Urban and Architectural Segregation

How do spaces express and reinforce the fictions of power?

“Blueprint and redlining: the spatial segregation of the capitalist city”.

The invention of race, urban segregation and social exclusion as instruments of control, exploitation and concentration.

Five thematic points

I. Historical origin of racial segregation.

There are various forms of discrimination (class, legal status, gender, ethnicity, creed). In the Modern Era, the most dramatic and later criminalized form was and is racial discrimination. The concept of race arose in the sixteenth century and justified the invention of modern slavery, hereditary and based on phenotype. One of the first writers to initiate the modern concept of race (Gomes Eanes de Zurara in Crónica dos Feitos da Guiné, 1453) never set foot in Africa. Not by chance, it is contemporaneous with the birth of capitalism, which began with enclosure in England, private property for accumulation, and the stratification and fragmentation of society as if in a supermarket.

II. Architecture as a technology of colonial control

Forms of social control are multiple and range from the brute force of the State (through military and police power, institutions), the media and preaching, economic and financial laws and institutions, culture and religion. Architecture is one more of these instruments. From slave forts in West Africa (Elmina, Cape Coast, Gorée) to dual colonial cities (European/African) in places like Freetown, Lagos, Luanda and Kenya, we try to show how walls, distances and urban layouts functioned as deliberate instruments of racial and economic domination.

III. Apartheid as the systematization of previous practices

Cases such as South Africa (townships, District Six, Sophiatown), Algeria (dual cities under French rule) and Palestine are presented as examples where urban planning formalized and perpetuated racial separation beyond the end of explicit legal regimes.

IV. United States: from redlining to urban highways

Policies such as redlining, “urban renewal” and the construction of interstate highways (Detroit, Miami, New Orleans, Durham, Nashville, Atlanta, among others) deliberately destroyed prosperous African American neighborhoods (“Black Wall Streets”), displacing hundreds of thousands of people and disrupting the development of communities segregated from and marginal to power.

V. Capitalism as a common thread and the persistence of harm

Racial segregation was not only a legal phenomenon but a spatial reorganization functional to capitalism, whose consequences (loss of wealth, community networks and infrastructure) persist today. On the other hand, some projects (such as social policies of “positive discrimination,” now being questioned and reversed) attempt to reverse this historical discrimination in ways that are rather marginal.

Divide et impera

The Latin expression divide et impera does not appear documented in texts from classical antiquity, but the idea is as old as the throne itself. It is attributed to Philip II of Macedon (father of Alexander the Great, fourth century BCE), who encouraged rivalries between Greek city-states. It was later applied by Rome. Julius Caesar used it in the conquest of Gaul (58–50 BCE), exploiting tribal divisions. The Latin phrase is a later formulation: it is attributed to Machiavelli, who describes the strategy in his work The Art of War (1520).

The English popularized the phrase and the idea of “divide and rule” in 1600, precisely at the beginning of the corporate, colonizing capitalism of giant private companies.

From that same period (1600, the founding of the West India Company), the concept acquired enormous practical importance for England as a tool of colonial government. The most studied case is India: the British organized electoral politics around religious identities, which ultimately led to the partition of India in 1947 and the creation of Pakistan. The same logic was applied in Ireland (Catholic–Protestant division), Nigeria, Cyprus and Palestine. It worked because it allowed vast territories and populations to be governed with few military and administrative resources, preventing the colonized from uniting against the metropole, and it left borders and identity tensions that endure to this day.

During the very brief Brexit campaign in 2016, a meme (a thumbnail with a neo-medieval moral) circulated on social media worldwide which, in different forms, stated: “If you see two neighbors fighting, the most likely thing is that the night before they were visited by a Briton.”

Jerusalem, 1840

For centuries, the Old City of Jerusalem (walled in its present form by the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in 1538) was not divided into four fixed religious quarters. It was a more mixed urban fabric, with Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Armenian communities coexisting and intermingling in different areas, without clear administrative borders between them. The division into the “four quarters” (Muslim, Christian, Armenian and Jewish) as we know it today appears documented for the first time only in the British map by the Royal Engineers of 1840–41, and the current designations date from the nineteenth century. It was not exactly a British “invention” from scratch—the city already had organic ethno-religious concentrations—but rather a formalization and external cartography, made in part by European powers (including Great Britain) during the decline of the Ottoman Empire, which fixed in maps and administration a separation that had previously been much more fluid; it is, in that sense, yet another example of the same “divide and rule” pattern we discuss: turning overlapping identities into fixed and separate categories, with consequences that persist to this day in the politics and memory of the city.

Neighborhood distinctions by religion in caliphates such as Al-Andalus (today Spain) were not impositions by Muslim rulers but organic products of the three major communities, generally (with exceptions over a period of nearly eight centuries) in commercial and academic coexistence. There was discriminatory taxation, but no forced conversion.

Segregation and discrimination

The forms of segregation and discrimination are multiple and, in modern social discourse, are valued negatively. From a strictly linguistic and practical standpoint, discriminations range from the discrimination of students by their merits to the discrimination of human groups by their physical and intellectual condition or their beliefs and ideas. The moral factor that distinguishes a positive discrimination from a negative one, an ethical morality from an immoral one, basically lies in the fact that (1) we cannot deny some the rights we grant or recognize to others without (2) the rights of some violating the rights of others. This is due to the introduction of the concept of equality linked to the older (but limited) concept of freedom that the Enlightenment recycled from the cultural shock Europe received with the discovery of Native American peoples.

From an architectural point of view, throughout history we can identify several forms of discrimination: (1) social class; (2) legal status; (3) gender; (4) ethnicity; and (5) religious creed.

Unlike the democratic and non-patriarchal societies of Native American peoples such as the Iroquois, in the three Abrahamic traditions, gender discrimination was also translated into built space.

In Judaism, medieval synagogues already separated women in a gallery or separate section, often with a limited view or behind a lattice; in the home, women managed the domestic space but were excluded from houses of study. In Christianity, churches did not always physically segregate the sexes, but they did exclude women from the presbytery and the altar (a space reserved for the male clergy); religious women were essentially confined to women’s monasteries. In Islam, the traditional dwelling (especially among urban elites) was organized around the harem or private area of the house, reserved for women and off limits to men outside the family; mosques assigned women a separate area or floor, and in many medieval Islamic cities streets and public spaces such as squares were predominantly male domains, with different schedules or routes for women in some contexts.

In all three traditions the general pattern is similar: public space and the main places of worship (altar, bimah, minbar) were reserved for men, while women were confined to domestic spaces or to marginal areas within the temple—although the degree of rigidity varied greatly depending on region, period and social class.

This patriarchal tradition that segregated spaces and rights was not very different in ancient Greece and Rome.

In what we now call the West, all these forms of discrimination were consolidated and radicalized before 1492. All were called into question as of the intellectual impact caused by the knowledge (and ignorance) of Native American peoples, especially from the mid–sixteenth century onward and with more than one counter-narrative that began to go viral in the seventeenth century.

In this presentation we will focus on racial discrimination and segregation, but it is worth noting that class, legal-status, religious and gender discrimination were radical practices during the Middle Ages. Capitalism continued some of these and tempered others, such as gender discrimination, basically for two reasons: (1) first, because of the strength of the Native American (Enlightened) counter-narrative that understood and practiced a radical gender equity for its time, and then (2) because, from a Marxist point of view, we can see that the inclusion of women in the labor market was one of its many forms of negotiated expansion. Urban districts characterized by religions are no longer ghettos imposed by arms and laws (except in regions such as Palestine) but derived from the customs and common interests of specific groups, communities and from the capitalist dynamic itself. Domestic spaces that discriminated by gender have been diluted, except in public restrooms or in some more conservative religious spaces, such as Jewish, Catholic and Muslim ones.

The case of segregation by social class continues in contradictory ways. Although under capitalism class status tended toward equality before the law (another expansion in legal estates; see Alfonso X up to the laws in thirteenth-century Spain) negotiated in the face of the force of the Enlightenment, such as literacy, in practice the power derived from the accumulation of capital made this more an ideal than a reality: we are all equal before the law but not before justice. On the other hand, this same progressive accumulation radicalized class segregation to the point of creating neo-feudal urban fiefdoms and private spaces according to economic power.

The form of discrimination and segregation that was radicalized during the Modern Era at the same time that it was demonized was ethnic discrimination, which today ranges from apartheid to the creation of racial ghettos due to discrimination by capital to the most distilled discrimination by race.

What is this due to? Two factors: (1) discriminations by race did not exist (or were very rare cases) before the Modern Era; and (2) enclosure and the privatization of land in England extended the power of a segment of the feudal nobility over capitalism: the privatization and commercialization of land first, of distant things later, ended with the privatization of human beings. From the sixteenth century onward, slaves became private property under all laws. To consolidate this capitalist fragmentation-classification of society, a new form of slavery was invented with two novelties: hereditary slavery and slavery based on a skin color. Slavery had existed for thousands of years, but not in this form nor on this industrial scale. The same can be said of the concept of race. Discriminations used to be based on religion, culture, language, social class, caste or estate, but the idea of race was a rarity. The Romans had administrators and even emperors of African origin, and although it is very difficult to determine their skin color, two important factors stand out: (1) they were born in North Africa, to families of different social classes, which makes it more likely that they were brown than white; (2) the very idea of race did not exist or was irrelevant, to the point that it left no record of the skin color of any of them.

We observe the same regarding the physical representation of Jesus. The Bible, like the Qur’an, did not place emphasis on physical descriptions that faithfully portrayed the appearance of historical figures, as modern biographies usually do. The Qur’an does not offer a detailed physical description of prominent figures such as Muhammad (mentioned 10 times) or Jesus (25 times).

For their part, Native Americans were unfamiliar with the idea of race and rejected it when they became aware of the Europeans. The Iroquois, for example, adopted captives from wars with other peoples, which were infrequent under normal conditions and never for material greed. Many other peoples also adopted members of other Native nations, as well as white Europeans and Black Africans.

Aside from the evangelist Mark, the philosopher and Church Father Saint Augustine, the Roman emperors and the three African popes, just a few minutes before the invention of race as a biological and legal classification, Alessandro de’ Medici, known as “Il Moro,” was appointed Duke of Florence in 1532. His mother, Simonetta da Collevecchio, was a servant, probably an enslaved woman of African origin (North African or sub-Saharan). His adoptive father, Lorenzo de’ Medici, was Duke of Urbino and cousin of the future Pope Clement VII, Alessandro’s biological father. In other words, Il Moro would have been the son of the cardinal and his African maid. Unlike the children of Thomas Jefferson three centuries later, Alessandro not only did not inherit his mother’s enslaved status but was elevated to head of state in succession to his adoptive father.

As far as we know, Alessandro de’ Medici was the last European head of state of documented African ancestry for several centuries, until the twenty-first century.

Cases of segregationist urban policies

From the slave trade to colonial segregation

From the Portuguese explorations of Africa in the fifteenth century, the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade and the plunder of Native American peoples, racial discrimination in Africa and the Americas was expressed not only through laws, violence or economic exploitation, but also in the physical organization of territory. Fortresses, ports, cities, neighborhoods, roads, railways and housing were progressively organized in ways that facilitated the control of specific populations. From an urbanistic and architectural perspective, one can observe an evolution from the confinement spaces of the slave trade to racially segregated colonial and postcolonial cities.

Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, the forts built by Europeans on the west coast of Africa constituted some of the first architectural spaces directly linked to the Atlantic slave trade. In 1482, in Elmina, present-day Ghana, the Portuguese built São Jorge da Mina, one of the first permanent European fortifications in sub-Saharan Africa. Later, the castle became a center of the slave trade. These complexes established a radical separation between spaces intended for European merchants, soldiers and administrators and the dungeons where rebellious slaves or simply anyone captured and awaiting transport to the other side of the Atlantic were confined.

At first, captives were seized in wars between different African peoples. It was not a matter of selling brothers, but a way the victor had of getting rid of his enemies. European trade created incentives and a much larger commercial network of captives that penetrated inland regions of Africa far from the coast and into subsequent generations.

At Elmina Castle, the dungeons could hold up to about 200 captives in a single chamber; at certain times it housed approximately one thousand men and 500 women. Men, women and children were kept for weeks in dark, poorly ventilated and overcrowded spaces for weeks or months before being led to the harbor and shipped to America. The spatial journey could be reduced to a brutal sequence:

dungeon → courtyard → passageway → gate → port → ship → America.

From the mid–seventeenth century, at Cape Coast Castle in present-day Ghana, or on the island of Gorée, off present-day Dakar, architecture functioned as an effective technology of bodily control: walls, doors, enclosed spaces and controlled access prevented mobility and facilitated surveillance. The fortress was not simply a commercial or military building; it constituted a point of connection between African territory and the Atlantic slave economic system.

Fracturing societies; unifying the colonized space

Colonization and European imperialism divided and fragmented Native nations while at the same time forming extensive regions and administrative, political, linguistic and cultural annexations. The idea that Europeans gave native peoples a common language so they could understand one another is a fossilized myth that serves imperial or nostalgic nationalisms. For millennia, the native peoples of the Americas, Africa and Asia had linguistic diversity similar to that of Europe. Just like Europe, neither Native Americans nor Africans nor Asians suffered from this diversity; quite the opposite. Trade and communication between peoples were intense and covered vast regions that stretched from one end of the continent to the other.

In the same way that port-capitals in Latin America became nodes of political and economic power and raw-material extraction, in Africa, from the early years of the slave trade, port cities were commercial centers for the export of slaves, while within them the rich were segregated in high areas, the merchants in the lower center, and the poor in the low-lying peripheries.

This was the case of Luanda, founded by the Portuguese in 1576. The slave trade came to influence the very urban structure. Its port became one of the main points of departure for enslaved people bound for Brazil. The city developed a differentiation between the Cidade Alta, located in an elevated position and linked to administrative and religious power, and the lower areas related to the port and commercial activities. The colonial city thus became a fundamental infrastructure for connecting the extraction of people and resources from the African interior with Atlantic markets.

During the nineteenth century, with the expansion of European colonialism, the spatial logic began to change. The objective was no longer only to capture and transport people, but to permanently control territories and populations. Colonial cities began to be organized according to a segregated structure: a European city, with mansions and large houses, with privileged infrastructure and services, and an African city, more densely populated and with fewer public investments.

Freetown, in Sierra Leone, is an interesting example. Founded in 1787 as a settlement for freed Africans and turned into a British colony in 1808, it experienced a spatial differentiation between Europeans and Africans. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the British developed Hill Station, six miles from Freetown, as a European residential area. Located in an elevated area and surrounded by green spaces, its homes were considerably different from the denser housing of the African city. Topography, distance and architecture functioned as instruments of a double segregation: (1) social and economic segregation into radically separate social classes and (2) racial segregation, both within the logic of capitalism.

In Lagos, Nigeria, the same process took place, although more clearly. In 1919 the British authorities began to develop Ikoyi Reservation, intended mainly for European residents. The area was characterized by well-appointed houses, gardens and large plots of land. In contrast, the natives who worked in these residences could live in small spaces located behind the houses. A strip of approximately 400 meters was even established as a physical separation.

In the British colonies of East Africa, separation was applied on an even larger scale. In Kenya, the so-called White Highlands were progressively reserved for European settlers from the beginning of the twentieth century. Segregation then ceased to be exclusively urban and began to organize entire geographic regions. The most fertile lands, certain residential areas and the main transport connections were linked to the European population, while African populations faced restrictions on ownership and access to certain areas.

In Johannesburg (founded in 1886, after the discovery of gold) industrialization produced an enormous demand for native workers. However, the city did not develop equitably. Neighborhoods and townships were created to concentrate the Black population outside white residential areas. The result was an urban structure based on the separation between (1) the place where workers lived and (2) the place where they worked. In this way, transport and distance became instruments of labor and racial control. That is, the privatization and zoning of land were not the only forms of social and racial control. The very services, such as the transport of workers, made most of the population vulnerable and dependent on the private ownership of urban and rural infrastructure.

In South Africa, these practices preceded and foreshadowed formal apartheid. During the first decades of the twentieth century, laws were passed that progressively restricted land ownership and occupation by the Black population. The Natives Land Act of 1913, for example, reserved approximately seven percent of South African territory for the African population, a percentage that was later expanded. The result was a profoundly unequal geography in which a white minority controlled most of the agriculturally and economically strategic urban lands.

Apartheid, formally established in 1948, did not begin from scratch. The regime turned previous colonial practices into a much more systematic system of racial planning. Legislation determined where people could live according to their racial classification, while the townships, white areas, roads and transport systems materialized that classification on the territory.

Here we see a crucial point for analysis: what the world condemned about South African apartheid was the same thing it condemned about the system of slavery in America: legal discrimination based on ethnicity or skin color. That is, based on an innate condition, not a moral one. Just as the social and economic system of the United States was not dismantled after the Civil War but, on the contrary, became even more radicalized in its economic segregation and in the concentration of capital and corporate power in the hands of an elite, the same occurred with apartheid and with the partial and controlled decolonizations of the Global South. This is not to say that, in many respects, the abolition of the legal system of apartheid was not real progress; rather, it also signified a reorganization of the capitalist system that allowed it to survive and even continue expanding through other means of discrimination, segregation, oppression, and exploitation.

From an urban planning perspective, we can observe a fairly clear historical evolution: the slave castle confined the body; the colonial port controlled movement; the colonial city separated populations; and apartheid transformed that separation into a comprehensive system of territorial planning. Racial discrimination became physically inscribed in the landscape through walls, distances, roads, railroads, neighborhoods, housing, population densities, and unequal access to infrastructure. Furthermore, we must not forget that physical space (urban and architectural) is deeply symbolic and expresses the reality and ideas of power. In other words, in addition to being a physical structure of domination, it forms part of the other pillar of power: communication, propaganda, and their media, such as the press or financial, religious, and educational institutions.

In this sense, the history of African colonialism can also be read as a history of the racial production of space. Colonial power did not only say who was European and who was African: it built cities and territories that made that difference visible and permanent. Architecture and urban planning thus became instruments through which social, economic and racial hierarchies could be reproduced on a daily basis.

South Africa

The Dutch were the first Europeans to colonize the southern tip of Africa until, in 1886, the discovery of gold in what is now the Johannesburg region led to competition with the British minority, which began to grow with a wave of new immigrants. This competition led to strong conflicts and wars between Creoles of Dutch origin (Boers and Afrikáners in general) and the British Empire, which led to the defeat of the former at the beginning of the twentieth century. As was the case of Irish immigrants and Germans and English in the United States during the same period, both groups ended up identifying as white. In the United States, the Irish minority became white and in southern Africa, the Boer majority (60 percent of the white population), by then impoverished, came to form the same group that organized white privileges against the majority of the South African population—Bantu and other native ethnicities.

From an urban and architectural perspective, apartheid produced deeply fragmented cities. As we saw earlier, whites occupied the best-located urban areas with infrastructure; the Black population was progressively displaced to peripheral townships (neighborhoods), generally far from economic centers. Housing, roads, transport and public services were used as instruments to maintain this separation. Mobility control through permits complemented residential segregation: it was not enough to determine where a person could live; it was also regulated where they could work and circulate.

Johannesburg, Cape Town and Pretoria were important examples of this transformation of urban space. The pushing of the Black population to the periphery generated long distances between housing and employment, dependence on transport and a deeply unequal distribution of infrastructure and services.

One example is District Six in Cape Town, which was declared a white area in 1966. More than 60,000 people were expelled and relocated to peripheral areas. As happened with Tulsa (Oklahoma, 1922), much of the neighborhood was demolished, destroying housing and community networks, businesses, religious places and a historic urban structure. The case shows how urban planning could be used to dismantle entire communities and rebuild the territory according to racial criteria. A similar process occurred in Sophiatown, Johannesburg. During the 1950s, 60,000 Black residents were expelled and the neighborhood was demolished. It was later rebuilt as a suburb for the white population under the name Triomf.

In both cases, architecture and urban planning were not simply consequences of apartheid: they became active instruments of its implementation. Segregation materialized in the landscape through territorial borders, demolition of neighborhoods, peripheral townships, residential separation and unequal access to urban space.

Algeria

Under French colonization (1830–1962), the urban organization of Algeria was also an instrument of colonial domination. The cities were divided into spaces reserved for European settlers (pieds-noirs) and areas inhabited by the Algerian population. In cities such as Algiers, Oran and Constantine, the French built new neighborhoods following European urban models, while relegating the population without access to colonial power to the old urban centers or to peripheral areas practically abandoned by the administration.

As we noted earlier, this separation was not only spatial, but also social, economic and political. European neighborhoods were served by better streets, transport, drinking water, electricity, schools and other public services, while indigenous neighborhoods suffered higher density, poverty and lower investment. In addition, colonial legislation established a deep legal inequality between French citizens and the Muslim majority, especially under the Code de l’indigénat.

The Algerian majority remained politically subordinate and with limited rights. This inequality fueled Algerian nationalism and was one of the factors that contributed to the War of Independence (1954–1962).

The slaveholding origins of Broad and Wall Street

Wall Street and Broad Street were born in the heart of Manhattan (

In the language of the Algonquian natives, Manhattan meant «place of gathering.» It was the Algonquians, the Iroquois, the Lenapes and other native peoples who maintained intense trade long before the arrival of the Europeans, who created Broadway which, in English, means «Broad Way» and earlier, when the Dutch discovered it, they called it the same way: Brede Weg.

Almost from the beginning, the colony’s economy was linked to slavery. In 1626, the Dutch West India Company brought the first enslaved Africans to New Amsterdam (later New York); a few years later, 100 of the 300 inhabitants of the colony were slaves forced to build houses and roads. They also built the wall and the cobblestones of the street that today is called Wall Street.

In 1711, the New York municipal government officially created a slave market on Wall Street, in the sector of Wall and Pearl Streets, next to the East River, where enslaved people could be bought, sold or rented, including Africans and Natives. The market operated until 1762 and the city itself collected taxes on the transactions. By 1730, around 42 percent of New York households owned slaves—in total, one fifth of the population.

Although the name Wall comes from the Dutch defensive wall, it was on that short street where one of the most lucrative trades and most functional to the rest of economic activity, the slave trade, took place for generations; the same street where the stock exchange was later built, currently the most important in the world.

The Exchange Market appeared there in the eighteenth century. Merchants, bankers and stockbrokers concentrated in the Wall Street area. What is little known is that the relationship between New York and slavery did not end when the Wall Street market closed: even after the gradual abolition of slavery in New York—completed in 1827 for the enslaved born in the state, although legal exceptions persisted until 1841—New York bankers, insurers, merchants and lawyers continued to finance, insure and trade in products produced through slave labor, especially cotton and sugar.

That is, the district that would end up symbolizing U.S. financial capitalism developed in a space whose colonial economy had been intimately linked to slavery

Algeria

Algiers is called «the white one» because of the almost searing white of its facades facing the sea, as if the color could be innocent in a city where nothing, not even an adjective, was ever casual. The French arrived in 1830 and, in barely fifteen years—between 1832 and 1845—they razed some 7,000 homes in the Casbah to build the Place du Gouvernement, dismantle the Ottoman walls and lay out wide avenues with that same urban hygienism that, in other latitudes, always seems hygienic only to those who impose it. It is worth remembering that the boulevards of Paris were born in the nineteenth century not for the beauty and enjoyment of the city, but to clear the way for repressive forces in a city of narrow streets.

Algeria was not an exception: it was the debut, on African soil, of the same Haussmannian urbanism that in Paris sought wide avenues so that troops could fire in a straight line against future uprisings. Military logic and aesthetic logic, in colonialism, always end up being the same logic under a different name.

The Casbah, on the other hand, met with a more subtle fate and, in a way, a more uncomfortable one to recount: they did not raze it. They preserved it. As architectural historian Zeynep Çelik documents in her landmark study Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers Under French Rule (1997), the French colonial authorities considered the Casbah «exotically charming and historically interesting«—that is, valuable not for those who inhabited it, but as a postcard for those who visited it. It was, in that sense, one of the first documented cases of a logic we now know by another name: turning other people’s poverty into a tourist attraction, with no need to improve in any way the lives of those who produce it with their mere daily existence.

The same script was repeated in Oran and Constantine: new European neighborhoods with paved streets, drinking water, electricity and schools, while the indigenous population was relegated to the old urban cores or to peripheral areas that the colonial administration visited, when it did, only to collect taxes. Segregation did not initially even need a specific housing law: inequality of services was enough, that silent way of saying «not here» without saying anything, just letting the pipes never arrive.

But there was also a law, because French colonialism, faithful to its bureaucratic vocation, was not satisfied with de facto inequality: it codified it. The Code de l’indigénat established a formal legal hierarchy between French citizens and the Muslim majority, a parallel justice system in which the same acts could be crimes for some and legal indifference for others. The Casbah, over time, became more than a poor neighborhood: it became the only place where Algerian resistance could breathe without being seen, and in fact it was there that the National Liberation Front planned much of its insurgency during the War of Independence (1954–1962)—as if the very architecture of exclusion had ended up unknowingly creating the perfect hideout for its own defeat.

Today the Casbah is a World Heritage Site according to UNESCO, a title that usually arrives late, when no one can be charged for the damage and all that remains is to admire its labyrinthine alleyways like someone admiring an old scar, forgetting—or preferring to forget—that that scar was traced, street by street, with the same ruler with which the avenues on the other side of the city were drawn.

Palestine

It is not necessary to demolish a neighborhood in a single blow with bulldozers when it is enough to systematically deny, year after year, the document that authorizes the construction of a home. In the occupied Palestinian territory, particularly in the so-called Area C of the West Bank (60% of the territory and under Israeli administrative and military control), this document is called a building permit, and its history is that of an almost perfectly consistent denial. The brutal massacre and demolition of Gaza lies outside the objectives of this study and deserves another chapter, more from a psychiatric perspective than an architectural one.

The numbers, documented by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and by organizations such as Bimkom, have the exact coldness of the irrefutable: between 2000 and 2007, only 5 percent of Palestinian permit applications were approved—91 permits in seven years, an average of thirteen per year. Between 2016 and 2018, the figure fell to 21 out of 1,485 applications. Between 2016 and 2021, only 24 out of 2,550. In 2025, the harvest was even more arid: of 282 applications submitted since October 2023, none were approved. Zero. Meanwhile, in the same Area C and in the same period, more than 18,000 housing units were built in Israeli settlements—a flow of permits as generous in one direction as it was restrictive in the other, as if two rivers sprang from the same source and only one of them were allowed to run.

The result of this arithmetic, according to OCHA, is that less than 1% of Area C has an approved urban plan for Palestinian communities, leaving thousands of people with no option but to build illegally—that is, to build the only possible house, knowing that any day a demolition order may arrive. In just the first half of 2025, more than 1,200 structures were demolished for lack of permits, an average of almost five per day. The road infrastructure, for its part, has been the subject of similar analysis by researchers and international bodies: roads, access controls and the Separation Barrier itself configure, according to these studies, differentiated circulation between Israeli and Palestinian communities.

Israeli authorities maintain that most demolitions respond strictly to constructions without legal permits, that Israelis and Palestinians are formally subject to the same zoning regime, and that security restrictions—access controls, alternative routes—are due to defense needs, not to a discriminatory design. International organizations and much of the academic literature cited here, on the other hand, describe the system as a «differential planning» that produces, in practice, radically unequal results between the two populations. Between these two readings—the technical and the political, the legal and the moral—a large part of the international legal debate on the status of the occupied territories is waged, a debate that this text does not seek to settle, but simply to point out in its documented complexity.

Brazil

Further south, in another hemisphere and under another sky, Brazil offers a different variation of the same problem: here there is no law that was ever written against the Black population—the slavery system ended in 1888 without any reparative measure following it—yet the map of poverty, as studies by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics indicate, overlaps almost perfectly with the racial map. Unlike in the United States or South Africa, the racial component was never explicit in Brazilian legislation. And yet it is there, as clear as if it had been: numerous studies show how urban planning, particularly in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, reinforced with surgical precision the same inequalities that no law ever mentioned by name.

The mechanism, in both cities, was repeated with the monotony of a formula: systematic removal of favelas from areas of highest real estate value, forced concentration of the Afro-Brazilian population in the peripheries, and a public disinvestment so constant that it ended up seeming almost natural, like the climate. The favelas of Rio, born on the hillsides that no one else wanted—those steep hills that the «elegant» city preferred to look at from afar, as landscape, not as neighborhood—today function as the physical script of that overlap: territories where the Black and brown population, almost half the country according to the census itself, was pushed not by decree but by the deliberate absence of any public policy that said otherwise. In São Paulo, the same logic operated with a different landscape but an identical result: the central neighborhoods were modernized while the periphery grew without transport, without sanitation, without the investments that did arrive, punctually and abundantly, on the other side of the city.

Marginalization, without signature or promulgation date, proved as effective as any Jim Crow law: it was enough to do nothing, which is sometimes the quietest and cheapest way of doing something. There was no need for a sign that read «not here,» as in the U.S. South. It was enough for the asphalt to end where the favela began, and for the bus to stop running precisely there. Brazilian segregation did not need a decree: the budget was enough.

Fascist architecture

Hitler and Nazi ideology rejected modern architecture (in particular the Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius in 1919) as «degenerate art,» a term that united aesthetics and racial biology. The key argument was articulated by theorist Paul Schultze-Naumburg, who in his book Art and Race (1928) argued that «true architecture» had to be born from the blood and soil (Blut und Boden) of a rooted people. Schultze-Naumburg labeled the modern style—flat lines, no ornament, international—as «nomadic» and «uprooted,» associating it with Jews and what he called «the people of color nomads of the Middle East and Africa.»

For Hitler, the frustrated artist, the flat roof of modern architecture was Oriental, Semitic and Bolshevik. Paul Schultze-Naumburg even referred explicitly to the «Judeo-Bolshevik flat roof.»

Thus, the Nazis linked modernism with a supposed Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy that «contaminated» the German body politic, closed the Bauhaus in 1933 and organized the «Degenerate Art» exhibition in Munich in 1937 to publicly ridicule that style. In its place, they promoted monumental neoclassical architecture (Albert Speer) presented as the pure and racial expression of the German people.

Mussolini’s case is different and less monolithic. Italian fascism never developed a systematic racial rejection of modern architecture comparable to that of the Nazis—in fact, both monumental neoclassicism (Novecento) and «Italian Rationalism,» a modernist movement (Giuseppe Terragni, Adalberto Libera), coexisted within the regime and Mussolini tolerated and even promoted it in certain projects, seeing it as an expression of fascist modernity and efficiency. However, toward the end of the 1930s, with the racial turn of the regime after the 1938 Racial Laws (inspired by the Nazi model) and the prohibition of miscegenation in Ethiopia, ideas from that ethnic-racial discourse also appear in the Italian architectural debate, although never with the ideological centrality it had in Germany.

In 2024, the AfD of Saxony-Anhalt discredited the legacy of the Bauhaus, calling it a «wrong path of modernity.» Culture minister Claudia Roth of the Green Party noted the similarity to the Nazi attacks on the Bauhaus in 1933. During a debate held in the regional parliament, AfD cultural policy spokesman Hans-Thomas Tillschneider claimed that the Bauhaus had «systematically violated the human need for comfort.» The AfD deputy used terms such as globalists against cultural diversity, and associated the Bauhaus with communism.

Today there are ideas such as far-right counter-territorialization: neo-Nazi and anti-immigrant groups have tried to forcibly take over small localities (such as Jamel, in eastern Germany) to create ethnically homogeneous enclaves through Nazi symbolism and imagery, although with very limited social impact.

In the United States, Trump promoted an executive order requiring that new federal buildings be in classical style. Some white supremacist groups such as Identity Evropa used images of ancient Greco-Roman architecture and statuary in their «Protect your heritage» propaganda.

United States

Blueprint and redlining: the invisible architecture

Blueprint and redprint. There is a color that in the United States was never innocent: red. Not only that of the flag, or of the blood spilled in so many battlefields and fields of crops, but also the bureaucratic and silent red of the maps that federal assessors drew in the 1930s over the country’s cities to decide which groups deserved credit and which did not. That exercise in punitive cartography was called redlining, and it worked for forty years with the discretion of a disease that does not need to announce itself because it already knows it is going to win.

Before there had been another map, older and more brutal in its literalness: that of the nineteenth-century Indian Removal Act, which reordered the territory by expelling those who already lived on it, like someone rearranging the furniture in someone else’s house convinced that the house was always theirs. Redlining, a century later, perfected the method: there was no longer any need to expel with soldiers. It was enough to deny. A neighborhood with a Black population received a red blotch on the map, and that blotch meant, in practice, a sentence: no mortgages, no insurance, no loans, no public investment. The neighborhood was not destroyed by a bulldozer. It was destroyed by a signature that never came, by a loan the bank never approved, by a color on a piece of paper that decided, with the coldness of an equation, who could accumulate wealth and who was condemned to rent forever the misery that others had designed for them.

The result was that wealth gap between whites and Blacks that economists now measure with graphs, as if it were weather or tide, and not the direct and calculated consequence of a map. The neighborhood marked in red deteriorated, yes, but not by accident: it deteriorated because it was condemned to deteriorate, and then, when it was already sufficiently ruined, someone in a tie with a PowerPoint would arrive to declare that this neighborhood was, in fact, a «blighted area» that needed «renewal.» The system not only impoverished: it also had the perverse elegance of using the poverty it had itself manufactured as justification for the next demolition.

This is how Black Bottom and Paradise Valley in Detroit fell, under the weight of the Chrysler Freeway and its more than one hundred thousand displaced— a figure that, said like that, sounds like a census, but in reality means one hundred thousand stories of forced moves, of businesses that closed without compensation, of jazz clubs that stopped playing one night and never opened again. This is how Hayti fell, in Durham, when the NC 147 highway decided that the Black commercial heart of the U.S. South was conveniently in the path of an infrastructure project. This is how Rondo fell, in Minnesota, between 1956 and 1968, with its 600 homes and 300 businesses reduced to rubble under Interstate 94, and its 7,000 neighbors scattered like someone scattering ashes without ceremony.

What was lost in each of these places cannot be measured only in square meters demolished. Business networks woven over generations were lost, community institutions that functioned as a social immune system, wealth accumulated with the sweat of several decades and, above all, the living proof—uncomfortable for the official narrative—that Black communities could prosper economically despite everything, and that precisely for that reason they had to be destroyed before prosperity became a habit. LaVilla, Overtown, Claiborne Avenue, Greenwood: different names, same script. As if the country, every time it saw a Black neighborhood become something prosperous and visible, felt the almost physiological need to trace a highway over it, to remind that community that prosperity in the United States had a speed limit and an obligatory exit.

In 1968 the law prohibited racial discrimination in access to housing. However, the practice continued. For example, between 2004 and 2009 alone, Wells Fargo was sued for discrimination in the administration of mortgage credit. The Department of Justice alleged and settled a case in which approximately 30,000 African American and Hispanic borrowers had received higher rates or fees than comparable white borrowers, and others were steered into subprime loans—assigned to people considered higher risk, that is, with higher interest rates.

Immigrants: the new Blacks

Currently, in the case of immigrants, contemporary forms of urban discrimination tend to be less explicit than redlining: although discrimination in housing on the basis of national origin is prohibited in the United States, some local policies can make access to certain neighborhoods more difficult, for example through rental restrictions linked to immigration status, while exclusionary zoning—limitations on apartments, multifamily housing or low-cost construction—can artificially raise prices in certain areas and exclude from them, in an apparently neutral way, immigrants and other low-income groups; thus, the mechanism has in many cases shifted from «this neighborhood is risky» to «this person does not meet the requirements» or «housing that this person can afford cannot be built here,» producing spatial segregation without the need to explicitly mention race or nationality.

Gerrymandering: ethnicity, politics, and urban space

Maping Inequality

Tulsa and similar cases

Collective violence as an instrument of racial disarticulation

Within U.S. urban history, collective violence motivated by structural racism constituted an alternative mechanism to formal urban renewal policies for dismantling the economic and institutional progress of African American communities. While residential segregation processes and road infrastructure interventions operated through state planning and the legal structuring of territory, in many cases they reveal a different pattern: the substitution of formal planning by outbreaks of direct violence as a means to dismantle consolidated Black communities. Three well-known cases illustrate this dynamic.

First, the Wilmington massacre and coup, which took place in 1898 in North Carolina, represents the only documented case of a successful coup d’état in U.S. history (see La frontera salvaje. 200 años de fanatismo anglosajón en América Latina). In this episode, a group of white supremacists overthrew by force a democratically elected multiracial municipal government. The consequences of this coup included the mass execution of African American residents, the physical destruction of the facilities of the local African American newspaper (the community’s main organ of political expression) and the forced expulsion of its entrepreneurs. The episode not only eliminated an experience of multiracial governance, but also laid the institutional foundations for the subsequent imposition of the Jim Crow segregationist regime in the region.

Second, the Springfield race riots of 1908 in Illinois began with false accusations against African American men, which led to mass lynching followed by the systematic destruction—through arson and looting—of African American neighborhoods and businesses. This event caused the forced displacement of numerous families and had, moreover, historic nationwide significance: it was the direct trigger for the founding, the following year, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization that has since institutionalized the struggle against racial terror in the United States.

Third, the Elaine massacre, which took place in 1919 in Arkansas, was triggered as a response to efforts to organize a union of African American agricultural workers who were demanding fair wages. The systematic attack perpetrated by white mobs resulted in an estimated more than two hundred deaths among the Black population, a figure that continues to be the subject of historiographical revision. Beyond its lethal magnitude, the episode had the effect of dismantling the affected community’s capacity for collective labor organization, as well as its systematic dispossession of land and productive resources, thus consolidating a forced reconfiguration of property relations and economic power in the region.

Taken together, these three cases show that collective violence did not operate as an isolated or spontaneous phenomenon, but as a functional mechanism—parallel to discriminatory urban planning—aimed at interrupting processes of economic accumulation, political organization and institutional autonomy within African American communities, whose structural consequences extended considerably beyond the moment of the violence itself.

Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921.

Before 1921, Tulsa was already a map carefully colored by custom and unwritten law: the Black population was squeezed into Greenwood, north of the train tracks, as if steel were a natural border. There grew, almost despite the white city that surrounded it, a relatively autonomous town, with its housing, businesses, churches, hotels and offices, which demonstrated every day that the attributed inferiority was a political decision and not a biological fact. Segregation was not only social; streets, houses, businesses and urban facilities were conceived and distributed by race, with the same neatness with which the shelves of a store are organized, so that no one would forget who could cross which street without suddenly becoming a public order problem.

Urban renewal and the construction of new roads fragmented the neighborhood. What violence did not erase, infrastructure divided. This shows that architecture and urban planning are not only the result of a system of segregation, but also one of its instruments that, in addition, help concentrate capital in some hands and not in others.

Thus, architecture functions as a physical, social and symbolic fossilization of a social system: it turns power and exclusion relations into lasting structures that continue to operate long after the original causes have disappeared. A current example is the University of Oklahoma in Tulsa (OU-Tulsa), where only 6 percent of the students are Black.

Then, euphemistic urbanism no longer needed to label areas as white, Black or brown. It was enough to classify each racial reality by its social and economic segregation, which was protected by the logic of financial capitalism, to confirm and expand segregation through redlining. Likewise, especially after the Second World War and the Nazi experience, discrimination based on races and ethnicities was replaced by discrimination based on nationalities.

1921. Rehearsal of bombing against an inferior race*

Tulsa, Oklahoma. May 30, 1921—at 4:05 p.m., Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old orphan shoeshine boy, heads to the bathroom for Blacks located in the Drexel building, at 319 Main Street. The bathroom is on the top floor, so the young man must use the stairs or the elevator. This time he chooses the quickest way, the elevator, where a young white woman named Sarah Page works. According to his own version, Dick (which in English is often used as a popular word for penis), upon entering the elevator, trips and, in his reflex to grab onto something, grabs the operator’s arm. An employee who sees him through the decorative grillwork understands that it is a rape and runs to the phone to report it to the police. The favorite theme of pornographic imagination (the inferior beast causing pleasure to the superior beauty; the inversion of roles between those below and those above, as a form of catharsis for power, fearful of its own fantasies) predates the pornographic industry by several decades, probably centuries.

The next day, the Tulsa Tribune headlines: «Negro Assailant Arrested in Elevator Attack on Girl.» The newspaper adds that the attacker tore the dress off the young Page and, further down, echoes the popular clamor: «To lynch the Negro tonight.» The newspapers do not report on the permanent activity of the Ku Klux Klan, which cannot tolerate the inexplicable prosperity of Tulsa’s Blacks.^[1]

For some reason only God knows, young Sarah refuses to press charges against the attacker, but Dick is nonetheless accused of rape. Immediately, hordes of outraged whites attack and vandalize Tulsa’s elegant Black neighborhood. The next day, May 31, 1921, private planes bomb the area to quell the protests of Blacks generated by the attack of mobs from other neighborhoods. Hundreds of buildings in the district are destroyed by the fire of the outraged whites and more than nine thousand residents lose their homes. Almost one hundred men, women and children, mostly Black, die in the massacre. Six thousand of the same color end up in prison.

Two years earlier, the good Winston Churchill, in the face of criticism over the English gas attacks in Afghanistan, Palestine and against the Kurds in the Middle East, had responded: «I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. It would spread a lively terror.»^[2]

On June 11, young Sarah Page insists, this time in the popular newspaper Appeal to Reason: «When he grabbed my arm, I screamed and he ran out immediately.»^[3] But nothing is more futile than trying to pull a believer out of their conviction. If reality does not adapt to desires, so much the worse for reality. In the decades to come, infrastructure development plans in the United States will cross the country and major cities with dozens of new and monumental highways. Many of them, by the grace of coincidence, will make technical detours, separating Black neighborhoods and communities from white ones and serving the development of centers with a majority white population. Tulsa will not be the exception and, in this way, after being devastated by fire and hatred, it will be mortally segregated and disconnected by the new northern highway.

Effectively erased from popular memory and from school textbooks, the Tulsa massacre in Oklahoma is the first recorded aerial bombing on U.S. soil, although it is still not the first military bombing of a civilian population, studied and organized with multiple scientific innovations, as would occur six years later in Ocotal, Nicaragua, to reverse the victory of a rebel named Augusto Sandino, who had cornered the Marines in a town building. This is a private bombing. The one in Nicaragua will be a government experiment. There are some differences.

Pero se parecen mucho.

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^[1] That same year, in Birmingham, Alabama, newly elected President Warren Harding says that Blacks should obtain «full citizenship.» The police and the press are outraged and Mississippi Senator Byron Pat Harrison protests that «if we accept the president’s theory… we would have to accept the possibility that one day this country could have a Negro president.»

^[2] Upon the taking of Palestine by the new State of Israel, the same Churchill declared: «I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the Black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.»

^[3] Appeal to Reason was an influential newspaper of the Socialist Party of the United States with more than half a million subscribers. After several decades of intense activity, it was abruptly closed in 1922.

(*From La frontera salvaje. 200 años de fanatismo anglosajón en América Latina, 2021)

Other African American economic centers comparable to Greenwood

Beyond the paradigmatic case of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, other African American commercial districts flourished which, against all odds, reached equally extraordinary levels of economic prosperity and vibrant community organization in the first decades of the twentieth century. Among the most emblematic examples are Sweet Auburn in Atlanta; Jackson Ward in Richmond; Deep Deuce in Oklahoma City; the U Street Corridor in Washington, D.C.; and the Farish Street Historic District in Jackson, Mississippi.

These districts shared a common structural feature: they constituted enclaves of African American economic autonomy in contexts of legal segregation, hosting banks, theaters, hotels, churches, professional offices and Black-owned businesses that operated on the margins of the white economic system, while simultaneously serving as spaces of cultural and political cohesion. Many of these communities managed to sustain their economic vitality for several decades, despite the adverse context of the Jim Crow regime.

However, the persistence of these districts did not exempt them from a subsequent pattern of decline, materialized through three main avenues: urban renewal policies, the construction of interstate highways and systematic public disinvestment. These mechanisms, already identified in the spatial segregation processes analyzed in previous sections, operated here as a second phase of erosion, different but complementary to the episodes of collective violence described earlier.

Taken together, these cases make it possible to identify a recurring pattern in U.S. urban history: economically dynamic African American communities were subjected, at first, to forms of direct racial violence, institutional discrimination, or a combination of both; and subsequently, to infrastructure and urban planning projects that consolidated their displacement, territorial fragmentation or economic decline. This sequential pattern—from explicit violence to institutionalized planning—suggests that the dismantling of Black economic prosperity in twentieth-century America cannot be attributed to isolated causes, but responds to a structural continuity of exclusion mechanisms that, although they changed form over time, remained consistent in their effects on the economic and territorial autonomy of these communities.

Urban highways as an instrument of spatial segregation

During the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. highway planning consciously and aggressively used the routing of urban highways as a weapon of racial segregation, tearing apart and splitting in two consolidated African American neighborhoods. Among the most compelling and painfully documented cases in the specialized literature are the cities of Detroit, New Orleans, Miami, Nashville and Syracuse, whose road intervention processes have been the subject of meticulous historical and urban scrutiny that reveals with stark clarity the depth of these injustices.

The underlying objectives of these interventions responded to a combined logic of three interrelated purposes: (1) to facilitate the transport of the suburban population (predominantly white) to urban centers of work and consumption; (2) to eliminate from the urban fabric those neighborhoods administratively classified as «undesirable,» a category that in practice systematically coincided with zones of high African American population concentration; and (3) to deliberately separate Black communities from the commercial and residential areas of greatest economic value.

The construction of the interstate highway system between the 1950s and 1970s was one of the most effective instruments of spatial segregation in the twentieth-century United States. Although this infrastructure policy was officially justified by arguments of mobility and economic development, an extensive body of academic research has documented that its routes disproportionately affected African American, Latino and immigrant communities. As a result, hundreds of thousands of residents were displaced and their economic and cultural centers systematically destroyed, interrupting a natural development, as was the case of colonies in the rest of the world.

This pattern fits within the same structural continuity identified in the previously analyzed cases: the progressive substitution of explicit collective violence (as a mechanism of community dismantling during the early decades of the century) by apparently neutral instruments of state planning, whose discriminatory effects operated through the technical ordering of territory rather than through direct force.

Jacksonville, Florida

Among the most representative examples of this pattern of spatial segregation through road infrastructure, the neighborhood of LaVilla in Jacksonville, Florida, is one of the most clearly documented cases within the state context. The name comes from a slave-labor plantation established in 1851 that in turn took it from an area previously occupied by Spain until 1821. During the Civil War it was a refuge for freed Blacks. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was already a small city administered by elected African Americans.

For most of the twentieth century, LaVilla was consolidated as the main African American urban center of Jacksonville, functioning simultaneously as a commercial district of economic importance and as the cultural center of jazz and entertainment in the region. The neighborhood housed a robust institutional infrastructure, made up of churches, schools, hotels and African American–owned businesses, which earned it popular recognition as the «Harlem of the South,» in reference to its New York counterpart due to its cultural density and economic vitality.

Between the 1960s and 1970s, this community fabric was subjected to a process of deliberate fragmentation through the construction of large-scale road infrastructure. Interstate 95 cut directly through the neighborhood, and later the connections with Interstate 10 were added, creating a crossroads of road corridors that consolidated the rupture of urban space. This intervention implied the expropriation of large sectors of the neighborhood and the displacement of thousands of residents, replicating the pattern of Detroit, New Orleans, Miami, Nashville and Syracuse.

The result of this process was twofold: on the one hand, (1) an irreversible physical fragmentation of the neighborhood, cut up by interstate road corridors; on the other, (2) the collapse of its local economy, with the consequent loss of the institutional and commercial base that had sustained its development for decades. The case of LaVilla thus exemplifies how transport infrastructure planning (apparently neutral in its technical justification) operated as an effective mechanism of community dismantling in a context of structural racial segregation, consistent with the national pattern identified in U.S. urban historiography.

Overtown, Miami

Within the panorama of spatial segregation through road infrastructure in the southeastern United States, the neighborhood of Overtown in Miami is another paradigmatic case, comparable in magnitude and cultural impact to that of LaVilla in Jacksonville.

Overtown was consolidated during the first half of the twentieth century as the main center of African American cultural and economic life in Miami, reaching a level of recognition equivalent to other districts analyzed in this work, which earned it the nickname «Harlem of the South»—a designation that, as noted in the case of Jacksonville, tended to be used recurrently for the main African American urban centers of the U.S. South during the era of legal segregation.

The fragmentation of the neighborhood was produced by the convergence of two large-scale road corridors: Interstate 95 and the Dolphin Expressway, both routed in such a way that they directly cut through the community’s urban fabric. This double road intervention reproduces the pattern of corridor convergence also identified in the case of LaVilla, where the intersection of I-95 and I-10 produced a similar fragmentation effect.

The result of this intervention was the displacement of 10,000 residents, a figure that places Overtown among the cases of greatest demographic magnitude within the corpus of examples analyzed. In addition to this displacement came the disappearance of hundreds of African American–owned businesses, as well as the irreversible loss of what had been one of the most important African American cultural centers in the state of Florida. The case of Overtown thus reaffirms the consistency of the national pattern identified in this study: the convergence of interstate road corridors systematically operated as an instrument for dismantling economically prosperous African American communities, regardless of the specific geographic region in which this process took place.

New Orleans: the Tremé neighborhood

Among the cases analyzed, the intervention on Claiborne Avenue in the historic neighborhood of Tremé, New Orleans, stands out strikingly compared to the previously examined examples: here the imprint of an alternative, lucid and possible routing decision that was nevertheless deliberately discarded by the authorities is clearly revealed.

Before this intervention, Claiborne Avenue was the central economic axis of the Tremé neighborhood, one of the oldest African American enclaves in the United States, whose commercial and cultural importance has been extensively documented in the specialized literature on urban segregation.

Unlike the cases of Jacksonville and Miami, where highways were routed through newly opened corridors, in this case there was a technically viable alternative: a nearby railroad corridor that would have made it possible to avoid directly affecting the commercial heart of the neighborhood. Nevertheless, the authorities chose to build an elevated viaduct directly over Claiborne Avenue, a decision that prioritized considerations other than minimizing the impact on the resident African American community. This routing choice reinforces the interpretation that the intervention did not respond solely to technical road engineering criteria, but also operated as a mechanism for the deliberate reconfiguration of racialized urban space.

The white neighborhood of the Vieux Carré (French Quarter), neighboring Tremé, avoided a similar fate in 1964, but the community, with greater resources and political influence, managed to stop the project in 1969 after a five-year struggle. Tremé, without that capacity for political influence, was not so fortunate and construction began in 1966.

The result of this decision translated into four interrelated effects: (1) the destruction of the commercial fabric that sustained the neighborhood’s economic activity; (2) the loss of the public spaces that had historically structured the community’s social and cultural life; (3) the consequent decrease in property values in the affected corridor, with its correlate in the loss of accumulated wealth for residents; and (4) more permanently, the physical division of the neighborhood, whose elevated viaduct continues to operate as a structural barrier to this day. The case of Claiborne Avenue thus illustrates how the availability of less disruptive technical alternatives did not, by itself, guarantee less harmful planning decisions for the affected African American communities, revealing the weight of extra-technical factors—of a racial and political nature—in the decision-making processes of mid-twentieth-century U.S. road engineering.

The case of Detroit: Black Bottom and Paradise Valley

Within the corpus of cases analyzed in this work, the road intervention on the neighborhoods of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley in Detroit is one of the largest-scale examples of convergent road infrastructure on a single African American economic enclave.

These neighborhoods formed the main African American economic and cultural center of the city of Detroit, replicating the pattern identified in the previously examined cases of LaVilla (Jacksonville), Overtown (Miami) and Tremé (New Orleans): a consolidated district of Black-owned businesses, institutions and cultural life, developed in the context of structural segregation in the first half of twentieth-century America.

The Housing Act of 1949 financed the demolition under the concept of «slum clearance» and work began in 1959. The new highway would be inaugurated in 1964. By 1970, the census showed that the Lafayette Park area (built over the former Black Bottom) was already 75 percent white and middle class.

Unlike the previous cases in which the impact came from one or two specific roads, the case of Detroit is distinguished by the convergence of three large-scale road corridors on the same territory: Interstate 75, Interstate 375 and the Chrysler Freeway. This triple overlap of road infrastructure is, within the set of cases analyzed, one of the most intensive examples of road saturation directed at an African American enclave, which allows us to hypothesize that the magnitude of the resulting destruction is directly related to the number of convergent corridors on the same territory.

The result of this triple intervention was the physical destruction of both neighborhoods as a whole, eliminating what had been the city’s main African American economic center. Unlike the cases of Overtown and Claiborne Avenue, where it was possible to quantify population displacement and business loss in a specific way, the Detroit case is characterized in the available sources by a more general reference to the magnitude of the damage, suggesting the need for additional research to determine the exact figures of displacement and economic loss associated with this case, in line with the level of detail achieved in the previously documented examples.

Other representative cases: Rondo, Hayti, and Jefferson Street

In addition to the larger-scale cases examined so far, U.S. urban historiography documents three other episodes that reproduce the same pattern of deliberate road destruction of consolidated African American business districts, albeit with a smaller volume of quantitative documentation available in the consulted sources.

In St. Paul, Minnesota, the construction of Interstate 94 destroyed the Rondo neighborhood, the city’s main African American community. The quantified impact of this intervention is one of the most precise within the corpus analyzed: it is estimated that more than 600 homes were demolished, around 300 businesses disappeared and approximately 7,000 residents were displaced, figures that place Rondo among the cases of greatest demographic magnitude examined, proportionally comparable to that of Overtown in Miami.

In Durham, North Carolina, the Durham Freeway (NC 147) cut through the Hayti neighborhood, one of the most important African American business districts in the U.S. South, replicating the pattern already identified in the cases of LaVilla and Overtown: the deliberate elimination of a center of Black economic prosperity through the routing of a newly built road corridor.

In Nashville, Interstate 40 gravely affected the historic African American neighborhood of Jefferson Street, a district that concentrated higher education institutions, music clubs and businesses, and whose destruction represents, in particular, the loss of a cultural and institutional as well as commercial core.

These three cases, although documented with less quantitative detail than Detroit, Overtown or Rondo itself in some sources, confirm the geographic extent of the pattern identified in this study: the construction of interstate highways consistently operated across the entire U.S. territory—from the Midwest (Rondo) to the Deep South (Hayti, Jefferson Street)—as an instrument for dismantling African American economic and institutional prosperity, regardless of the regional particularities of each affected city.

Atlanta and the national pattern: synthesis of a recurrent model

In Atlanta, the construction of the Downtown Connector and Interstate 20 consolidated physical barriers between white and African American neighborhoods, reinforcing residential segregation patterns that already existed prior to their routing. Unlike other cases analyzed, in Atlanta road infrastructure did not inaugurate racial separation of urban space; instead, it deepened and physically crystallized segregation that was already operating through other mechanisms—zoning, redlining, discriminatory real estate practices—functioning as a structural reinforcement rather than an initial cause.

This case also makes it possible to synthesize the national pattern underlying the set of cases examined in this work. The mid-twentieth-century road interventions consistently shared four structural characteristics throughout the United States: first, routes often targeted neighborhoods with less political and economic power, as their institutional capacity to resist was more limited; second, expropriations were significantly cheaper in historically disinvested communities, which economically incentivized the choice of these routes over less disruptive alternatives; third, the cumulative loss of housing, businesses and institutions durably weakened the economic base of these communities, interrupting wealth accumulation processes sustained over generations; and fourth, once built, the highways themselves acted as permanent physical barriers, hindering integration and mobility between adjacent neighborhoods.

In recent years, this recognition of the discriminatory pattern has led to the emergence of urban repair initiatives in various cities—including Jacksonville, Syracuse, Rochester and New Orleans—aimed at removing, burying or redesigning some of these road corridors. However, as documented in the specific cases examined above, the degree to which these initiatives have been implemented varies substantially: while Syracuse and Rochester show concrete progress with binding implementation schedules, other cases—such as Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans—remain stalled, suggesting that rhetorical recognition of historical harm is a necessary but not sufficient condition for its effective repair.

Syracuse: a viaduct as a paradigm of urban repair

Among the urban repair projects identified in this work, the so-called I-81 Viaduct Project—also known as the Community Grid—constitutes, so far, the most concrete and advanced example of an effective reversal of the damage caused by the segregationist road infrastructure of the mid-twentieth century

The elevated viaduct that crossed downtown Syracuse, New York, was built in the 1960s on a structure originally inaugurated in 1957. Its route displaced more than 1,300 families and fragmented entire city neighborhoods, destroying in particular the local African American district, in line with the pattern identified in the previously analyzed cases of Detroit, Jacksonville, Miami and New Orleans.

Unlike the cases of Claiborne Avenue (New Orleans) and the Illia Highway (Buenos Aires), where repair attempts stalled or were executed only partially, the Syracuse project is in a phase of effective implementation. The intervention contemplates the complete demolition of the elevated viaduct and its replacement by a ground-level boulevard, called Business Loop 81, which returns the road layout to the pedestrian and urban scale of the affected neighborhood. Long-distance traffic, in turn, is rerouted to the city’s perimeter through the expansion of Interstate 481, which will assume the I-81 designation. The new urban corridor will also include a 45-foot-wide (13.7-meter) tree-lined central park, conceived as a space for symbolic and functional repair of the fragmented community fabric.

The completion of the project is scheduled for 2028, which places Syracuse, within the set of cases analyzed, as the example with the greatest temporal and budgetary concreteness among the urban repair initiatives identified to date.

The Syracuse case allows a methodologically relevant contrast to be established with the previously examined cases of stalled or partial urban repair (New Orleans, Buenos Aires), suggesting that the decisive variable for the success of these processes does not lie solely in the discursive recognition of historical harm, but in the existence of sustained financing, continued political will and an effectively binding implementation schedule.

Robert Moses and the segregationist urbanism of New York

One of the most effective ways of exercising power is to present it as a technical necessity. A road seems like an engineering work; a highway, a solution to traffic. But before the concrete, there is a decision about territory: where the infrastructure will go, what will be demolished, who will benefit and who will have to move.

That was the legacy of Robert Moses, one of the men who most profoundly transformed New York during the twentieth century. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, he redesigned parks, bridges, highways, housing and major urban projects. Although he was never elected by citizens to an executive office, he controlled public agencies and financial resources that allowed him to intervene decisively in the city’s physical configuration.

His vision of urban modernization was closely linked to the automobile, just as in the Middle Ages justice was linked to the horse and the nobility’s cavalry. New York had to facilitate circulation and build infrastructure capable of sustaining metropolitan growth. The problem was that the new routes did not cross an empty territory. They passed through neighborhoods where people lived, businesses operated and communities had existed for decades.

The Cross Bronx Expressway is one of the most important examples. Its construction began in 1948 and cut through densely populated sectors of the Bronx that were initially white and working-class, mostly Italian, Irish and Jewish. Thousands of residents were displaced and numerous homes were demolished. The cost of the work did not appear only in public budgets: it was also expressed in the loss of housing, businesses and community networks.

This impact took place in a city already deeply marked by residential segregation and economic and racial inequality. Low-income communities had less capacity to oppose expropriations and to find alternative housing in a real estate market permeated by discrimination. For this reason, even if it is not necessary to attribute to Moses a direct racial intention behind every project, it is necessary to examine their consequences within that context. Debating the intention of each project does not eliminate the structural problem: an urban policy can produce racially unequal effects without explicitly formulating a racial policy.

The Moses case also raises an institutional question. In The Power Broker, Robert Caro documented how a non-elected official was able to accumulate an extraordinary capacity to determine New York’s development. His influence lay in public authorities, financial mechanisms and administrative structures that allowed him to act with considerable independence from the electoral process. The story reveals a less visible dimension of democracy. Citizens may elect mayors, governors and legislators and, at the same time, live for generations within decisions made by administrative bodies or public authorities that do not answer directly to them. Urban space thus becomes a concrete expression of power relations that almost always remain outside democratic debate.

The consequences were existential for communities that already occupied vulnerable positions. Infrastructure did not, by itself, create U.S. segregation, but it fossilized it. A highway could connect parts of the city and, at the same time, isolate neighborhoods that were left on either side of it.

For this reason, Moses’s legacy cannot be reduced to a discussion about roads. His story belongs to a broader tradition of U.S. urbanism in which renewal, development and modernization justified the displacement of populations with little political capacity. The same pattern, with important differences, can be studied in other infrastructure projects that affected Black, Indigenous and low-income communities. Urbanism is never neutral.

The highway ran through neighborhoods that at that time were predominantly white working-class. In East Tremont, a Jewish neighborhood with areas inhabited by Italians and Irish, just a one-mile stretch required the demolition of some 1,500 apartments. This destruction of a neighborhood of mostly poor whites created the conditions for the lowering of property values and the arrival of Latinos and African Americans.

Today, Bronx residents, especially children, have asthma rates three times the national average. With 29 percent of the population identifying as African American and 55 percent as Hispanic or Latino, these low-income communities face greater exposure to dust, pollution and allergens that trigger or worsen asthma, especially among their children.

Reversions

In Flint, Michigan, between 2014 and 2019, the water crisis became public knowledge when the local government changed the source of drinking water from the Detroit network to the Flint River to cut municipal costs. In the process, they omitted the legally required anticorrosive treatment, causing the acidic water to erode the obsolete lead pipe network and release extremely high doses of this toxin into thousands of homes. The mass exposure caused serious public health problems (especially in thousands of children vulnerable to lead poisoning) and triggered a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak, causing health emergencies.

In 2025, in its first week in office, the Trump administration eliminated the Justice40 initiative, which required that 40 percent of the benefits of federal environmental and climate programs reach disadvantaged communities, and closed all environmental justice offices in the federal government. It also prohibited federal agencies from assessing whether certain demographic groups would be disproportionately affected by projects, as well as references to climate change, disadvantaged communities, equity and environmental justice.

In Shiloh, Alabama, the expansion of a state highway in a majority-Black rural community has caused severe flooding: each storm erodes more than twelve inches of soil, causing economic losses and the loss of homeowners’ insurance for residents. A new highway project proposed in the area runs through populations that are mostly Black.

In Fresno, California, there is ongoing litigation against Caltrans over the approval of a highway expansion project, alleging violations of the state anti-discrimination law and the fair housing law.

At the Brent Spence Bridge in Cincinnati, there is a lawsuit over possible environmental and health impacts on minority communities, in an area where the original construction of I-75 had already displaced about 27,000 people, almost all of them Black.

Regarding the Kensington Expressway in Buffalo, NY, there was litigation over a reconnection project against the state for not considering the persistent environmental damage (asthma, poor air quality) in the majority-Black neighborhood of Humboldt Park.

Hispanic cases: California, Tampa, and the paradoxes of whitening

Alongside the African American racial segregation cases examined thus far, U.S. urban history records a parallel set of Hispanic experiences which, although less documented in mainstream historiography, reveal analogous structural patterns—and, in certain cases, a historical genealogy of resistance to slavery that contrasts significantly with the African American experience.

Among the documented examples of road infrastructure that disproportionately affected Hispanic communities, the case of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles stands out, where the construction of the East Los Angeles Interchange in the 1960s displaced approximately 15,000 residents, mostly Mexican Americans and other immigrants. The neighborhood, known for its multiethnic character—Jewish, Japanese, Mexican, Russian and Armenian—was systematically cut through by the convergence of several interstate highways, reproducing the saturation pattern already identified in the case of Detroit. Similarly, the Sugar Hill neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles was demolished to make way for Interstate 10.

The anti-slavery precedent of Mexican California

It is significant that when California entered the Union as a free state through the Compromise of 1850, this status did not respond solely to a political calculation of balance between slave and free states, but was inscribed in a legal continuity inherited from the Mexican period: Mexico had abolished slavery by decree of Vicente Guerrero in 1829, so California, as Mexican territory until 1848, was already legally a slavery-free territory before its U.S. annexation. The 1849 Constitutional Convention, held in Monterey, unanimously prohibited slavery, although available sources qualify that this decision responded more to a pragmatic calculation than to a sustained moral abolitionist conviction: gold miners did not want to compete with slave labor brought by Southerners. Even so, the prior resistance of the Mexican authorities of Texas and Coahuila to the 1829 abolition law itself—the departmental chief Ramón Músquiz withheld its publication to request an exemption in favor of slaveholding Anglo-American settlers—illustrates the structural tension between the Mexican legal framework and the slaveholding practices that Anglo-American colonists sought to preserve in northern Mexican territories, a tension that precedes and contextualizes the later conflict over the extension of slavery westward.

The integrated founding of Ybor City, Tampa

Another case of particular relevance is that of Ybor City, founded in 1885 by Spanish tobacco manufacturer Vicente Martínez Ybor, which became the founding settlement of the Cuban community in Tampa. Cuban migration to Florida, beginning with the Ten Years’ War in 1868, brought with it an explicit commitment to racial equality, rooted in the Cuban independence movement itself. The Instituto San Carlos in Key West, founded in 1871, housed one of the first racially integrated schools in the United States, and the labor organizations of Ybor City—such as La Resistencia—recruited workers without discriminating by race. This racially integrated microcosm, where white and Black Cubans lived together and shared spaces of mutual sociability, contrasted sharply with the prevailing racial order in the U.S. South at the time.

However, toward the end of the nineteenth century, the imposition of Jim Crow laws—Florida was the first state to pass segregationist train laws in 1887—progressively altered this dynamic. When Tampa annexed Ybor City in 1887, Anglo-American authorities required that mutual aid societies segregate their membership, which gave rise to La Sociedad de la Unión Martí-Maceo, an institution created specifically for Black Cubans excluded from the originally integrated clubs. This process shows how a racial segregation foreign to the Cuban cultural tradition was externally imposed on a community that had not previously practiced it, crystallizing a division that, according to the available evidence, did not exist or was irrelevant before the arrival of the Jim Crow regime in Florida.

Whitening as a survival strategy

This process of imposing segregation on Hispanic communities is linked, finally, to the broader phenomenon of blanqueamiento (racial whitening), a social, political and economic practice widespread in many Latin American countries and in U.S. Hispanic communities, aimed at symbolically and biologically approximating an ideal of whiteness. In the U.S. context, the adoption of a «white» racial identity by Hispanic communities—in a way analogous to the experience of Irish and Southern and Eastern European immigrants—operated as a functional survival strategy in the face of a legal and cultural system that granted differential privileges according to racial classification. For U.S. culture at the time, Cubans occupied an ambiguous racial status, situated «between Black and white,» similarly to Mexicans, Creoles and immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. The structural pressure to whiten (thus avoiding the legal and social restrictions of the Jim Crow regime) therefore did not stem from an autonomous aesthetic or ideological preference but from the pragmatic need to access the legal rights and cultural privileges reserved for the population classified as white, thereby reproducing within the Hispanic community itself the racializing logic that their traditions of origin explicitly rejected—such as the Cuban one before 1887.

Argentina: «Here the Blacks are us»

Villa 31: the highway that embraced the poor

Muhammad Ali visited Argentina in November 1971 and, after an exhibition match, was invited by union leaders José Ignacio Rucci (Secretary General of the CGT), Lorenzo Miguel (Secretary General of the UOM) and businessman Lorenzo Spadone to eat an asado at a metalworking factory in Lanús. At a certain point, Ali asked:

«Where are the Blacks?»

«You have them right next to you. Here we are the Blacks,» Rucci replied.

The phrase alluded to the term «cabecitas negras» (little Black heads), the derogatory nickname by which Argentine elites referred to migrant workers from the interior and the Peronist electorate. Although no society is free from racial discrimination, the difference was notable: in Argentina, the greatest discrimination was and is based on social class. Racial discrimination in the biological sense (as we analyze in other chapters, an invention of the sixteenth century) was weaker.

Let us now look at a concrete case of urban discrimination not focused on «race» but on social class—which in the United States tend to coincide, for historical reasons.

In the 1930s, a handful of European immigrants and dockworkers built their houses from nothing next to the Retiro train tracks in Buenos Aires, on that low-value land because it was too close to the river and too far from respectability. They had not been expelled by a fire or a massacre, as in Tulsa. They were expelled by something quieter: the geography of money.

When the highway arrived, it was not necessary to deliberately divert it toward the neighborhood, as in Tremé, Louisiana: the neighborhood was already there, poor and off the map, when the Illia decided to run over it. It is a subtle but decisive difference from the United States: there highways were built to destroy Black prosperity; here highways are built over poverty, like someone laying a carpet over a stain. The result is the same verb—divide—applied to a different noun: not race, but class, that other apartheid that does not need an identity card because it is already written on clothing, on accent, on neighborhood of origin.

The highway cuts the shantytown in two: Villa 31 on one side, Villa 31 bis on the other, as if a coroner had decided to perform an autopsy on a still living body. Under the embankment, between concrete columns that were never designed to have neighbors, shacks, chapels, twelve hundred families settle, learning to live with the constant roar of cars over their heads, as if all of Buenos Aires were reminding them, every minute, that they are literally trampled by the city that ignores them.

In 1990, Carlos Menem signed a decree transferring the occupied land to its inhabitants, a generous gesture made with the same hand that, a few years later, would privatize almost the very air breathed in the country. The villeros applauded at the time, like some Mexican peasants during the porfiriato at the end of the nineteenth century. No one told them that signing a decree and signing a deed are, in Argentina, two completely different acts of faith. For a poor person to own something is the best way to strip them of that something at the price of necessity.

In 2016 someone had a brilliant idea: move the highway route, they said, and turn the old alignment into an «urban promenade.» An enthusiastic journalist compared it to New York’s High Line—that elegant walkway where tourists with three-dollar coffees walk on what was once an industrial railroad. No one noticed the irony: proposing the world’s most famous gentrification model as a solution for the poorest neighborhood in downtown Buenos Aires is like prescribing champagne to quench thirst. It is like in Uruguay calling the shantytowns cantegril in reference to the country’s wealthiest neighborhoods in Punta del Este.

The project, of course, stalled in 2018. «Prioritization of other road works,» the official statement said, that bureaucratic phrase that in any language means the same thing: later. The poor people’s «later,» as we know, has a habit of never arriving, or of arriving disguised as another promise with another name and another mayor.

Invisible walls: physical and virtual cities

Every city has its walls. Some appear on maps; others are only discovered when one tries to cross them. There are bridges that unite two shores and avenues that bring a neighborhood closer to the center, but there are also bridges and avenues that divide. The difference usually lies in who decided to build them, who benefited and who had to suffer their construction.

The investments of modern empires’ industrial surpluses in infrastructure, in railways and ports in Africa and Latin America, served to fossilize an extractivist structure, which prevented independent development of economies, societies and their local cultures. The same logic materialized in the urban layout of cities within the empires themselves.

Robert Moses did not have to declare a war on New York’s poor. It was enough for him to draw a highway. The Cross Bronx Expressway cut through working-class neighborhoods and transformed entire communities. In Detroit, I-375 ran through Black Bottom, one of the centers of the city’s African American life. In Buenos Aires, during the military dictatorship, highways also pushed their way through homes and entire neighborhoods while the State disappeared people.

There is a significant coincidence among these stories: almost no one talked about destruction. They talked about circulation, modernization, efficiency, progress. Words matter. They are almost always the first wall.

Other invisible walls hide behind the design of facilities or social policies. A bench with a fixed armrest in the middle prevents someone from sleeping on it without the need to expel them. A rent increase that becomes impossible to afford can produce the same result as an eviction. A neighborhood can change its inhabitants completely without anyone formally approving the expulsion of its former residents.

Gentrification has that advantage for those who manage it: it does not need soldiers. Price does the work. We then call that process progress and development. It serves to justify a highway, a tower, a port, a gated community or a new city. The most obvious question is almost never asked: development and progress for whom?

The smart city and the new nomads

Now the walls are more sophisticated. They are no longer always made only of brick and concrete, but of shares, algorithms, data, access systems and ways of consumption.

+Colonia, in Uruguay, appears in this new landscape with the words that today almost inevitably accompany any large real estate project: innovation, sustainability, technology, connectivity, community. And a particularly interesting figure also appears: the digital nomad.

For much of history, the nomad was someone who had to be controlled, settled or expelled. Now that person can become a desirable category if they arrive with a computer, dollar income and a high-speed connection. The old gated communities had a virtue that today seems almost naive: they showed the border. There was a gatehouse and someone who decided who entered. In the new smart cities the border is less visible. No one has to tell you that you do not belong in the neighborhood. It is enough that the cost of living there, the services available and the economic logic of the place make that prohibition unnecessary.

The result is more effective precisely because it seems natural, legitimate and, obviously, protected by the law and the sacred right to private property. Colonia del Sacramento was born as a colonial enclave in a dispute between empires. Centuries later, the possibility of another type of enclave appears, now associated with international capital, technology and new forms of work. There is no longer talk of conquest, but of innovation. Soldiers no longer arrive. Investors, developers, platforms and global professionals arrive.

The language has changed. The relationship with territory not so much. As in colonial times or under imperial urbanism, the problem of deciding what will happen to those who already live there has not changed either. Because no smart city functions without workers who are, in the capitalist and supremacist mentality of its promoters, far less smart. Someone has to clean, cook, repair, drive, build, guard. Someone has to do all those jobs that allow others to work from the beach with a laptop. Well, it is most likely that this new segregation will be sold as «new job opportunities,» just as was done in the days of slavery.

Technology can change the stage. It does not necessarily change the hierarchy. On the contrary, history indicates that it tends to radicalize it: new inventions, new innovations are quickly hijacked by the privatization efforts of those who have capital and who, as a result, reinvest their surpluses to reinforce the gilded cage.

As if this were not enough material for debate (a debate that the functional governments of colonies are quick to avoid in their erotic urgency), natural resources and the environmental impact that this progress for a few will exact from the peoples, not from the investors, are not seriously considered. A city may have solar panels, green areas, efficient buildings and smart management systems. All that can be positive. But no technology automatically turns into public that which has been privatized. A space can be ecological and exclusionary at the same time. It can be green and profoundly unequal.

The final blow is delivered by the governments of the day, promoting and justifying the accumulation of capital derived from this new «great development opportunity.» The government begins by ignoring the population regarding a project with high social and ecological impact. It then defends itself by mentioning that the entire project will not cost the public treasury a dollar, since it will be financed with private and foreign capital.

Money is the old trick. A big investor appears with other shareholders’ money. He then puts in less than promised or the project requires more. The government will put in the rest because it is another «too big to fail.» Not to mention infrastructure and resources that were, are and will be funded by the State. Once the new reality is in place, the rescue company raises its demands, since it has a captive group of workers and a region under its control. It thus continues with further privatization of public assets and direct interference in the State derived from its gravitational power. They take over scarce resources, in their countries of origin, such as fresh water, land with low taxes, a banana-republic legal system, and the faith of the colonized in the idea that new technology, in the hands of a hermetic sect, will make them more developed and independent. As if that were not enough, the ideological and virtual ecosystem ends up in the hands of this sect of depravers which, as we have already analyzed elsewhere, is rooted in a perverse, supremacist and imperialist ideology.

But cities are not inevitable machines. They are accumulated political decisions that can also be reversed. An avenue can destroy a neighborhood or become, with different planning, a connection between communities. An urban scar can remain for generations or be transformed into a park. A neighborhood can be designed to attract capital or to ensure that those who already live there can continue to live there with a better quality of life and a better sense of belonging and justice.

It is also possible to imagine cities where basic services are not concentrated in a few centers and whose objective is not the profit of a few according to the laws of the stock markets; where decent, healthy housing does not depend on the income of its inhabitants and where citizens have something more than a non-binding opinion on the transformation of their own urban space.

The most effective walls are those that no one recognizes as walls anymore.

Jorge Majfud, September 2026

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