When analyzing situated technologies on the scale of the planet, the ideology of free trade or foreign trading zones can been seen as a cybernetic network on the scale of the world. Extended beyond governments, political boundaries, socioeconomic systems, and cultural divides, free trade zones are an intersection of infrastructural urbanism and communication zones. In the article, Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft by Keller Easterling, he begins the examination of Free Trading Zones stating “Today urban space has become a mobile, monetized technology, and some of the most radical changes to the globalizing world are being written, not in the language of law and diplomacy, but rather in the spatial information of infrastructure, architecture and urbanism.”
The text is subdivided into three portions calling attention to three eras of the evolution of zones; the 16th century to 1930’s free trading ports, 1950-1970 foreign export zones that focused on manufacturing, and the third is after the 1970’s of mutated free zones covering scientific and national centers. Free zones started as European ports that were the median between two destinations were good and services were transferred or refined. Due to serving multiple municipalities and countries, these ports and surrounding urban spaces often evaded power and jurisdiction of powerful monarchies or nations. However into the 20th century due to new technologies of consumerism transportation, cities of trade zones presently are not limited to shipping ports. There is a plethora of new centers of trade dispersed around the world using foreign or free trading zones as a legal and economic tool to revitalize areas and to establish dominance in the global market. Specifically, Easterling describes Free Zones as an economic tool by providing economic sources from large corporations to be concentrated on a particular region or urban center. These zones can be economically more appealing due to separation of these zones from laws and regulations including labor restrictions, sanitation requirements, and / or environment impact. It is a political tool for corporations which bring in funds due to lack of regulation and ability for businesses to negotiate better business terms with adjacent government
Currently, free trading zones have permeated outside the boundaries of a particular site evolving from being purely business centers to become areas that are deployed around universities, museums, residential neighborhoods or tourist areas. As examples in the text “operating as it does in a frictionless realm of legal and economic exemptions, the zone, as it merges with other urban formats, perhaps most naturally adopts the scripts — the aura of fantasy — of the vacation resort and theme park. Taken together business travelers, itinerant workers and tourists create temporary populations which, like temporary agreements and shifting identities, are good for business.” This good for business mentality as progressed into a new frontier presently involving the entire city as a trading zone and in turn becoming a rapid urban center seemingly overnight. The speed of this growth, however, can even be considered to be out of control and potentially not sustainable as seen in the Shenzhen providence in China which has developed almost exclusively in the past 10 years. Using the freedoms and connections of the global trading zone, the city quickly became a extremely complex and vast urban area which serves as a model for speed and spectacle in the urban condition around the world in the 21st century.
