CONCEPT
The Projective City
Boltanski and Chiapello's name for the new order of worth that governs the network society — where value is measured by connection, mobility, and project fluency.
The projective city is the seventh order of worth, added by Boltanski and Chiapello to the original six in The New Spirit of Capitalism. It names the value system that governs contemporary work and increasingly contemporary life: the valued person is the one who connects, who builds networks, who moves fluidly between projects, who demonstrates adaptability and mobility as core virtues. Worth is measured not by stable expertise or institutional loyalty but by the capacity to initiate and sustain productive connections across organizational boundaries. AI tools appear, at first glance, to enhance the capacities the projective city values — and this appearance is precisely the mechanism by which the projective city absorbs AI while intensifying the precarity that was already its defining feature.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The projective city emerged historically from the metabolization of the artistic critique. The 1960s demand for authenticity, creativity, and liberation from bureaucratic stifling was answered not by granting those demands in their original form but