99% Invisible

Episode 51- The Arsenal of Exclusion

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(Above: The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion, illustration by Lesser Gonzales. Click image to go to another site with a larger image.)

“Cities exist to bring people together, but cities can also keep people apart”
- Daniel D’Oca, Urban Planner, Interboro Partners.

Cities are great. They have movement, activity and diversity. But go to any city and it’s pretty clear, a place can be diverse without really being integrated. This segregation isn’t accidental. There are design elements in the urban landscape, that Daniel D’Oca calls “weapons,” that are used by “architects, planners, policy-makers, developers, real estate brokers, community activists, neighborhood associations, and individuals to wage the ongoing war between integration and segregation.”

Daniel D’Oca is an urban planner with Interboro Partners, an architecture and design firm based in New York City. Over the past few years, D’Oca, along with colleagues Tobias Armborst and Georgeen Theodore have been cataloging all the stuff inside of a city that planners use to increase or restrict people’s access to space. They’re publishing their findings in a book called The Arsenal of Inclusion and Exclusion: 101 Things That Open And Close the City (Fall 2012).

D’Oca took our own Sam Greenspan and Scott Goldberg on a tour of Baltimore to demonstrate the subtle ways different neighborhoods are kept apart.

Interboro Partners described more weapons in the Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion in a great Esquire article.

(Above: Daniel D’Oca shows Sam Greenspan the iron fence at the site of the former Hollander Ridge housing project on the Baltimore County line. Credit: Scott Goldberg)

(Above: The residential parking permit zones on either side of Greenmount Ave. Permit only parking keeps non-residents, including students from nearby Johns Hopkins, from leaving their cars in the neighborhood.)

Source: SoundCloud / Roman Mars