The work here is a prolegomena for a project where I outline the contours of a postal model of urbanism. This model posits the post as the ur-condition of the modern metropolis, as the defining condition of possibility for modern urbanism at all. That this model of urbanism is co-terminus with a territorial understanding of space is to simply acknowledge the total urbanization of the territory. In this, standard questions of scale--urban vs rural, urban vs architecture, architecture vs landscape--seem quaint and obsolete. The post suggests a telescoping, fractal model of scalar resolution that has less to do with boundary definition and is entirely constituted through processes and practices that operate within and across any scalar register we might be able to define.

This postal principle is, to my mind, the most useful analog for thinking about modern urbanism as well as modern subjectivity. Which is to say, this project will not weigh in on the contemporary debate over the efficacy, legitimacy, or future of the postal system--with its office closures, challenges posed by email, commerce, etc--because the post has already always done its work--whether or not it continues to exist or deliver mail on Saturdays. As long as there are bodies and a world, there will be posting--the arrangement of distances. And as long as there is posting, there is geography and urbanism. This relationship of bodies is, I argue, the metonymic condition for an understanding of geography and urbanism in the first place.