The Design, Intended or Not, of Segregation
Suburbs are socially 'designed,' intentionally or (more often) not, to achieve certain collective and individual goals. They are designed either explicitly through the logic of top-down centralized planning, either public and corporate, or indirectly through a plethora of public policies, market decisions, social attitudes and local regulatory practices. Most suburbs, in reality, reflect both logics. This is not meant to suggest yet another conspiracy theory of urban development. Rather, it is a reaffirmation on the one hand of the crucial but problematic role of the state, and on the other hand of the uneven consequences of individual decisions and corporate actions in shaping the nature and form of the suburban landscape. My hypothesis is that this landscape is becoming more unequal, fragmented and socially polarized. There are mounting troubles in paradise and those problems will increasingly come to dominate our research and planning agenda in the next decade (Hayden, 1984; Baldassare, 1986; Blakely, 1992; Langdon, 1994; Palen, 1994; Downs, 1994). The need to redesign the suburbs, both old and new, may well be the next frontier in urban research and planning (Bourne 1996, 164).
A quarter-century after Larry Bourne wrote his 1996 essay, “Reinventing the Suburbs: Old Myths and New Realities,” its thesis appears as a warning sign in the rear-view mirror. Blissfully ignored along the road it is commonly known as the status quo. Yet, as is always the case with hindsight, it is now rendered with vivid clarity. It demands a heightened re-evaluation of the term “systemic racism.” If the individual public and private decisions and actions which Bourne describes are encoded with racial biases, then the resulting urban environment, intentionally or not, will privilege certain ethnocultural groups and disadvantaging others.1 Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of individual policies favour a “normative” white culture, while disenfranchising Black, Indigenous, Latino, and other ethnocultural minority groups2 resulting in a cumulative assemblage of marginalization which manifests within the fabric of our cities and suburbs. A phenomenon that George Lipsitz refers to as “the racialization of space and the spatialization of race.”3
Lipsitz frames spatial imagery through “whiteness,” reflecting a normative majority benefitting from the cumulative assemblage of individual policies and mechanisms, and “blackness,” ethnocultural minorities which develop sociability and insular community values to subvert and circumvent the obstacles imposed by whiteness.4 Spatially, whiteness manifests as the capitalistic commoditization of land and space and the resulting financial power which it accrues. While blackness emerges within the gaps in white society, and therefore spatially manifests in the overlooked and interstitial areas of the city. “Journalists, politicians, scholars, and land-use professionals have long been cognizant that these views represent the experiences and opinions of different races, but they have been less discerning about the degree to which these differences in views stem from the experiences and opinions of different spaces."5 The resulting socio-spatial formation of blackness emerges as a result of the shroud which whiteness places on the urban citizenship rights of Black residents. Lipsitz clarifies that not all whites embrace whiteness but do inherently benefit from it; while not all Blacks identify with blackness but are subjected to it.6 In cities and regions of increasing financial polarization, these spatial imageries lead to segregation as income inequality and economic disparity pushes groups geographically farther apart.
Perhaps one of the clearest examples of segregation that emerged as a result of the dichotomy between whiteness and blackness can be seen during the Postwar years. Rapid suburban expansion, due to a growing white middle class, “hollowed out” many of the inner cities leaving behind impoverished pockets of ethnocultural communities within urban cores. Such was the case in St. Louis in the early 1950s.7 At first, this resulted in a rapid decline of real estate values within the central city, with areas functionally becoming ghettos or slums.8 However, within a few years, the increased vacancy rate allowed for a spatial reclamation of the central city and organic de-ghettoization that achieved the goal set forth by the social housing policies of the city.9 In her essay, Katharine Bristol dismantles the myth that the Pruitt-Igoe housing project was a “failure of High Modernism”10 and the inability of architecture to provide low-income housing. However, when viewed through the context of Bourne’s thesis and Lipsitz’s spatial imagery of whiteness and blackness, it becomes clear the “failure” of the project was precisely the policy decisions and broader financial mechanisms imposed by whiteness that designed a social housing project doomed to fail. Ironically, the modernist housing project proposed by city officials, business owners, and made possible by the agenda of a normative white federal government, failed to predict what would become central to Neo-liberalism and the financial advantages entrenched in whiteness: “the self-regulation of the free market.” Pruitt-Igoe was both conceived of, and killed by, whiteness. This is not because of the failure of its architecture. This reframes the discussion about what role literal designers, architects and urban planners, have in addressing racial-spatial segregation. In many ways, segregation is the manifestation of much broader and deeper-rooted inequalities and institutionalized racism within North America’s socio-technic construction. While designers have significant influence over the physical configurations and qualities of the built environments they contribute to, their agency is often limited by budgetary considerations and the financial agendas of their public or private clients—systems which in themselves are deeply embedded with whiteness.
Completely external to the traditional role of designers are the civic relationships and social tensions within neighbourhoods or between ethnocultural communities. Progressive planning practices have placed greater emphasis on “social mixing” as a means of addressing wealth polarization,11 however, this assumes that desegregation is the desired outcome by all residents. For many minority communities within North America, particularly Black, the cultural wounds of racial oppression and marginalization are still too fresh.12 “Many people in our nation, especially white people, believe that racism has ended. Consequently, when black people attempt to give voice to the pain of racist victimization, we are likely to be accused of playing the 'race' card. And there are few if any public spaces where black folks can express fear of whiteness.”13 As designers grappling with these issues, perhaps the first step within a design process is to recognize the pain which the socio-technic systems informing our projects have inflicted. Reflections must be undertaken before even the first sketches. Secondly, to evaluate whether the whiteness of a proposal is impacting the solidarity and safe space that a community has fought to achieve. While the progressive knee-jerk reaction is to eradicate segregation, doing so within a society still deeply entrenched by racism14 takes away the counter-spatial asylum generated by blackness.15
Until these issues are fully recognized and addressed, whether, in the form of reparations16 or some yet-to-be-discovered alternative, the design of our urban and public space will continue to maintain a systemically racist status-quo. Much like the myth of Pruitt-Igoe, we cannot place the sole burden of this on designers. Instead, the responsibility is on us as a citizen to demand and affect change. It is only through repairing and rebuilding the individual attitudes, policies, and mechanisms17 of our wickedly-complex world that we can begin to design a world without segregation.
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1 George Lipsitz, “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race: Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape,” Landscape Journal 26, no. 1 (2007): 11. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43323751?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
2 Ibid, 12.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid, 14.
5 Ibid, 19.
6 Ibid, 14.
7 Katharine G. Bristol, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” Journal of Architectural Education (1984-) 44, no. 3 (1991): 163. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1425266?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
8 Ibid, 164.
9 Ibid, 166.
10 Ibid, 163.
11 Justus Uitermark, “‘Social Mixing’ and the Management of Disadvantaged Neighbourhoods: The Dutch Policy of Urban Restructuring Revisited,” Urban Studies 40, no. 3 (March 2003): 531–49; Marion Roberts, “Sharing Space: Urban Design and Social Mixing in Mixed Income New Communities,” Planning Theory & Practice 8, no. 2 (June 1, 2007): 183–204; Lees, Loretta Lees, “Gentrification and Social Mixing: Towards an Inclusive Urban Renaissance?” Urban Studies 45, no. 12 (November 2008): 2449–70.
12 Bell Hooks, “Again – Segregation must End,” in Belonging: A Culture of Place, (New York: Routledge, 2009), 71. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780203888018/chapters/10.4324/9780203888018-8
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid, 72.
15 Lipsitz, “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race," 14.
16 Ta-Hehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
17 Steven J. Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot (MIT Press, 2014), 221-239.
