This article considers projects by Gunnar Birkerts and Constantinos Doxiadis that proposed future scenarios for Detroit in the 1960s and 70s. Birkerts designed a subterranean urban system of infrastructural conduits that would be created by excavation. Doxiadis envisioned a megalopolis in the Great Lakes Region based on the analysis of large quantities of statistical data. Each relied on a form of extraction, of material and of data, to constitute the city and the idea of an urban region relative to new forms of governance and power. The article discusses these projects together and understands them as critical reflections on a present moment in which excavations of data and matter have become inextricably intertwined and continue to underpin articulations of territory and governance.