The political notion of architecture cannot be separate from the city. However, the model to examine the contemporary city is no longer the Greek polis, but rather the Roman civitas – the gathering of free individuals in a public sphere. Urbs lies in the interstitial space. It is both infrastructure and the space of connection and integration. Contrary to the polis which presupposes a defined community and limits, the urbs represents a network of assimilation. In such a model, the distinction between politics and economy is formulated in a radically different way. Koolhaas and Aureli treat the city as something that has ceased being its own political representation, and has been reduced to the managerial function of its economy. The city is simply what it does—a place of production and reproduction.

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Surrogate opposes both Koolhaas's Generic City and Aureli's Stop City. It gives form to what has long been understood simply as a capitalist backdrop to another consumer experience. It restores urban identity, not through the treatment of facades as the immediate confrontation of symbolic cultural signifiers, but rather through the relationship of forms—how tall the house, how wide the street in-between, how big the public square—and their necessarily intense reconciliation with the existing fabric. Surrogate pulls threads from the bounding urban grids, weaving a matrix of its own, patching the tears and coordinating the movement between existing parts. Surrogate becomes a new tissue that deputizes the role the capitalist city could not bear anymore—that of socio-urban identity.