular theology, its underlying belief system. Los Angeles arose not by accident or gradual organic growth but through deliberate acts of infrastructure: capturing distant rivers, electrifying deserts, and threading sprawling freeway systems across inhospitable terrain. Its birth represented human ingenuity overcoming ecological constraints. Yet by the dawn of the twenty-first century, this triumph had given way to crisis, an infrastructural impasse born directly from the city’s prior successes.

The modernist vision of infrastructure had always been heroic: a technocratic dream of reshaping unruly nature into orderly, productive landscapes. Infrastructure provided secular salvation for the American West, turning deserts into farmland, canyons into reservoirs, and remote valleys into thriving suburbs. Los Angeles embodied this vision more vividly than any other American metropolis. From William Mulholland’s aqueducts and the ambitious freeway system to distant electrical grids, the city’s infrastructures were built at vast scales, each project reinforcing the belief that ecological and geographic limits could always be transcended.

Reyner Banham famously celebrated this infrastructural landscape in his 1971 book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, describing the city through four interlocking ecological systems: Surfurbia (beach towns), Foothills (privileged hillside communities), Plains of Id (the sprawling, banal yet exuberant flatlands), and Autopia (the freeway network that tied it all together). Banham embraced Los Angeles as a decentralized, spontaneous city shaped by infrastructure rather than traditional urban planning. He valorized what he called “Non-Plan,” a condition where bottom-up forces, consumer preferences, and private initiatives generated urban form free from bureaucratic constraints and grand masterplans. But by 2008, the consequences of Banham’s Non-Plan were painfully evident. Instead of creating a liberating urban landscape, Non-Plan had set the stage for infrastructural dysfunction, political paralysis, and environmental degradation.

By the early 2000s, Los Angeles’s infrastructures no longer reliably delivered their original promise. Instead, they produced chronic dysfunction: aqueducts drained distant ecosystems and provoked political conflict, freeways clogged almost immediately after opening, air basins remained perpetually polluted, and entrenched NIMBY politics stymied new infrastructural projects. Proposition 13, enacted in 1978, severely limited public funding, locking infrastructure into a state of permanent decay and inadequacy. Heroic infrastructure—massive, centralized, technocratic—had effectively come to an end. What emerged instead was a lasting infrastructural stalemate: political paralysis, ecological deterioration, and structural underinvestment.

Yet Los Angeles’s experience was not unique. As Edward Soja pointed out, the city was both exception and rule: a singular example that revealed broader trends. The infrastructural impasse evident in Los Angeles reflected conditions across America—neoliberal governance, entrenched individualism, private interests dominating public goods, and widespread resistance to new development.

Infrastructure’s future, then, would not be defined by grand heroic visions, but rather through difficult, continuous negotiations with ecological constraints, competing political demands, and limited resources. Seventeen years later, these fundamental issues persist: how can infrastructure meaningfully adapt, and can a compelling new vision emerge from what appears to be a landscape of perpetual impasse?

Shortly after The Infrastructural City appeared, Christopher Hawthorne, then architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, reviewed it prominently on the front page of the Culture section (February 15, 2009). This should have been a pivotal moment, bringing attention to a project that had taken years to produce. Instead, Hawthorne condemned our book as overly pessimistic, arguing that our emphasis on invisible systems, regulatory complexities, and entrenched political barriers dismissed too quickly the potential for visible, iconic infrastructure projects created by starchitects like Foster and Koolhaas. Given how many years we spent working on the book—carefully documenting how infrastructural dysfunction arose from these very systemic conditions—such a cursory dismissal was disheartening.

In fairness to Hawthorne, although the call for infrastructural starchitecture is laughably naïve, he was writing in the hopeful early months of Barack Obama’s presidency, when substantial investment in infrastructure seemed imminent through the stimulus package being developed in response to the financial crisis. His optimism reflected that brief historical moment. Had he written the review a few months later—once the limitations of the Obama administration’s infrastructural policies became evident, as ambitious plans were significantly tempered by political compromises, regulatory inertia, and the economic approach of funding the banks favored by Director of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers, his assessment might have shifted dramatically.

Hawthorne’s optimism about architectural solutions to infrastructural problems reflects a persistent pattern in American discourse: the belief that our systemic challenges require merely aesthetic or technical fixes rather than fundamental political-economic restructuring. This misdiagnosis has continued to shape infrastructure debates in the years since our book’s publication. In retrospect, the optimistic viewpoint Hawthorne expressed—a belief that transformative infrastructure renewal was simply a matter of political will and visible design—is exactly the perspective Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson critique forcefully in their book Abundance. Klein and Thompson underscore precisely what Hawthorne misunderstood and our book originally argued: that the infrastructural impasse cannot be resolved through aesthetic interventions or bold architectural gestures alone. Instead, they show that America’s infrastructure problems remain stubbornly rooted in the invisible political-economic structures, regulatory barriers, and social conditions that we sought to reveal and that Hawthorne mistakenly overlooked.

Seventeen years after The Infrastructural City, the conditions described then have intensified rather than eased. Los Angeles remains trapped in infrastructural paralysis, reflecting a broader failure extending across California and, indeed, the United States as a whole. Little meaningful progress has been made in addressing fundamental urban crises—traffic congestion, housing affordability, ecological degradation—while political stalemates have deepened rather than resolved.

In Los Angeles specifically, infrastructure initiatives remain sporadic and insufficient. Ambitious projects promised decades ago, such as high-speed rail and comprehensive transit expansions, remain unrealized or delayed indefinitely. Traffic congestion has worsened, air quality improvements have stagnated, and despite efforts to promote transit-oriented development, the city still struggles with its legacy of automobile dependency. Water scarcity, predicted to become critical nearly two decades ago, is now acute, with the region stuck in cyclical drought emergencies while permanent solutions languish in political gridlock. Meanwhile, Proposition 13’s legacy continues to limit revenue streams, ensuring persistent underinvestment in public infrastructure.

But these problems extend far beyond Los Angeles. Throughout California, similar infrastructural crises have emerged, emblematic of broader national trends. Housing shortages have driven soaring costs, contributing to an affordability crisis that increasingly drives young families out of the state. Homelessness, once confined to downtown skid rows, has become pervasive in cities large and small, from San Francisco and San Diego to Sacramento and Fresno. Public education and transit remain underfunded, overcrowded, or inadequate, while the state’s famed climate initiatives repeatedly collide with stubborn local opposition and regulatory obstacles.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, in their recent book Abundance, identify California explicitly as the paradigmatic example of this broader American infrastructural and political impasse. As they put it bluntly:

“California’s problems are often distinct in their severity but not in their structure. The same dynamics are present in other blue states and cities. In this era of rising right-wing populism, there is pressure among liberals to focus only on the sins of the MAGA right. But this misses the contribution that liberal governance made to the rise of Trumpism. […] Donald Trump won by shifting almost every part of America to the right. But the signal Democrats should fear most is that the shift was largest in blue states and blue cities—the places where voters were most exposed to the day-to-day realities of liberal governance.”

Klein and Thompson’s argument underscores that the dysfunction found in California—highly regulated yet infrastructurally stagnant, rhetorically progressive yet practically conservative—is symptomatic of deeper national failures. States across the country share California’s fate, caught in regulatory entanglements, financial constraints, and political paralysis that make meaningful infrastructure impossible to build. Federal attempts at infrastructural renewal, such as the Biden administration’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, have struggled to break through entrenched local resistance and bureaucratic inertia. Even when funded, projects stall at the state and municipal levels, tangled in endless public hearings, lawsuits, and regulatory hurdles.

America in 2025 thus finds itself stuck in the impasse first described nearly two decades earlier in Los Angeles. Infrastructure, which once symbolized national strength and optimism, now stands as a monument to collective failure. The broader infrastructural gridlock, first identified at a local level, has become a national condition. The question posed in 2008 persists, now at an expanded scale: can America escape the structural trap of infrastructural impasse, or is permanent stagnation the new normal?

In their recent book Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson offer perhaps the most compelling response yet to the infrastructural paralysis and political stalemate that have defined the last several decades. Their central thesis is straightforward but powerful: scarcity, particularly infrastructural scarcity, is not inevitable but chosen. America’s inability to build housing, transit, clean energy projects, and critical infrastructure is fundamentally a political problem, rooted in policy failures, regulatory barriers, and entrenched political and ideological opposition rather than technical or economic limitations. This argument reframes infrastructural impasse not as destiny but as an active political choice—a choice that can be reversed.

Klein and Thompson argue that both sides of the American political spectrum bear responsibility for the present stagnation. Conservatives, committed to shrinking government and relying exclusively on market solutions, have systematically undermined the public sector’s capacity to execute ambitious projects. Progressives, meanwhile, despite their rhetorical commitments, have often obstructed meaningful development through excessive regulation, overly cautious environmental policies, and local NIMBY resistance. The outcome has been pervasive paralysis and disillusionment—particularly visible in progressive strongholds like California.

Yet Klein and Thompson are not pessimists. They present a positive, forward-looking vision of what could be accomplished if political will aligned with technological capability. A new infrastructural abundance—marked by rapid housing construction, widespread deployment of renewable energy, modernized transportation networks, and equitable urban growth—is entirely achievable, they assert, provided regulatory and ideological barriers are dismantled and public ambitions are renewed. Their solution is clear: the United States must build more, faster, and smarter, to address chronic shortages in housing, energy, healthcare infrastructure, and transportation. Abundance, in their view, represents not merely an economic or technological goal but a necessary political project—a pathway out of the stasis and frustrations of contemporary American life. Their central solutions involve streamlining regulatory processes, significantly accelerating permitting timelines, boosting public investments in infrastructure projects, and revitalizing government agencies’ capacities to execute ambitious, large-scale developments.

Moreover, Abundance explicitly acknowledges California as the critical testing ground for this new politics of infrastructure. Klein and Thompson argue forcefully that the progressive vision must be more than merely redistributive—it must also be productive. As they point out, liberal governance should proudly demonstrate its ability to build better futures through tangible achievements in housing, transit, and ecological resilience. Their critique of California’s political dysfunction thus doubles as a call to action for progressives nationwide to reclaim their heritage as builders, innovators, and infrastructural pioneers.

In positioning infrastructure as a core political issue, Klein and Thompson validate much of the analysis presented nearly two decades ago in The Infrastructural City. Infrastructure remains fundamental not only to urban life but also to social equity, environmental sustainability, and national prosperity. But their emphasis differs importantly in its optimism: infrastructure, rather than a relic of past ambition, can once again become a catalyst for transformative change, provided political courage matches technological potential.

Thus, Abundance offers an ambitious and necessary answer to the stalemates described in 2008. Their vision suggests a compelling alternative to decades of resignation, pointing the way toward meaningful urban renewal, ecological recovery, and broadly shared prosperity—if only political actors can move beyond the entrenched interests and ideological inertia that have defined recent American history.

Despite the optimism of Klein and Thompson’s vision, their analysis overlooks a critical dimension shaping the infrastructural and political future: demographic contraction, or what can be termed “actually-existing degrowth.” Unlike the eco-leftist advocacy of voluntary degrowth—an understandable, politically driven attempt to shrink populations and economies deliberately and ethically—actually-existing degrowth describes the unplanned, ongoing, and increasingly rapid demographic decline occurring across much of the developed world. Populations are already shrinking significantly in countries like Japan, South Korea, and numerous European nations, driven by persistently low fertility rates, aging populations, and intensifying migration pressures. This phenomenon, increasingly evident even in the United States, signals a profound structural shift that will fundamentally reshape urban and infrastructural planning in coming decades.

As I have done before, I will again borrow novelist William Gibson’s evocative term “the Jackpot” to refer to this unfolding demographic transition Rather than a sudden apocalyptic population collapse, the Jackpot describes a slower, distributed unraveling—a prolonged and uneven demographic downturn, intensified by climate stress, economic instability, and shifting cultural values. In the United States, signs of the Jackpot’s approach are increasingly clear: declining birthrates, shrinking rural and small-town populations, aging demographics, and regional depopulation. If infrastructure planning and political visions adopt the Abundance agenda but fail to acknowledge this demographic reality, the country risks investing in futures that will never materialize, preparing for continued growth while confronting the steady reality of shrinkage.

Crucially, demographic contraction coincides with—and is amplified by—the rise of Artificial Intelligence. Rather than viewing AI merely as a threat stealing jobs, it can instead be embraced as a tool to ease the social and economic adjustments required by shrinking populations. AI’s widespread deployment is already reshaping labor markets, significantly reducing demand for traditional labor across industries. This shift could alleviate some economic pressures posed by a shrinking workforce, helping facilitate a smoother transition toward sustainable, high-quality urban life. Yet precisely how we harness AI while mitigating the profound disruptions likely from automation—especially the potential mass displacement in service and intellectual sectors previously insulated from the upheavals experienced by industrial labor during post-Fordism—is perhaps the most critical question we face regarding AI today. No matter how challenging this is for many progressives—who often view AI as deeply flawed or irredeemably captured by corporate interests—AI-optimized infrastructures, such as smart energy grids, autonomous transit systems, predictive healthcare networks, and intelligent urban management platforms, can help societies navigate demographic contraction efficiently and equitably. In this scenario, infrastructural abundance becomes redefined: not merely building more, but building better—investing in adaptive, intelligent infrastructures that enhance human and ecological well-being as populations decline.

Nearly two decades after the infrastructural impasses first articulated in The Infrastructural City, America finds itself at a critical juncture. The stagnation and paralysis of infrastructure that we diagnosed in Los Angeles have now spread across California and the United States. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s vision in Abundance offers a welcome antidote, reframing infrastructural scarcity as a political choice and calling for renewed public ambition, regulatory reform, and strategic investment. Their optimistic perspective rightly identifies infrastructure not merely as a technical necessity but as a crucial political project—a pathway toward broader social and ecological renewal.

However, integrating the Jackpot scenario into the abundance argument demands redefining abundance itself. Rather than pursuing endless quantitative expansion, infrastructure must become adaptive, resilient, and oriented toward ecological regeneration and urban livability. A future of smaller populations offers genuine opportunities: cities redesigned around quality of life rather than growth alone, restored ecosystems, and revitalized urban spaces characterized by abundant green infrastructure, sustainable energy systems, and human-scale design.

Yet achieving this vision faces political headwinds. The political Right increasingly portrays degrowth and adaptive urban strategies as part of a conspiratorial ‘Great Reset,’ framing necessary adaptations as threats to personal freedom, economic prosperity, and American cultural identity. This ideological stance complicates practical discussions about managed shrinkage by conflating sustainability with politically charged fears of elite control, making constructive bipartisan solutions harder to achieve. Yet a realistic reckoning must still occur in declining areas. Citizens need to be actively brought into the planning process, clearly addressing their understandable anxieties and explicitly answering the fundamental question: ‘What can we do to make things better for our communities if the population continues to fall?’

Fortunately, this strategy doesn’t require reinventing the wheel. Europe and Japan have long developed successful methods for managing urban shrinkage. For instance, Youngstown, Ohio’s Youngstown 2010 explicitly acknowledged population decline, consolidating services and converting vacant lots into urban agriculture. However, implementation remained limited due to persistent economic challenges, limited municipal resources, and political resistance to fully abandoning growth-oriented strategies. Nonetheless, it represents an instructive American precedent in accepting shrinkage explicitly. Japan’s compact city policies, exemplified in Toyama, have strategically concentrated development around transit nodes, allowing peripheral zones to revert gradually to nature and creating more vibrant, walkable urban cores despite overall population decline. Detroit’s strategic framework similarly strives to establish higher-density neighborhoods surrounded by green infrastructure and innovative urban agriculture. These examples demonstrate how thoughtfully managed shrinkage can lead to more sustainable, livable urban environments.

Thus, infrastructure after growth represents not a reduction of ambition but a recalibration of priorities toward genuinely sustainable abundance. Given these realities, it is clear taht nearly two decades after The Infrastructural City diagnosed systemic infrastructural paralysis rooted in political, ecological, and regulatory impasses, America can break this deadlock by embracing the Abundance agenda—curtailing excessive governmental constraints and strategically collaborating with industry to advance technological innovation. Rejecting identity politics that frame society as composed of factions competing over an ever-dwindling pie, this vision instead offers tangible improvements in everyday life: lower costs of living, better public services, cleaner air and water, strengthened local economies, and greater accessibility. Yet confronting the emotionally appealing but misleading nostalgia of MAGA requires political leaders to subtly and thoughtfully reframe demographic contraction and technological transformation as opportunities rather than threats. Persuasive political figures must communicate effectively, demonstrating through concrete examples how thoughtful management of decline can further enhance quality of life and ecological sustainability. Ultimately, resolving the infrastructural impasse identified nearly two decades ago demands not only wise policies but compelling voices capable of articulating a credible, hopeful vision of ecological restoration, social renewal, and enduring resilience.

Infrastructural City, New Jersey Style

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Although the final nail hasn’t been hammered into the coffin, New Jersey governor Christopher Christie has unilaterally cancelled ARC (Access to the Region’s Core), new tunnel to connect New York City to New Jersey.

Now, ARC itself is a damaged project. Instead of ending in Penn Station or having any hope of exiting in a future Moynihan Station (the plan to reconstruct the Beaux-Arts post office across the street into a 21st century version of the glorious old Penn Station that used to greet travelers prior to the 1960s). But instead, due to politics and complexities of existing infrastructure, ARC was to terminate off-site and deep underground, making arrival at Moynihan station impossible and complicating connections to other rail lines. 

The Infrastructural City‘s lesson is that, if you give constituents and politicians enough power and you build a complex enough civilization in which notions of civil society are replaced by ideas of property rights, you are going to bring future growth to a crashing halt. So Los Angeles strangles on itself.    

The creative destruction of the New York City of consensus and big projects by a succession of mayors since Ed Koch certainly helped its recover. Finance has done very well and the city has become a playground for the wealthy even as manufacturing and the middle class have been eviscerated. But for now, the city is still unsustainable without the large numbers of commuters that work in the towers throughout Manhattan. This is a dirty secret that Manhattanites—including all too many architects and urbanists—don’t want to admit. I haven’t found a comprehensive source of statistics this morning, so my figures are a little cobbled together, still, at least 900,000 commuters enter into Manhattan every day via New Jersey Transit, Long Island Rail Road, the Port Authority rail lines, and the buses that go in and out of Port Authority. In contrast, only some 628,000 workers from Manhattan work on the island (what do all the rest of the 1.2 million people do?) and some 880,000 workers from the other boroughs commute in. Now again, don’t rely on these figures too much, but still they seem to be roughly on target in suggesting that the majority of community into the city comes from the suburbs.

But infrastructure in and out to the suburbs is at a breaking point. Amtrak has been starved of funds for decades and its tracks and tunnels are in a horrific state of disrepair. Since New Jersey Transit has to share the Amtrak train lines in and out of the city, it has to face congestion caused by constant technical glitches on the aged, overstressed Amtrak lines. But since Amtrak owns the lines, it gets priority when only one of two tunnels is running in and out of the city.    

Now Christie’s constituency is residents who don’t commute to New York. On paper, his motivation is the opportunity to use ARC funding for highway repairs. Still, he’s a Republican and when they’re involved its hard not to imagine conspiracy theories. In particular, its plausible that part of the economic mess the country is in is due to the "Starve the Beast" policies of a generation of conservatives. Using profligate tax cuts, stave the beast was meant to create fiscal conditions that would force massive cuts in government services. The impossible situation that we face today is arguably the result. No matter how utterly incompetent the Obama administration has been, there is little question that their hands have been tied by the massive deficit and debt incurred by the Bush administration. If one applied this sort of reasoning to Christie’s move, its plausible to imagine that it’s an anti-city project, aimed to make commuting in and out of the city so much more difficult, thus forcing workers and—more importantly—corporations to either move into the city (unlikely, given current demographic flows) or to move further out into exurban areas. These, in turn, have historically been more conservative in nature (this has a bit to do with the lack of shared infrastructure, roads aside, and the insulation that exurbanites feel from the poor). So, in other words, canceling ARC is a foresighted move that will likely make it impossible for Christie to get re-elected (given the money and votes concentrated in the commuting suburbs) but will make it possible for a shift further rightward in state politics over the next several decades and, in turn, help undermine Manhattan’s future.