Becoming non-commensurable: synthesis, design, and the politics of urban experimentation in post-Superstorm Sandy New York

Abstract

This article uses a case study of the Rebuild by Design (RBD) program in post-Superstorm Sandy New York City to advance research into experimental urban environmental governance, notably that aiming to enhance resilience. Existing literature about experimentation tends to distinguish experimental governance from more conventional, modernist forms of environmental governance. Our technical critique of RBD’s design-based experiments in post-disaster reconstruction and urban resilience planning instead situates experimentation in the wider history of ongoing cybernetic transformations in liberal rule. We draw attention to new practices of control and regulation that do not eliminate socio-ecological difference but instead try to make such difference transparently knowable and functionally useful. As we demonstrate through an analysis of the troubled implementation of design-driven urban resilience projects in RBD, the issue for such experimentation is that the push for synthesis and solutions can deny the existence of forms of knowledge that are qualitatively, intrinsically different. In this reading, the politics of experimentation in the Anthropocene increasingly hinges on recognizing and maintaining the potential for some things and groups to be non-commensurable—that is, irreducible to resources for others’ resilience.

Keywords:

• Design
• resilience
• disaster
• biopolitics
• experimentation

Introduction

Superstorm Sandy was an exceptional event. On one level, the storm’s impacts were unprecedented. Sandy made landfall on October 29, 2012 on the east coast of the United States near Atlantic City, New Jersey.¹ In nearby New York City alone, the storm’s rainfall and storm surge killed 44 people and damaged over 69,000 residential units, displacing thousands of residents and threatening key infrastructure nodes. On another level, the response to Sandy was also unprecedented. The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation, New York University, and other sponsors, launched an innovative design competition, Rebuild by Design (RBD). RBD utilized an experimental design approach that, rather than “bouncing back” to pre-storm conditions, sought to “bounce forward” both by facilitating design of future-oriented urban ecological solutions and by reshaping the broader social and political environment in which such solutions might henceforth be designed. The program received US$935 million of the roughly US$13 billion in federal government relief aid earmarked for housing and infrastructure reconstruction. These resources supported a four-stage design competition that sought to transform state-society relations to innovate the delivery of post-disaster services. RBD’s competition effectively turned “design” and “innovation” on their head: rather than having a set goal in mind and seeking out innovative ways of meeting that goal, design teams worked with state officials, technical experts, and community members to collaboratively identify problems that federal post-disaster reconstruction and resilience funds could address.

The novelty of RBD as response to Superstorm Sandy was thus not only a matter of the specific, and undoubtedly experimental, projects it generated, which have been detailed elsewhere.² Rather, and our concern here, RBD was also a unique practice of design, whose object was not, at least initially, the design of projects, but of a broader functional environment in which new styles of collaboration could create novel problems for post-disaster reconstruction. As RBD’s principal, Henk Ovink, explained in a reflective essay, the challenge was to transform existing state-society relations that structured (and limited) the scope of post-disaster reconstruction decision-making processes:

If we truly wish to create resiliency, to be better prepared next time around, we have to change the way we work together. I know this in my bones…we have to go beyond seeking a holistic understanding of the [New York] region and its needs to rethinking the different roles and responsibilities of various components of government, society and non-profit institutions (Ovink and Boeijenga 2018, 61–62).

In short, through designerly techniques, rationalities, and strategies, RBD created a platform that allowed Superstorm Sandy’s unprecedented environmental impacts to provoke critical reflection on the institutional environment—notably the limits of existing institutional norms, regulations, and procedures—and allow these critiques to generate novel experiments in public service provisioning (Wakefield 2019). For these and other reasons, RBD has been widely hailed as a visionary step forward in urban planning for climate change and disasters: as the Urban Institute’s report on RBD put it, “in sum, RBD has moved the mark on resilience action in the U.S.” (Urban Institute 2014, ix).

Our interest in this article lies in this distinct practice of design that facilitated RBD’s post-Sandy experiments in disaster reconstruction and resilience-building. To date, there has been limited work exploring the relation between design and experimentation. Consideration tends to black-box design, treating it as another face of urban entrepreneurialism or participatory governance, to focus on the successes or failures of design activities, or to analyze the political effects that result from specific design-driven initiatives (Cowley et al. 2018; Grove et al. 2019; Goh 2021; Mareis and Paim 2021). Less attention has been dedicated to examining design as an experimental art of government that strives to recalibrate the wider functional environment of public service provisioning in the Anthropocene. Accordingly, in this article we ask what forms of knowledge and power are exercised through design? What kinds of innovation do these forms of knowledge and power facilitate? And what practices of resistance and contestation emerge around these innovations in urban governance?

Reading across literatures on urban experimentation, resilience, and design, we suggest that the case of RBD can help expand how we understand the politics of urban experimentation in the Anthropocene. The program enables us to draw out how urban experiments recalibrate urban governance around what design-studies scholar Nigel Cross (1982) calls “designerly ways of knowing.” This style of thought folds an experimental ethos—a “will to design”—into the heart of urban governance, which enables governance to become reflective of, and responsive to, emergent and unpredictable socio-ecological conditions. In the process, the institutionalization of a will to design becomes a hinge around which the modernist drive to decouple the human from the world—to make the world an instrumental object of human design and totalizing control—becomes paradoxically recalibrated through the immersion of governance within the world.

Focusing on this will to design, we argue that urban experimentation mobilizes designerly forms of knowledge and power to govern urban futures through uncertainty and indeterminacy. RBD integrated a concern over the social impacts of design with an ethico-epistemological demand for cybernetic synthesis. With the term synthesis, we are referring to a historically-specific, pragmatic form of truth-telling that strives to grasp existents—human and non-human, living and non-living, material and ideational—as abstractions that can be functionally combined (and endlessly re-combined) with one another (Halpern 2014). Rather than grasping the essential truth of “what exists” (a mode of truth-telling proper to the analysis offered through natural and social sciences), synthesis reveals and works upon a world composed of entities whose “essence” lies in their relational, contingent functionality and their potential to be de- and re-combined with each other to create new desires, capacities, identities, and solutions (Grove 2018). Rather than representing the world, synthesis is a form of pragmatic, world-making knowledge production that exercises a distinct form of biopower, environmental power: the power to make operative. This particular form of biopower immanently generates the world it describes through working on the affective relations between existents, drawing them into new functional relations with each other to generate new affective desires and capacities (Massumi 2009).

Synthesis, and the environmental power exercised through synthetic reasoning, animated two distinct forms of innovation within the RBD competition: first, the synthesis of diverse forms of knowledge and interests into distinct resilience “problems”; and second, the creative repurposing of governmental agencies, philanthropic organizations, and social justice organizations into novel governance arrangements calibrated to meet the demands of these resilience problems. However, while these innovations promise new forms of adaptive governance capable of coping with the Anthropocene’s complex social and ecological challenges, they also transform the limits of modernist control. When power involves making things operative, resistance to synthesis arises from non-commensurability, from the friction and impediments that result from the refusal to become legible, transparent, and amenable to synthesis. In the case of RBD, this refusal arose in at least two expressions: first, the regressive institutional inertia of urban decision-makers’ persistent drive to maximize profitability, cost efficiency, and expedite top-down projects; and second, a more local, progressive mobilization against specific RBD projects that drew on legacies of lived experiences of marginalization and exploitation (e.g., Wijsman 2022). Set against the designerly compulsion to radically change how systems work, non-commensurability is both a barrier to progressive transitions and an important source of political potential.

To develop these arguments, our next section reviews literature on the politics of experimentation and brings this into conversation with design as an art of governing uncertainty. We make the case for a technical critique of design-based experimentation, which situates experimental governance within the history of transformations in liberal rule. The three following sections then use the case of RBD to analyze how designerly forms of power and knowledge facilitate: first, the urban problematization of complexity; second, the recalibration of urban governance through synthetic reasoning and techniques of environmental power; and third, the ethico-epistemological and political problem non-commensurability poses to experimental governance. A brief conclusion reflects on the significance of this analysis for further research on urban experiments in the Anthropocene.

Design and experimentation in the Anthropocene

At first glance, bringing design and experimentation into conversation with each other may seem curious. For the most part, researchers in social science fields such as geography and urban studies have black-boxed design, situating it as either part of the neoliberal management of creativity or as an instrumental component of experimentalism. For good reason: design has been at the forefront in transformations in both capital accumulation and management, which focus on enhancing responsiveness to shifting consumer demands, targeting niche-market segments, and weaving mechanisms of control more seamlessly into everyday life (Boltanski and Chiapello 2018; Thrift 2006). A remarkable quote from RBD principal Henk Ovink problematizes this elegant equation between design and neoliberalism.

There is no other way to drive innovation and resilience, and increase capacity across all actors. No other way to raise awareness and foster understanding and the ability to collaborate. No other way to get to real innovation and solutions with local buy-in. No other way to connect the region and look toward the future. No other way than through design (Ovink 2014, 1).

This is a dramatic assertion: only design can raise awareness, generate innovation, build resilience, and foster mutual understanding, collaboration, and local buy-in while also harmonizing competing interests across the region. It also complicates standard narratives on experimentation. Transforming governance regimes, forging new relations between actors, developing new forms of knowledge and new capacities: these are traits the literature typically associates with experimentalism, but which Ovink attributes to design.

Ovink’s assertion offers a provocation to provincialize research on experimentation: to reflect on prevailing approaches, assumptions, and arguments, and possibly open space for multiple narratives on the nature and politics of contemporary forms of experimentation. To date, much research has tended to situate experimentation as a transformation within environmental governance. Again, for good reason: while experimentation has emerged as a policy and pragmatic response to all manner of “grand challenges” or “wicked problems” that transcend single disciplinary solutions such as biodiversity loss, cybersecurity, global migration, or urban sustainability (Rickards, Grove, and Wakefield 2022), some of the most prominent examples of experimentation have emerged in response to the challenges climate change poses to conventional governance approaches. Since the 1980s, climate change has gradually shifted from a problem for global governance to a national and local problem of decarbonizing economies, energy systems, and everyday life and building resilience to place-specific climate-change impacts (Bulkeley 2021, 2023; Meyer 2023). As the capacity of top-down, command-and-control governance approaches to force society-wide transformation has wavered, a plethora of localized experiments in alternative ways of provisioning vital services and adapting to a climate-changed world have proliferated.

Research on experimentation in the Anthropocene has thus tended to focus on the formal distinction between contemporary interest in experimentation, particularly in fields such as urban sustainability and climate-change adaptation, and earlier, high-modernist and technocratic forms of experimentation. Here, critical analysis often assumes an epochal dimension, emphasizing how the Anthropocene is blurring or fracturing the rigid conceptual and practical boundaries that separated high-modernist forms of experimentation from everyday life. It focuses on the concomitant breakdown in prevailing forms of environmental governance based on principles of modernization and command and control, including the belief that basic science produces analytical knowledge that reduces uncertainty and can be instrumentally applied through technology and policy to improve common welfare. Compared to modernization’s view of experimentation as a privileged domain of science that occurs in the exceptional space of the laboratory, more recent governance approaches—and social research of the sort that discusses governance—position experimentation as a practice that can be embedded within everyday activities, producing knowledge through rather than prior to technological and policy implementation. As Bulkeley (2023), Jalas et al. (2017), and others discuss, these new governance approaches and related grassroots practices scramble the political and institutional coordinates that have traditionally legitimized policy, calling into question the authority of scientific expertise, and the assumption of a single, unified “social” or “public” good that can be advanced through the application of knowledge and solutions (e.g., technologies) generated from traditional forms of experimentation. In this light, the contrasting formal qualities of experimentation—exceptional or everyday, expert or lay, prior to or during implementation—mark distinct eras of environmental governance.

This work has done much to draw attention to the practical and political dimensions of experimentation, and especially a core tension in the rise of experimentation: in the face of the dislocations and displacements of the Anthropocene, experimentation is closely and paradoxically coupled to both new forms of control and resistance. Key here is the way experimentation reorients governance toward indeterminacy: while modernization is premised on the assumption that indeterminacy could and should be eliminated, climate change introduces and amplifies all manner of indeterminacies. Formal analyses, and wider work on wicked problems and post-normal science, have thus drawn out how experimentation is a site of political contestation over what potential futures might look like and how human and non-human collectives can and should be governed to bring about these futures (e.g., Delina and Janetos 2018; Scoones and Stirling 2020).

Engaging with design can further advance this understanding of the politics and ethics of experimentation in the Anthropocene. However, this requires us to shift focus, to look beyond formal transitions in environmental governance and to situate both experimentalism and design within a wider history of transformations in liberal governance. To do this, rather than focus on the formal qualities of governance, we instead adopt a technical critique (Folkers 2016; Collier 2009), which examines how diverse techniques, rationalities, and strategies of governmental practice attempt to govern people and things in contextually specific ways. This allows us to approach indeterminacy in a new manner—not only as a novel problem for environmental governance in the Anthropocene, but also as an expression of the core ethico-political problem of liberal governance, the problem of finitude, or the potential for individual and collective life to become otherwise to itself (Dillon 1996), that is, to fundamentally change identity, meaning, value, and function. In modern, Western culture, the collapse of European feudalism unmoored society from the theological guarantees of security as divine salvation and the future became seen as open and amenable to human intervention. Action in the present no longer took its meaning from divine order but could now improve or degrade future conditions. Modern techniques of power emerged to chart a course for action in the face of this radical indeterminacy (Dalby 2002). The modern state and territorial sovereignty, for example, attempted to fix the arbitrariness of the sovereign decision within stable state borders (Walker 1993). Techniques of discipline and biopolitics, such as surveillance, individualization, demography, and national accounting, sought to maximize national productivity in the face of political-economic and military disruptions by establishing ideal norms and bringing individual and collective action in line with these regulatory ideals (Reid 2007). Techniques of security such as actuarial analysis rendered an indeterminate future in terms of calculable risks and incalculable uncertainties (O’Malley 2004). In contrast, more recent techniques of environmental power such as cybernetics, systems analysis, and new institutionalism problematize the quality of relation between component parts of complex social and ecological systems and attempt to engineer not only those systems, but the wider affective “environment” that shapes desires and capacities for thought and action (Massumi 2009; Anderson 2012; Grove 2018). In other words, these contemporary approaches take a wider view and try to generate systemic conditions conducive to the changes they want (see Appendix A).

Importantly, while these various techniques are distinct, they are not mutually exclusive: modern, liberal societies are not defined by successive shifts from a disciplinary society to a regulatory society of biopolitics, to a society of security, and, finally, to a society of environmental control. Instead, these techniques combine and recombine with each other in complex and uneven ways that reflect historically specific problematizations of government (Collier 2009). Liberal government is defined by the constant tension between freedom and security, resistance and control. The problem of how much to govern, the roles and limits of the state, science, economy, nature, and society, and the distribution of techniques, capacities, and expectations across each domain, are open-ended questions that shift in response to the repeated failures of established governmental apparatuses to control an indeterminate future (Foucault 2007, 2008). As the future escapes governmental control, the failures of government to direct how the future unfolds prompts critical reflection on, and strategic intervention within, established norms, procedures, and practices of government (Wakefield 2020).

Cast in this light, the shift in environmental governance from eco-modernization to experimentation is one case among others of liberal governmental apparatuses responding to social and environmental conditions that exceed prevailing governance mechanisms. Here, the critical question focuses less on formal distinctions between governance regimes within the sphere of environmental governance and more on how the emergence of experimentation as a guiding principle of environmental governance in the Anthropocene reconfigures the larger problem of knowing and governing uncertain futures. This technical critique offers a distinct stance from which to approach the relation between design and experimentation, for it focuses attention on the techniques, rationalities, and strategies through which design-driven approaches (such as RBD) critique and attempt to transform prevailing governance practices. In the process, as the following sections will demonstrate, this technical critique draws attention to additional ethical and political dynamics driving the emergence and consolidation of experimentalism within environmental governance today.

The urban problematization of complexity

At the time of the disaster in 2012, Superstorm Sandy registered as the second-costliest storm in United States history in economic terms, trailing only Hurricane Katrina which devastated New Orleans and other coastal communities in southern Louisiana in 2005. Despite these losses, local and federal emergency-management organizations asserted that their response activities were by and large effective because, in contrast to Katrina, there was no massive breakdown in social order and outcomes could have been much worse (FEMA 2013). In reaching this conclusion, officials did acknowledge the role of luck. For example, the authors of the resilience plan for the New York City Office of Resilience and Recovery pointed out that had the storm arrived at a different time of day, Superstorm Sandy might have flooded the Bronx’s Hunts Point district, which serves as a food-transfer depot for over 70% of New York City’s population. More than anything, the disaster revealed just how dependent the city was on critical infrastructure services for its basic food, utility, and water supply—and this infrastructure’s startling level of exposure.

These concerns about the tight coupling of urban life and vulnerable infrastructure—the urban problematization of complex interdependencies—is a distinct problematization of the urban in the Anthropocene, one in which specific practices that make up the urban have become increasingly linked to our understandings of risk, vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience (Barnett and Bridge 2016). While modern, disciplinary sciences have often artificially separated “urban studies” from “disaster studies” and “climate change,” new experiences of disaster, such as Superstorm Sandy, bring to the fore how processes that drive urbanization are also driving risk, vulnerabilities, adaptation, and resilience. These urban practices and processes, in turn, have increasingly attracted critical reflection and experimental interventions that attempt to generate new behaviors, transform individual and systemic capacities, and create alternative future urban trajectories (Wakefield 2019, 2020; Barnett 2022; Collier and Gruendel 2022).

Crucially, these interventions are increasingly facilitated through design-based activities. Reflecting on RBD’s design-driven urban resilience planning, Goh (2021) argues that the design process has become a privileged site of struggle over what kinds of contemporary urban forms are possible and desirable. Analysis of how advocates for tenants’ rights engaged with RBD projects in Manhattan’s Lower East Side (LES) demonstrates how the design process generated new ways for organizers to advance claims for public services (Collier, Cox, and Grove 2017; see also below). In Miami, urban resilience planning created a space for fostering broad public participation in urban public service provisioning, a surprising development given the region’s history of racial segregation and exclusionary, technocratic governance (Grove, Cox, and Barnett 2020; Cox, Grove, and Barnett 2022). Similarly, climate-resilience initiatives in Boston have opened diverse pathways for green resilience strategies (Shokry, Anguelovski, and Connolly 2023). In short, if the urban has become an arena for reconceptualizing problems of risk, vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation in the Anthropocene, then design is becoming the platform on which urban form and trajectory are being determined.

The RBD competition explicitly cast urban resilience as a problem of prevailing urban governance processes. It was organized around a highly specific problematization: the “Balkanization” of regional governance. According to Ovink (2014, 9), jurisdictional fragmentation and political division prevented collaboration and held back quick, innovative, and effective decision making capable of responding to complex problems. RBD thus approached the Superstorm Sandy reconstruction challenge as a classic design problem: a mismatch between the interior world of Balkanized existing governance structures and the exterior world of complexity that manifests itself at the regional scale. As Ovink put it, “that is exactly where design comes in: where our future risks, vulnerabilities, and uncertainties aggregate on the regional scale, we can mitigate and act through a design-driven political approach. Design and politics are at the heart of the development of a more resilient future” (Ovink 2014, 9). Ovink never explicitly specifies his understanding of politics, but his writings and talks suggest that he has in mind the institutional arrangements through which collective decisions are made.³ This is precisely the wider affective environment that defines the institutional context in which decisions on the provision of public goods are made. In a 2015 talk, Ovink elaborated that a design-driven political approach involves creating an “environment” where “decisions are informed by both the past and the future” and thus more responsive to dynamic and unpredictable futures (Ovink 2015). This is an essential point: the challenge facing Ovink and other organizers of RBD was not to innovate the content of specific innovations themselves, or even how to scale them up to the regional level, but rather how to intervene directly at that scale by “designing” an affective environment that could facilitate innovative approaches to urban service provisioning in a changing climate in the first place.

RBD’s problematization of urban governance thus opened up a distinct problem: how to conceptualize, intervene in, and transform the wider affective environment that conditions how urban governance unfolds in relation to complex and indeterminate problems of climate change. The next section examines the designerly forms of knowledge and power that circulated through the RBD competition.

Synthesis: the environmental power of urban resilience design

Speaking on the core logic behind the RBD competition, Ovink explained that “one group of actors can never think of a solution, you always have to do it together and infuse that knowledge with the knowledge of others” (Ovink 2015). This sense that complex problems exceed a single field of disciplinary expertise and require interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration is a guiding epistemological principle of experimentalism, and a key contrast with modernist forms of environmental governance (Bulkeley 2023). It also expresses a distinct style of reasoning, synthesis, that has been central to the efforts of design-studies scholars to identify and solidify the field’s standing as a distinct disciplinary field of study (Cross 1982). Synthesis is distinct from the more familiar styles of thought, analysis, and hermeneutics. Rather than providing a mechanistic understanding of some aspect of reality (analysis, the domain of physical and social sciences) or exploring meaning and experience (hermeneutics, the domain of arts and humanities), synthesis instead provides functional and pragmatically applicable understandings of how existents relate to one another. Early proponents of design sought to identify design as a science of synthesis and to develop objective models of synthesis that could maximize the process of decision-making in conditions of complexity (e.g., Simon 1996; Rowe 1987). Subsequent critiques of this “scientistic” school of design sought to introduce more subjective and human-centered understandings of synthesis, focusing on the role of the reflexive practitioner and the unique modes and techniques of thought designers develop to gain a functional understanding of phenomena and deploy that functional sense in creative design solutions (Schön 1983; Buchanan 1992).

For our purposes here, for both proponents and critics of “scientistic” design studies, synthesis gestures to a relational and processual mode of thought that seeks to visualize and intervene in the quality of relation between existents, in order to “change existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon 1996). The emergence of designerly rationalities organized around synthetic forms of reason transformed the nature of science, and particularly the relation between truth, science, and experimentation (Halpern 2014; Grove 2018). If modern science had been based around a transcendent “will to truth,” or the drive to reduce the world to calculatory elements that could be known, analyzed, predicted, and controlled with algebraic precision (Foucault 1989), synthesis operates instead through an immanent “will to design” which strives to reduce the world to functional existents that can be infinitely re/combined with each other to produce new capacities and relations (Grove 2018).

Ovink’s assertion that solutions to complex problems require “infusing” diverse forms of knowledge together demonstrates how a cybernetic ethos of synthesis, a will to design, animates experimental urban resilience initiatives. This ethos was embraced by other urban resilience practitioners post-Superstorm Sandy as well. For example, Kate Orff, lead designer of the RBD-winning “Living Breakwaters” project and Director of Columbia University’s Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes, echoed Ovink’s sentiments in a 2019 media interview: “When Sandy hit, I was by no means an expert, but what I brought to the table was an ability and desire to be a visionary coordinator—to be a synthesizer of many people and many kinds of expertise.” She concluded that, “the power of design is that it can take multiple viewpoints” (in Budds 2019). Non-designers also expressed this synthetic ethos. Shaun Donovan, co-creator of RBD and former Secretary of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, saw a similar role for the federal government in driving innovation. In a 2017 lecture at Columbia University, Donovan suggested that “most innovation is theft,” the result of “a communal process of creativity.” The federal government, in turn, can drive innovation because its national scale gives it the capacity to “see what innovative things are happening in communities” across the country and allows it to “encourage the theft of ideas, to take the best ones and disseminate them” (in Jacobs 2017).

Whether it involves designers synthesizing diverse forms of knowledge or the United States federal government disseminating and encouraging creative adoption of best practices across diverse community contexts, the practice and ethos of synthesis in RBD expresses a will to design that treats material and ideational elements—actors, institutions, knowledge, experience—as functionally re/combinable with one another to produce new capacities. This will to design animated how RBD approached the problem of regional complexity. In his 2015 talk, Ovink (2015) referred to RBD with the Dutch term list, or “trick.” A “list” is analogous to a Trojan Horse. But what is it that needs to be tricked? In response to the problem of regional jurisdictional fragmentation, what needs to be tricked is government: how to make government function differently so that it facilitates rather than impedes decision-making processes that incorporate different bounded rationalities and new spatio-temporal horizons. This trick occurred through RBD’s ability to create what Ovink called a “safe space,” a transparent and smooth cybernetic space of frictionless circulation, where ideas are not held back by political boundaries, and where both innovation and vulnerabilities can be discovered.

[W]ith [RBD], I imagined a place, a situation, a process, and a partnership where this collaborative force could emerge to confront—by design—the Hurricane Sandy-affected region’s future uncertainties. Not something owned by any one actor or group but intended for a multitude of stakeholders through a process where ownership and complexity could increase everyday (Ovink 2014, 9).

Indeed, much of the RBD competition was designed in a way that would identify and synthesize the always partial and limited insights of different actors. The project brief detailed the rules and stipulations that teams should follow and the competition’s four stages. For the first stage—“talent”—potential applicants were told that their teams would “need professional expertise in at least three” fields (RBD 2015, 4). Design teams also had to work closely with actors in the public, private, and community sectors to identify specific problems that could be addressed through innovative infrastructure reconstruction. Ten teams were selected for an “intense participatory process” with diverse stakeholders and experts to “develop a comprehensive understanding of the region, its interdependencies, key vulnerabilities, and areas that warrant integrated design thinking and solutions” (RBD 2015, 4). In stage two—“research”—each team received US$100,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation to propose so-called design opportunities—“key opportunities or key projects that have the potential for maximum impact on the region’s strengths and vulnerabilities” (RBD 2015, 4). In stage three—“design”—the teams received an additional US$100,000 to develop specific design projects that an international panel of design, resilience, and planning luminaries judged. Six winners then received a slice of HUD’s US$935 million funding to implement their projects.

Here, we can see how Ovink’s sense of “design as politics” deploys techniques and strategies of synthesis to problematize and work on the process of collective urban decision making. As a cybernetic safe space that allowed participants from multiple sectors, jurisdictions, and communities to collaboratively re/pose the problem of post-disaster decision making from a number of angles, the competition “tricked” different actors in the state, science, and community into collaborating in innovative ways to address the region’s complexity. In the process, new meanings, identities, and functions were created as actors interacted with each other and their surroundings.

This “trick” expresses a distinct form of biopower, environmental power (see Appendix B). Environmental power is distinguished from other forms of biopower, such as security, discipline, or biopolitical calculation, based on the way it targets and acts on the wider affective environment in which people and things circulate (Anderson 2012). It engineers how people and things can relate to one another in some ways rather than others, thereby shaping desires, relational capabilities, and capacities (Thrift 2004). The environmental power of design lies in its capacity to abstract entities from context and render them amenable to functional synthesis—for instance, as winning design teams deploy techniques of biopolitics and actuarial analysis to abstract elements of the physical and social environment into risks, hazards, vulnerabilities, and capacities, and further synthesize these elements into creative solutions; or as the RBD competition repurposed diverse institutional roles, interests, and responsibilities to promote creative urban resilience experiments.

Importantly, environmental power operates in conditions of radical indeterminacy and emergence, where the precise outcome of interventions cannot be known in advance. The links between experimentation and design become clear here. Not only does design shape affective qualities of its object, endowing it with certain qualities, values, feelings, and characteristics rather than others, but design products and their effects are also indeterminate: they are “hypotheses” that test or experiment with the indeterminate quality of relation between the design object and the wider environment in which it circulates (Buchanan 1992).

To return to the question of how analyzing urban resilience design can inform research into experimentation in the Anthropocene, we can see in the practice of design several key themes that have recently come to prominence within the literature on experimentation, such as the decentering of technical expertise, the shifting relationship between science, state, and society, the fracturing of a single ideal of the “common good,” and the emergence of modes of acting and governing complexity within and through conditions of ontological, epistemological, and political indeterminacy (Bulkeley and Castán Broto 2013; Sengers, Wieczorek, and Raven 2019; Bulkeley 2023; Ehnert 2023). Urban resilience designerly techniques, practices, and strategies create new possibilities for emergent, experimental order out of the chaos and disorder of indeterminacy. However, rather than focus on the formal distinctions between experimentation and other forms of modernist governance, a technical critique of design positions those techniques, practices, and strategies for knowing and governing indeterminacy within the wider history of transformations in liberal rule. In the process, it draws attention to novel political and ethical dynamics at play within experiments in urban governance in the Anthropocene. Specifically, a technical critique draws out how the power of design is the power to make operative. The techniques, practices, and strategies of urban resilience design “play” with different entities to draw them into new affective relations that give them new meaning and function: to “tur[n] negotiations into collaborations,” in Ovink’s terms (in Cohen 2016, 318). They render the world as it exists as a “playground” of sorts—systems of entities with contingent, functional and relational meanings, identities, and values that are always potentially amenable to playful, synthetic, experimental interventions. In doing so, they exercise a form of environmental power.

However, as the literature on experimentation shows, the politics of experimentation are likewise indeterminate: experimentation is mobilized in both new practices of governmental control and resistance. Here, a technical analysis of environmental power—the power design exercises to make operative—can help further unpack the nature of resistance and the political possibilities of experimentation in the Anthropocene.

The politics of experimentation: progressive synthesis and non-commensurability

Much like other politically polyvalent governmental techniques and rationalities such as resilience (Cox, Grove, and Barnett 2022) or cybernetics (Pickering 2013; Gruendel 2022), the political content of design is never pre-determined, being instead contingent on how those techniques and rationalities are strategically mobilized to critique existing affairs and pursue interventions intended to alter those conditions (Collier 2009). Such open-endedness is a key theme in the literature on experimentation, which stresses how experimentation can both reinforce the political-economic status quo and help generate new possibilities for individual and collective existence (Braun 2015; Wakefield 2021; Meyer 2023; Exner and Strüver 2023). A technical critique of RBD’s design-based approaches to urban experimentalism can further develop these arguments. In this section, we focus on the struggles and frictions around the implementation of one project supported through RBD, the Bjarke Ingels Group’s (BIG) “Dryline,” to reflect on the politics of experimental governance in the Anthropocene.

Politics through design: repurposing identity and difference

Research on the politics of experimentation has increasingly focused on the transvaluation of indeterminacy within experimental governance. High-modernist and eco-modernist forms of governance seek to ideally eradicate indeterminacy through homogenization and categorical abstraction, identifying all existents within pre-determined categories and subjecting these categories to surveillance, regulation, and predictive control. Experimentalism, in contrast, welcomes indeterminacy as a source of change. Because failure can reveal new information about how a system functions, experimentalism strives to generate and manage rather than ameliorate indeterminacy (Wakefield 2021; Bulkeley 2023; Exner and Strüver 2023).

As we saw above, the RBD design competition’s emphasis on “tricking” regional and urban governance explicitly sought to introduce a degree of indeterminacy into relations between competing factions within city and regional politics. Techniques of environmental power created a “safe space” where actors were drawn into new relations with each other, creating new identities, interests, values, and goals that allowed them to re-envision problems and solutions to social and ecological complexity within the region. BIG’s Dryline illustrates these dynamics. A multi-functional flood barrier/community park designed to be built along the East River adjacent to Manhattan’s Lower East Side (LES), the Dryline aimed to protect the local utility company’s power plant, public housing blocks that line the riverbank, and the predominantly poor, minority and migrant communities in the area. The LES has a long history of radical activism and anti-gentrification movements and it was the birthplace of community planning in the 1950s (Angotti 2010). Community groups had successfully derailed earlier developer-led efforts to build parkland along the East River, primarily by mobilizing against the threat of future gentrification that these parks posed. However, throughout the competition, these organizations cautiously supported RBD’s efforts, in large part because the BIG team included them from the earliest stages in the design process.

The successful inclusion of community groups in RBD’s competition phase reflects the influence of social design movements. Beginning in the 1970s, movements such as social design and ecological design, drawing inspiration from the radical ethos of the Bauhaus, sought to make design more attentive and responsive to its broader social and environmental impacts (Papanek 1971; Margolin 2002). These were more reflexive styles of design attuned not only to clients’ demands—whether corporations or local communities—but more broadly to the effects designed products can generate for end users and humans and more-than-humans affected by the design and production process. More recently, fields such as design justice and critical design studies have broadened the scope of social design. This work emphasizes the potential for design to contribute to wider social and environmental justice goals, folding considerations of gender, race, sexuality, environment, and socio-spatial difference into design practice and education (Costanza-Chock 2020; Mareis and Paim 2021). Recent work on decolonizing design also critiques design education’s emphasis on formal training and certification, instead recognizing the various forms of innovative activities that non-specialists exercise in everyday life (Escobar 2018; Mareis, Greiner-Petter, and Renner 2022).

These diverse fields of design practice shaped the scope of the RBD program, and particularly the emphasis the competition placed on design teams working with affected communities to identify both problems (“design opportunities”) and design solutions (Ovink and Boeijenga 2018). There is a subtle yet significant political move here: through the design process embedded within the competition, RBD briefly transformed the antagonistic interests of distinct social actors and their histories of social conflict into synthesizable bounded knowledge, or more specifically into partial information on past, current, and future vulnerabilities and potential responses to these threats. Through designerly synthesis, RBD afforded historically marginalized groups a novel capacity to influence decisions on their community’s future social and ecological landscape (Wijsman 2022). This is the environmental power of design-based urban experiments: design assembles an affected public out of social and ecological difference and makes this public “work.” In the case of the Dryline, RBD’s experiments in institutional design facilitated new experiments in decision-making processes around urban service provisioning. These experiments sought to provide services, such as flood protection, recreation, and green space, to economically and racially marginalized communities of predominantly low-income, minority renters typically denied these conditions. This is a twist in the biopolitics of urban service provisioning, cybernetically extending infrastructural services to communities and spaces that hold little value for the real estate interests that typically dominate urban governance in New York City (Collier, Cox, and Grove 2017).

While these designerly experiments introduced new forms of indeterminacy into governance, scrambling the coordinates that typically guide actors’ strategic decisions, a technical critique of design-based urban experiments can draw attention to additional ethico-epistemological and political dynamics. Key here is the way experimentalism, and the underlying will to design that animates environmental power detailed above, approaches difference. As Scott (1998) famously detailed, the logic of high modernist governance relies on uniformity, regularity, and predictability to maximize productivity. Efficiency and optimization, in this view, can only be achieved through the elimination of difference. Experimental governance, in contrast, recognizes difference as the wellspring of adaptability and resilience. When a system is subjected to unpredictable and emergent external environmental forces, social and ecological difference is the source of variation and diversity that allows a system to adapt to its constantly evolving environment (Walker and Salt 2012). To capture the adaptive power of difference, the logic of experimental governance approaches difference as the source of unique, bounded information on complex, unpredictable systemic conditions. In other words, it abstracts difference into information that can be adaptively synthesized to reconceptualize both problems and solutions (Grove 2018).

The case of the Dryline illustrates how design-based urban experiments adaptively synthesize difference. The design process animating the development of the Dryline, like other design-driven urban resilience initiatives (Grove, Barnett, and Cox 2020), abstracted from variegated experiences and knowledges of past disasters, losses, and social conflict in the LES. It smoothed over a conflictual history and transformed this diversity of experiences into transparent and translatable “interests,” information that could be functionally synthesized in order to reconceptualize the problems facing the neighborhood and develop pragmatic resilience solutions, such as a multi-functional flood barrier and community park. This is a key ethico-epistemological and political dynamic within urban experiments: an ethical demand that socio-ecological difference make itself transparently knowable, legible, and commensurable with other knowledges and experiences. This dynamic transfigures difference. Where earlier practices of critique recognized socio-ecological difference as the product of underlying structural inequalities and legacies of social conflict, techniques of environmental power render division and difference potentially useful. From this perspective, socio-ecological differences produced through decades of social struggle are merely distinct viewpoints that can each contribute to the development of innovative, synthetic solutions to intractable problems competing interest groups posed to more resilient disaster reconstruction (Cox, Grove, and Barnett 2022). While this is often read as the neoliberal instrumentalization of difference and cybernetic mechanisms of control, for good reason (e.g., Povinelii 2011; Tiqqun 2020; Grove and Rickards 2022), the design of the Dryline demonstrates that this operationalization of difference can also open onto more progressive outcomes that challenge the political economic status quo.

Politics against design: non-commensurability

However, there are also limits to design’s political plasticity. As the Dryline and other RBD projects moved from the design phase to implementation, the inertia of bureaucratic permitting, oversight, and regulation stripped out much that made them creative and innovative in the first place (Goh 2021; Wijsman 2022). Those ingrained and routine bureaucratic processes, the kind of details required to build a project, not just vision it, created entry points for other established urban interests to intervene in project implementation and steadily unravel the design elements the RBD competition synthesized together.

Recent conflicts around the portion of the Dryline now called the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project (ESCR) illustrate these problems. The ESCR is a $1.45 billion plan for a 2.4-mile system of flood walls and gates to govern sea rise and flooding along the East River. This section of the Dryline was created collaboratively with community groups and entailed building berms and a coastal flood barrier, leaving the park alone and letting it flood during storm events.

As Wijsman (2022) has detailed, the ESCR held out the promise for new forms of social, environmental, and ecological belonging, incorporating not only the transformation of adversaries into collaborators but new ways of living with nature, and water in particular. However, while the design competition had been organized around specific forms of practice, expectations, and forms of expertise, the shift to implementation introduced new actors and incongruent norms, regulations, and expectations that impeded the realization of its promise. As Wijsman (2022) explains in her comparison of the ESCR with other RBD projects, design teams used inconsistent calculatory practices to prepare benefit-cost analyses and impact statements for their proposals. These differences included using imagined 500-year or 100-year storm events to assess damages, selecting a 50-year or 100-year project lifespan, and qualitatively describing or quantitatively cataloguing environmental impacts. As a result, design teams struggled to quantify project costs and benefits in a manner that would consistently ensure approval from regulatory oversight throughout the implementation process. As she emphasizes, the “haphazard” way designers address implementation—if considered at all—left projects open to possible alterations.

In the case of the ESCR, these alterations have been significant. In 2018, a fast-track redesign was imposed by then-mayor Bill de Blasio who presented it as more feasible, faster, less disruptive to traffic, and more sustainable. Administered by the city’s Department of Design and Construction, the Department of Parks and Recreation, and the Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency, the new plan entails bulldozing the nearly 60-acre East River Park and burying it with landfill to elevate it 8–10 feet above sea level. The 82-year-old park—located in a dense, historically poor and working-class neighborhood, lined with public housing buildings—is one of the few remaining uncommercialized public spaces in lower Manhattan. In the old park’s place, the city is building a new “world class” park bookended by floodwalls and sea gates and featuring redesigned entryways, new playgrounds, amphitheaters, and basketball courts. In place of the 1,000 mature trees removed in the demolition, the city is installing new species adapted to saltwater exposure and extreme storms. Planned for completion in 2025, the elevated park’s highest edge will double as a sea wall, protecting the city from rising waters and coming storms.

As this has unfolded, community activists who had been “collaborators” in the design process have become increasingly antagonistic again, as they see their ability to shape their surroundings and their potential futures eroded by those same institutions Ovink sought to “trick.” In the wake of the former municipal administration’s unveiling of the ESCR, the project has been met by resistance from residents and formerly allied organizations. Hundreds rallied and marched against the demolition with banners and chants proclaiming, “Bury the FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive, a riverside highway], not East River Park.” Others laid down along the East River waterfront path, splaying their bodies in a “chain of solidarity” along the esplanade (Riggio 2021; Zhao 2021). After lawsuits and attempted talks with city-council members, protests against each tree felling in the park continued through early 2023.

Many experimental socio-technical and environmental innovations depend on the creation and maintenance of a “niche” space within the “regime”—a protected space that supports rather than disciplines or penalizes alternative, experimental practices (Giganti and Falcone 2022; Loorbach, Frantzeskaki, and Avelino 2017). A major problem confronting research on experimentation has been the question of how to “scale up” experiments, to allow them to function in different contexts and induce wider, systemic transformations in urban and environmental governance (Ehnert 2023; Peng, Wei, and Bai 2019). The ongoing unraveling of the ESCR would appear to offer a case in point: removed from the “safe space” of the design competition, institutional inertia and bureaucratic norms undid RBD’s “trick.” Antagonists who had become collaborators became antagonists again; struggles over jurisdictional and bureaucratic authority re-fragmented urban environmental governance, and an innovative, collaboratively designed multi-functional park became yet another case of the urban growth machine commercializing public land and marginalizing minority communities’ visions for their own future. All of this is certainly in play. At the same time, a technical critique of experimentation draws attention to additional political dynamics. When experimentation hinges on the environmental power to make operative, this exercise of power can be disrupted through the refusal of commensurability.

Non-commensurability is evident in at least two ways in the ESCR project. First, the institutional inertia of bureaucratic planning norms, such as the expectations that all construction plans would conform to certain cost-benefit measures, signals an arrhythmic disjuncture between non-commensurable systems. While the RBD competition succeeded in “tricking” federal, state, and local institutions and actors involved in disaster reconstruction, this trick did not extend to regulatory agencies involved in everyday planning and engineering decisions. However, this is more than an extensive problem of “scaling up” or “scaling out” RBD to agencies outside of disaster and environmental governance. This extensive problem is also an intensive problem of refusal to visibilize and synthesize institutional norms and practices into the new decision-making “environment” RBD created. The resultant friction between incommensurable systems for post-disaster reconstruction destabilized RBD’s “safe space,” unbounding new relations between actors the design competition had synthesized.

Second, actors such as LES community organizations maintained the political capacity to become non-commensurable. Their ability to shift roles from collaborators to adversaries after city agencies removed key design elements from the ESCR was not a passive reaction to the systemic uncoupling the implementation process produced. Instead, it was a strategic maneuver based on decades of struggle with city officials, experiences that had prepared organizational leadership for city government to backtrack on its promises (Angotti 2010; Collier, Cox, and Grove 2017). Even though they participated in experimental governance initiatives, they retained the capacity for refusal, to reject the cybernetic demand for transparency and commensurability, and to make themselves non-commensurable with both the “space” the RBD competition created and the systemic “environment” of everyday urban planning regulation.

Taken together, these two examples of non-commensurability expand our understanding of the politics of urban experimentation in the Anthropocene. When experimentation relies on the environmental power to make operative, both for reactionary purposes of greater social control and for the institution of more inclusive and progressive decision-making structures, political struggle increasingly revolves around, on one hand, the expectation and demand for transparency and commensurability and, on the other, the refusal of commensurability. This refusal could lead to violent retribution or abandonment to eliminate the non-commensurable—a danger inherent in any form of cybernetically-inflected governance (Tiqqun 2020). But at the same time, when power demands transparency and operativity, as the case of LES activists demonstrates, the capacity to render oneself opaque and non-commensurable is one of the few resources available to disrupt systemic governance and claim alternative futures.

Conclusions

This article has utilized a case study of a design-driven experiment in post-disaster reconstruction and urban resilience building, Rebuild by Design (RBD), to engage with and expand how we might understand the politics of urban experimentation in the Anthropocene. Where much research on experimentation focuses on a formal analysis that contrasts experimentation with earlier forms of modernist environmental governance, we have advanced a technical critique of RBD that directs attention to the techniques, practices, and rationalities of design-driven experimentation and situates them in wider, ongoing transformations of liberal rule. This positions experimentation within a long line of techniques for engaging the core problem of Western modernity: an indeterminate future. The case of RBD draws out how experimentation mobilizes a distinct form of biopower, environmental power, the power to make operative. When power operates through making operative, the nature of resistance changes. Resistance is no longer a question of creating and maintaining social and ecological difference, since synthesis and environmental power operate through cybernetically interiorizing difference. Instead, resistance involves non-commensurability, or becoming inoperative, refusing functional integration and synthesis.

As demands for experimentation in the face of indeterminacy proliferate, the ethical and epistemic demand for commensurability will continue to pose problems for all manner of experimental initiatives, no matter their avowed political orientations (Derickson 2022). While non-commensurability can challenge even progressive experimental initiatives—as the implementation of the ESCR project demonstrated—it also becomes an essential political resource in the Anthropocene. For while non-commensurability may complicate experimentation, it also holds out the possibility for difference that refuses systematization, and which preserves the promise of experimentalism to open onto new and transformative modes of life. In this regard, the protection, maintenance, and support of non-commensurabilty becomes a pressing ethical and political task for researchers engaging with a variety of forms of experimentation in the Anthropocene.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Margarete Haderer, Hauke Dannemann, Ingolfur Blu¨hdorn, and Maurie Cohen for their editorial advice and assistance. This manuscript benefitted from discussions, comments and suggestions from participants in the 2021 International Research Workshop hosted by the Institute for Social Change and Sustainability, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Stephen Collier and Savannah Cox, and three anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Sandy’s informal designation as a “Superstorm” reflects the unique conditions when the storm made landfall. Sandy had characteristics of both a tropical storm and a winter storm, a condition that climatologists call an “extratropical” storm. Sandy drew its energy both from the atmosphere (a characteristic of a winter storm) and from unseasonably warm mid-latitude ocean waters (a characteristic of a tropical storm). As a result, while Sandy did not have hurricane-force winds, the storm system moved inland at an exceptionally high speed, which drove water inland and created an unprecedented storm surge (Wall 2022).

2 Examples of these projects include the Living Breakwaters project, which features artificially-​constructed oyster reefs as coastline-protection infrastructure in the New York City borough of Staten Island (Wakefield 2019) and the East Coast Resiliency Project, discussed in the latter half of this article, which features a multi-functional park designed to enhance flood protection along the Lower East Side district on Manhattan’s southeast side (see Collier, Cox, and Grove 2017; Goh 2021; Wijsman 2022).

3 There are important links here with the vision of politics developed within public choice theory, a branch of new institutional economics that sought to apply economic theory and methods to problems of political science. Stephen Collier’s work on James Buchanan (Collier 2011) and Vincent Ostrom (Collier 2017) details how these key public choice theorists offer an understanding of governance as an artificial process of institutional design in a complex and indeterminate world. This vision resonates strongly with the problem Ovink sought to address through RBD: how to make governance more responsive to the challenges complexity poses to the greater New York City region.

Appendix A:

An explanatory note on power and biopower

Our analytical focus on power differentiates this article from much research in interdisciplinary, “solutions-oriented science” on vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience (see also Turner and Robbins 2008; Castree et al. 2014). Systems analysis-based approaches such as vulnerability science, sustainability science, or resilience studies tend to approach power as a technical problem of governance: governance institutions that are not properly aligned with complex environments can create information-sharing inequalities and power imbalances that distort system performance and lead to maladaptations (Folke et al. 2007; Olsson, Galaz, and Boonstra 2014). From this perspective, governance innovations—such as the RBD competition—“solve” the problem of power by introducing new decision-making procedures that reduce power imbalances, improve information-sharing, and thus re-align society with complex environments in ways that improve adaptation.

In contrast, our article draws on the concept of “biopower” to explore how power relations are established, contested, and reproduced even through seemingly benign and apolitical scientific and technical practices (Braun 2002). In his defining work on biopolitics, French historian Michel Foucault distinguishes biopower from conventional understandings of power as a quantity held by individuals and exercised over and against the will of other individuals (Foucault 2003, 2007, 2008). This conventional understanding of power, what he calls a model of sovereign power, is typically approached as a matter of competing interests, where one individual that “holds” more power is able to force their interests onto other individuals that “hold” less power. In this model, power is a negative quantity that enables an individual to restrict, limit, and control another individual, often against their will. This is the common understanding of power, and it is implicitly assumed within much “solutions-oriented science” research on vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience (Grove 2018). Biopower, in contrast, refers to a more diffuse form of power that is exercised through seemingly benign and beneficial activities, such as public health, education, economic development, or risk-management campaigns. It uses scientific knowledge to establish ideal norms for individual and collective performance, such as the population’s birth and death rates, or economic growth rates, and intervenes within the population to bring its measures in line with ideal goals. As such, and in contrast to sovereign power, it is a normative and productive form of power that compels rather than forces individuals to change their attitudes, values, and behaviors (Jones, Pykett, and Whitehead 2013).

Since Foucault’s lectures, scholars have subsequently unpacked a variety of forms of biopower, taking care to distinguish different forms of biopower on the basis of how they envision the “life” that they seek to improve (Anderson 2012; Grove 2013). For example, techniques of discipline target individuals, techniques of biopolitics target the population as a biological unity, techniques of security target individuals immersed in an uncertain future marked by predictable regularities, and techniques of environment—or environmental power—target the population as a complex system. In this article, we elaborate on these distinct forms of biopower and analyze how they operate in the governance innovation the RBD competition represents.

Appendix B:

An explanatory note on modernist and experimentalist governance

We can further distinguish high modernist governance from experimentalist governance on the basis of the form of abstraction each practices. High modernist governance operates through transcendent, categorical abstraction. It assumes the everything that exists—social and natural, material and ideal—has a single, defining essence, its categorical identity. Each entity is an example or instance of its category, or ideal type, and the category defines its essence. Here, abstraction occurs through the identification of the existent with its transcendent category, giving that existent a “name” that fixes its identity and thus its essence. Experimental governance, in contrast, relies on more relational approaches attuned to existents’ functional plasticity. Rather than assuming a transcendental, unchanging essence, a relational approach recognizes how the “essence” of any existent will be determined by the quality of its relation to other existents. The identity, function, and value of any existent is shaped by its wider environment, and more precisely, the relations it has with other surrounding existents. What something “is,” in other words, is always defined by what it can be related to. This functionality is, in turn, mediated by the exchange of information (Canguilheim 1994). Functional abstraction, in short, abstracts not to reduce existents to a categorical identity, but rather to enframe existents as information (Halpern 2014).