How Urban Design Perpetuates Racial Inequality-And What We Can Do Abou

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How Urban Design Perpetuates Racial Inequality–And

What We Can Do About It
Our cities weren’t created equal. But they don’t have to stay that way.
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BY D I A N A B U D DS
LO N G R E A D
Cities are complex organisms shaped by myriad forces, but their organization bears the fingerprints
of planners and policy makers who have shaped them for decades. At the root of many of these
practices is racism, and modern cities bear the legacy of that discrimination.
In an era of social protest, when movements like Black Lives Matter are bringing inequality back into
the national conversation, it’s time to reassess the practices that have perpetuated these problems–
and how we fix them.
But the first step is understanding the urban policies that got us here. For decades, planners slashed
through neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal and slum clearance, underwritten by federal
funding from the Housing Act of 1949 and the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, displacing residents
using tactics like eminent domain and condemnation laws.
As a result, much of our highway system courses through black neighborhoods (which helps explain
why they’ve often become spaces of civil protest). “This method fails,” wrote F O Lgrassroots
LOW LOurbanist
GIN Jane
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Jacobs in the Death and Life of Great American Cities, one of the most influential planning books
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its own tincture of extra S U B S C R
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hardship and disruption. At worst, it destroys neighborhoods where constructive and improving
communities exist and where the situation calls for encouragement rather than destruction.”
“Legislation can always be changed. It’s very hard to tear down a

bridge once it’s up,” Moses told his biographer, Robert Caro.
Access to public transportation–which affects everyone in a city but disproportionately impacts low-
income and minority neighborhoods–is another factor. In the San Francisco Bay Area, some have
argued that the scarcity of public transit in certain neighborhoods is an intentional tactic to keep
affluent communities isolated and more segregated. Robert Moses purposefully designed some
overpasses on Long Island to be too low for buses to drive under them, thereby segregating one of
its beaches from low-income residents. “Legislation can always be changed. It’s very hard to tear
down a bridge once it’s up,” he told his biographer, Robert Caro.
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Realtors have also contributed to racial segregation through practices like blockbusting–using scare
tactics to convince white homeowners to sell cheaply–and racial steering–guiding prospective
homebuyers to certain neighborhoods based on race. This process has led to increased racial
tensions, as is what happened in East New York, a low-income neighborhood in Brooklyn which has
recently been rezoned in an effort that some say will lead to more racial displacement. Others view
the rezoning as necessary to boost affordable housing stock in the city.
These examples are by no means an exhaustive list of how racism has influenced modern cities, but
representations of how complex and deep the problem is. Recognizing that design can’t solve all of
our social problems, we asked architects, scholars, urbanists, and planners to share their
recommendations for ways design can be a starting point for more equitable cities.
REDESIGN DESIGNERS
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Justin Moore, an architecture professor at Columbia University, believes that while designers focus 
on creative solutions for urban problems, issues that are rarely broached are shortfalls within the
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methodology of design education.
“There is a need to redesign the designers, and to give them the tools and competencies to work
within social constructs and spatial contexts that they are meant to serve. Designers spend much of
their academic and professional training to build the spatial, technical, communication, and critical-
thinking skills that are needed to do the difficult work of transforming spaces and places. They use
their skills, often with good intentions and ‘best practices,’ toward results that may not align with what
is needed or wanted in a given context.
“There are major blind spots, and the design professions and design education systems need to
develop other sensibilities, frameworks, skills, and technologies for designers and design
F O L LOW LO G practice
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that includes not only social or community engagement but also better understanding and relations.
“The demographics of the design fields are improved from a few generations ago, but there are still
very few people of color or from lower-income backgrounds in these fields or in the schools–and
certainly there are few in the leadership, resource-allocating, and decision-making positions. This
results in a missed opportunity to have the diversity of understanding, ideas, talent, and perspectives
for the very important role that designers have in influencing the constant change of urban and built
environments.
“In 2016, it remains the case that the majority of the people who
plan, design, and build our communities and cities lack the diversity
of those same communities and cities.”
“Imagine if there were only a small number of musicians, artists, athletes, or leaders of color in
shaping America and its identity. How much would be lost? In 2016, it remains the case that the
majority of the people who plan, design, and build our communities and cities lack the diversity of
those same communities and cities. It is a big problem that is not being addressed or taken seriously
at the broad scale and scope necessary to make a meaningful impact.
“It is difficult to pinpoint or articulate the direct impacts that design has on the complex social and
racial inequities that have been present in our cities for generations,” Moore adds. “Advocates and
people in leadership rightly focus on more legible policies and actions like police training and judicial
reform, or better access to education and jobs. But design does have an impact across the multiple
issues and grievances that people have about the inequities that exist in American society and its
spatialized contexts: quality housing, transportation, public spaces and facilities, environmental
conditions, and the other tangible ways that designers help shape built environments.”
BUILD OPPORTUNITIES FOR FREER MOVEMENT THROUGH PUBLIC SPACE

Isis Ferguson is the associate director of city and community strategy at Place Lab, an initiative at
the University of Chicago led by artist and activist Theaster Gates. She sees ample room for more
cities to become more equitable for their citizens by becoming more physically inviting.
“Cities can function as magnificent places of excellence and can also be governed and experienced
as repressive places enforcing flawed or even bad policies,” Ferguson says. “Public spaces alone will
not create the vitality and empathy we seek in and from our cities. Universally designing for everyone
can create homogenized, soulless places that have all people in mind but have meaning or use for
no one.”
“In cities in the United States, we cannot pretend that all bodies have the freedom to move through,
occupy, and enjoy public space. The perception of black and brown bodies gathering in public space
routinely reads as suspect, criminal, or illegitimate. Peoples’ rights to convene or congregate
becomes interrupted, sometimes–ever more frequently–through limitation, denied access, and force.
If your very existence is read as a violation, is public space really for you? What looks and feels safe
to some in public space–like security cameras and police as traditional forms of surveillance–can be
experienced by others as another dimension of the state violence.
“In cities in the United States, we cannot pretend that all bodies
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space.”
“Projects in the public realm need to be informed not only from more disciplines but from more kinds
of people. Artists, misfits, outsiders, elders, immigrants, people of color, and women have been
leading community development efforts in unconventional ways, partly because they have not been
invited to the table and also because their varied lived experiences offers something more or counter
to the standard advanced for our civic commons, parks, plazas, and other urban public assets.
“The space between who is considered an expert and who is typically on the margins of
conversations about public space needs to be collapsed. If that happens I think cities will feel,
function, and be designed with multiple points of view, engendering spaces that promote social
mixing and most importantly social equity.
“Public space is contested ground in our country. Are there design solutions that promote social
integration but also uphold the dignity of the people once they enter that space? Asking the typically
untapped people–artists, misfits, outsiders, elders, immigrants, people of color, and women what the
most joyous, liberatory, and authentic spaces are for them is a good start at imagining more for public
life and for creating places of greater possibility for all in the public realm.”
FIX THE BROKEN POLICY PROCESS

Allison Arieff–a contributing writer for the New York Times and the editorial director of SPUR, a
nonprofit planning think tank–argues that building more equitable cities starts with mending the way
governments make decisions.
“A constant of so many seemingly intractable urban design challenges is broken public process,” she
says. “It’s not the people aren’t being given the opportunity to weigh in on projects, from condo
towers to high-speed rail. They are–but it seems that for all the talk of stakeholder engagement, few
are satisfied with the processes or outcomes. Even well-designed, well-intentioned projects become
the subject of lawsuits, protests, even reversal of project approvals.
“Opposing sides now often engage consultants from the get-go to develop talking points and
strategies for getting projects approved as well as making sure projects don’t get approved. This is
not an easy quandary to solve but it seems the most pressing and is symptomatic of the broader
culture’s current difficulty in communicating across, and even within, cultural, economic, and racial
lines. If compromise is viewed as weakness, little progress can be made. I have no easy solution; I
want to keep thinking about how the process might work better for more people and more projects.”
DEMAND MORE FROM THE 1%

Benjamin Grant, urban design policy director at SPUR, thinks that there needs to be a redistribution
of resources in cities–starting with the rich. F O L LOW LO G I N 
“This has been said before, but for me good cities are machines for managing mixture,” Grant says.
“By substituting public goods–particularly public transit and public space–for private ones, cities offer
a (complex, imperfect) bulwark against social and economic stratification. Elites in great cities
depend on public goods and have a strong interest in applying their disproportionate resources to
maintaining them. Think of Central Park or the New York City subway–rescued by wealthy and
politically connected boosters. Low-income people are enfranchised by public goods, and are
enabled to partake of city life alongside the powerful.
“Of course this in no way means that cities are egalitarian. The corporate baron and the immigrant
laborer live profoundly and unjustly divergent lives, but in a city where public goods are abundant,
they encounter one another as ordinary people, drawing on the same resources in the same space.
Where large numbers of elites can opt out–into private schools or private cars for example–the
investment of the powerful in public goods becomes an abstraction, something to do on
F O L LOW LOprogressive
GIN 
principles, not practical need.”
PLAN CITIES AROUND A PUBLIC LIFE MOVEMENT

The Gehl Institute–a policy consultancy that spun off of urbanist Jan Gehl’s architecture firm, and
which just opened an office in the United States–believes that designing cities for stronger public life
could address equity issues.
“The public realm works when you have this notion of trust and this notion of ‘ours’–we have to learn
how to co-exist,” says Jeff Risom, chair of the Gehl Institute and managing director of Gehl
Architects in the United States. “Our cities are clearly segregated. We want more mixing racially and
economically in public space. We want neighborhoods to be healthier, we want to increase the
amount of physical activity we get. Public life could be a tool to address major urban challenges to
equity, access to opportunity, health, and sustainability. A thriving public life has to do with a very
active, diverse form of participation in public life ranging from civic engagement–things
F O L LOW like
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organizing–to everyday routines like feeling like you can cross a street safely.”
In order for cities to facilitate a stronger sense of public life, the Institute argues that governments
need to take stock of their civic spaces.
“The public realm works when you have this notion of trust and this
notion of ‘ours.'”
“It’s not just miles of road or square feet of park space; we want to equip some decision-makers with
people-centered metrics to make sure it’s inviting to different social income groups and that’s hard,”
Risom says. “How much time are people spending in the public realm, not just outside, but in civic
institutions like libraries or community centers and who is spending time there? We need to know
about their income, how far they travel. Here data and technology can help us get that information.
We also need to know tough stuff that’s messy to find, like how people feel there. So do you feel
welcome? Are you participating in community activities? Are you civically active? How can we help
you become civically active?
“A big part is how the public realm can provide folks with access to opportunity. So far, I don’t think a
lot of it has been thought of that way. We have streets and spaces, which are these incredibly
valuable public assets, and we don’t utilize them enough for things like civic services. We don’t use
them enough to ensure that citizens are informed and engaged.”
To Shin-Pei Tsay, the Institute’s executive director, having space that feels inclusive is essential for
cultivating a strong public life. “There’s an erosion of public space,” she says. “For example, there are
so many more private pools than there are public pools. There’s also the inability for us to maintain
branch libraries, which are really community centers for a lot of neighborhoods. We need places that
people come together to have open conversation about current issues. Immigrant communities are
interesting to look at because this welcome-unwelcome feeling is very inherent to their experience in
their city. It has nothing to do with design, necessarily, but design can reinforce that invitation.”
EXPAND THE DEFINITION OF DESIGN

Vishaan Chakrabarti, founder of the firm Partnership for Architecture and Urbanism and a former
principal at SHoP, thinks the scope of design should be reevaluated.
“In addition to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, the more recent U.S. history of urban renewal
continues to have an outsized impact on our racial geography. Throughout the postwar era, vibrant
black neighborhoods had highways torn through them, noxious facilities sited within them, and
economic investment and mortgage lending directed away from them,” Chakrabarti says. “As a
consequence these districts experienced a disproportionate loss of good jobs, schools, transit, parks,
and air quality. These inner-ring neighborhoods–which proved remarkable in their cultural resilience
despite decades of aggression directed against them–have ironically now been rediscovered as the
nation urbanizes, creating issues of gentrification and urban inequity and fomenting the racial
tensions we are tragically experiencing today.”
“Designers have a major role to play, through what commissions

they take, the voice they have, and the skills they bring as
democratic visionaries and utopian pragmatists.”
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ideas of designing buildings and landscapes will only exacerbate the problem. Instead we must
pursue an expanded definition of design in which we re-envision the legal and economic systems that
distribute the benefits of growth and investment. Communities should share in the benefits of new
development in a way that stabilizes and strengthens them through the design of mechanisms such
as community land trusts and cooperatives.
“Sorely needed new investments in schools, transit, and parks must be designed to meet the
generational aspirations of existing residents–the hope each of us have for our kids to live a better
life than we do–rather than a means to displace those residents. Designers have a major role to play,
through what commissions they take, the voice they have, and the skills they bring as democratic
visionaries and utopian pragmatists. The challenges are enormous, they are spatial, and they can be
addressed, at least in part, through a redefinition of what great design truly means.”
REFORM HOUSING
Richard Florida–an urban design professor at the University of Toronto, the founding editor of
CityLab, and Co.Design contributor–argues that the modern complexities of racial inequality in cities
lies, in part, with accessible and affordable housing.
“The inequality, segregation, and sorting of our major cities and metros is a huge problem and is
reinforced through a whole gamut of urban structures and policies–from the loss of the middle class
and the splitting of our labor force into a small tier of good knowledge jobs and a much broader class
of low-paid service jobs, the massive decline of once sturdy middle-class neighborhoods, and the
splitting of our cities and metros into areas of concentrated advantaged and concentrated
disadvantage, to enormous subsidies to affluent homeowners, exclusionary zoning in the suburbs,
and land use restrictions in the urban center that limit denser housing development there, and terribly
fraying social compact,” he says.
“This is a not a problem the magic of the market can solve or that
cities and mayors can solve for themselves: It will take a full-on
national effort.”

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07-1 8 -1 6 SLICKER CITY