Over the next decade, the $20-billion project — spanning seven blocks from 30th to 34th Street, between 10th and 12th Avenues — will add 17 million square feet of commercial, residential, and civic space, much of it housed in signature architecture by the likes of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; Diller Scofidio + Renfro; and Bjarke Ingels Group. But you don’t have to wait that long to see where this is headed. The first office tower, Kohn Pedersen Fox’s 10 Hudson Yards, opens next month, with direct access to the High Line. The new subway stop is already in business (and has already sprung a few leaks); an extension of the 7 train line connects the diverse, middle-class neighborhood of Flushing, Queens, with this emerging island of oligarchs.

It’s a major transformation for the grim streetscape of the Far West Side. A decade ago, The New Yorker’s John Cassidy described the neighborhood’s “notable architectural features”:

The Port Authority Bus Terminal, the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, the cavernous Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, which blocks access to the river … and the Manhattan tow pound. … The M.T.A. rail yard, which is hidden behind concrete walls. … a Greyhound-bus parking depot, a Sanitation Department refueling station, and several vacant lots.

The terminals and tunnels and tracks are still there, but now someone has flipped a switch, and a whole new section of the city is coming online. (Stick with me for a few thousand words, and you’ll understand that’s not a metaphor.) New Yorkers haven’t seen anything like this since the construction of Rockefeller Center transformed Midtown in the 1930s. Hudson Yards is even more impressive, as it rises atop two massive steel-and-concrete platforms that span a working rail yard. [PDF]

It’s also rising on a bed of data. Reports say it will be the nation’s first “quantified community,” a “fully instrumented” testing ground for applied urban data science. If you’ve read my work for Places, you know I’m not about to let that claim pass unnoticed. To understand what Hudson Yards portends for smart cities and smart urban citizens around the world, it is crucial that we examine the ground on which this experiment is taking place — the people and powers that converge here, and the epistemologies and methodologies and urban fantasies they are enacting.

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If you happen to be in New York next month, stop and look up at the new building straddling the High Line. Whatever’s brewing on the 27th and 28th floors, it’s going to be big. Sidewalk’s new leadership, announced in February, includes former heads of key divisions at Google — maps, shopping, machine intelligence — as well as Bloomberg allies with deep experience in planning and development. Joining Doctoroff in the C-suite are Rit Aggarwala, who designed Bloomberg’s PlaNYC sustainability program, and Josh Sirefman, who helped build Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island. The company is hiring machine vision and simulation experts as well as “city leads” focused on municipal processes like health and human services, public safety, and criminal justice. Presumably, these are the urban sectors it aims to optimize. As recently as last month, Sidewalk Labs was also recruiting a “product lead” for “citizen experiences.”

When Doctoroff, surrounded by his old Bloomberg compatriots and new Alphabet colleagues, looks down upon the construction at Hudson Yards, he must feel that his Olympic dreams, long deferred, have been fulfilled — recast, rebranded for our new age of algorithmic ambition. The developers and financiers and data-managers will behold the same scene. These-modern day Haussmenn have tamed their western frontier, sunk mounds of capital into a buried rail bed, finessed the zoning at the Department of Buildings, and now intend to use their new weapon — data — to revolutionize the old urban regime. They’ll remake the infrastructures that have been entangled at the Yards; they’ll overlay a new topology of circuits and data flows atop the train tracks and tunnels. These Great Men — this is a latter-day Power Broker story, after all — will have successfully united New York’s powers in finance, real estate, design, marketing, engineering, technology, and now data science to construct a floating empire that blends all the urban age discourses: triumphalism, sustainability, technoscientism. They’ll behold the city “fully instrumented” — and instrumentalized, as an engine of data and profit.

And fantasy. From the observation deck atop 30 Hudson Yards, projected to be the highest in the city, residents and visitors will look out upon a dream made manifest: a clean, efficient urban machine; a carefully curated cultural experience; a Keller-fed, Equinox-toned, Coach-clad populace; a sustainable urban ecosystem; a harmonious community that behaves in accordance with the rules; a city that plays by the numbers. Here, those modern theories of behaviorism, dear Professor Arendt, will have “become true.”