ABSTRACT
In the 1970s, Swiss architect Fritz Haller designed a city plan inspired by the photograph of a computer chip. A few years later, the American science-fiction-author William Gibson dreamed that “all the data in the world [were] stacked up like one big neon city”. A machine is generally understood as a man-made technical system that converts, transports or stores either substances, energy or information. Mechanical machines convert energy into motion. Such machines were constructed long before industrialization. For example, Leonardo da Vinci invented water pumps and strange apparatuses that would fulfill the old human dream of flying. The city- or state-body analogy was updated in the medical world toward the end of the 19th century with the introduction of cell theory. The trope of the fascinatingly eerie city monster has been enriched in recent decades by the facet of cyborg city, referring to idea of man as cybernetic hybrids of organisms and machines, as Donna Haraway formulated it in 1985.
