ABSTRACT
The question of forecasting and regulating urban change and growth in order to manage the indeterminacy of forces—economic, political, cultural, social, environmental—is not new; it is a historical process immanent to the development and planning of the modern city. So is its connection with the idea of mobility and connectivity. However, the principle of flow, resting on the dynamic nature of contemporary processes of economic and cultural activity, which often engender novel forms of citizenship and urbanity, transforms the city, paradoxically, into a permanent frontier zone. Though the problem of the frontier has always arisen in the political economy of urban territoriality, at a time when the urban enclave and the rise of global alternatives coexist, multiple and changing demarcations of the singular and the multiple, the individual and the collective, the private, the public, the national, and the transnational emerge. It is in precisely these internal territories that the various regimes of the architectural project, as unfolded in the economy of the new design technologies, can play a role in the articulation rather than management of indeterminacy.
