Some decades ago now, Fredric Jameson concluded that any strategy to confront the 'universal urbanisation' of capital would be defined by a collective ability to 'name the system'.[1] Today, while the title of Jameson's most popular work evokes the same cultural sense of the present as a MiniDisc player, this observation has a peculiar currency; particularly in the various fields of intellectual analysis which converge upon the contemporary city. Since the mid-nineties, theorists of wildly different stripes have coalesced around a sequence of attempts to describe the urban intersection of social creativity, technological innovation and cultural activity.

One feature of these debates – and what perhaps gives terms like 'Network Society' (c. 1990s), 'Creative Class' (c. 2000s), 'Smart City' (c. 2010s) and 'Platform Capitalism' (c. 2020s) their discursive energy – is the isolation of a socio-technical tendency of contemporary urban experience and its projection onto the entire edifice of the 'here-and-now'. In this connection, what appears to animate what Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer call the contemporary 'art of city-making' is a hyperactive nominalism – an urbanism defined not so much by how cities are constructed as the race to name the 'bleeding edge' of transformation.

Another characteristic is that while all these terms designate massive structural change, the compulsion to describe change tends to obscure a more basic question. Namely, how is it that, in spite of a continuous transformation of the technological and social processes of urbanisation, the specifically capitalist mode of production remains intact? Or to put the matter another way, given all these modal changes why do nineteenth century categories, like 'society', 'class', 'industry', and 'capitalism' still carry weight?

The urban question of the 'platform' is a case in point. Although the 'platform economy' is reckoned to be a fundamental disruption to the technological matching of labour supply to service demand, so far the tendency appears to preserve and intensify the monopolistic (i.e. rent-seeking) structures of urban economic activity. As Mörtenböck and Mooshammer argue, urbanism seems in no danger of being dissolved by the platform economy; rather, it constitutes the infrastructure on which all these networks, start-ups and platforms are predicated for their future growth.[2] To borrow a phrase from Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, the urban ideology of capital is being updated in order to remain the same. [3]

The following reflects on the spatial protocols which have enabled capital to change while remaining the same totalising system it has been for centuries. Though instead of focusing on the term 'platform' to analyze how urbanism is transforming, our question moves in the opposite direction. How have the urban environments built by capitalism cultivated the conditions that make 'platforms' possible? To keep matters focussed, I want to use the occasion of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021 to consider how the theme of the 1980 Biennale The Presence of the Past diagnosed a conjunctural restructuring of the spatial modes of cognition and perception that capital requires in order to become urban.