We Didn't Build This City

How racist and sexist urban planners made cities suck for everyone else

robert moses if i was your mother

Recently, I’ve read two books that ran on similar themes: “The Color of Law” by Richard Rothstein, and “The Feminist City” by Leslie Kern. I liked the former much better than the latter, but both were interesting books that highlighted a single issue: how who built cities matters. And it wasn’t everyone.

Sexism and the City

If women’s rights are human rights, it stands to reason that a feminist city is a humanist city.

Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman, “Urban Planning Has a Sexism Problem”, 2017

I’m going to start with my opinion of the book: it’s very interesting, and it puts forward some fascinating ideas, but I don’t think it’s very accurate - mainly because the economics of it aren’t very careful. But it’s still a solid read if you’re interested in urban planning and urban issues - and how they affect women.

Cities, shows Kern’s book, were largely built by and for men. The main thread going through this is car dependency: most car trips are done by men, and most women make notably shorter trips. The fact that women do most of the housework is important for urbanism for a simple reason: plenty of “chores” require traveling outside the house on short notice - taking the kids somewhere, going to the store, etc - and this means that, when cities are designed around cars and not transit and pedestrians, unequal outcomes occur.

Zoning, you might be surprised to hear, is the culprit here. Originally, cities had very few restrictions on what could be built and where, but over time that was changed - and not, as might be believed, to prevent unsafe uses being too close together. The reasons were, as we’ll see later, pretty much social engineering: to explicitly promote a certain type of society, with a specific racial composition and specific gender norms. We’ll get into the racism later, but historically, single-family zoning has served as a way to ensure women remain out of the workforce and in domestic labor. This has been true, in fact, since all the way back in the Victorian Era - urban design being used as a way to ensure social norms around gender be upheld.

The government policy that promoted suburbanization was both a cause and a consequence of women’s labor force exclusion: a cause because a second car was too difficult to afford, and services too difficult to replace, and a consequence since lower wages and fewer opportunities meant a higher opportunity cost to not do housework. But since cities were built around the extremely limited commutes and chores of men, this results in cities that are hostile to the commutes and chores of women - many locations are inaccesible, support for strollers or carriages is extremely limited, and public transportation is often unreliable.

The fact that city planners are usually men also means that safety and comfort are normally out of the question - public spaces commonly do not take into account the ways that women, specifically, use them, and their design is often centered around the activities preferred by men - resulting in less usage of public space, and less safety reported, with harassment or worse being a real possibility.

Is there a solution? Maybe. Cities have experimented with a variety of approaches - gender-segregated subway cars, women’s only parking spaces, and even high heel friendly streets (bafflingly enough). But in truth, any kind of urban planning that takes into account the basic economics of how cities function and thrive will be better for women - and urbanism that explicitly takes women’s concerns seriously can yield even better results.

Drawing red lines

How did American cities first adopt zoning ordinances? This might seem like a dumb question, but it’s not, and it’s really telling.

The traditional belief is that zoning was adopted to separate dangerous industrial uses from residential and commercial uses, and thus protect citizen’s health. But in fact, the origins of zoning (in the United States, at least) trace back to the 1910s and 1920s - specifically, immediately after the Supreme Court made it illegal to establish racial zoning ordinances on cities and neighborhoods. Suddenly, and after several failed attempts at building racialized cities explicitly, a workaround was found: Euclidean zoning, known thusly because of the SCOTUS case that allowed it - Euclid vs Ohio. In it, separation of residents was performed through land use restrictions: single family on one part, industrial on another, commercial elsewhere, multifamily often nowhere.

Even from the start, land use rules were designed inequitably. Since single family homes are more expensive, and white people tend to be wealthier, this established nearly all-white enclaves de facto. Aditionally, areas where Black people tended to live were not zoned single family, and in fact where disproportionately likely to allow for industrial or hazardous uses, such as waste facilities - ensuring no Black homeowners moved to the all-white suburbs. The US government, starting in the Hoover and continuing throughout the Roosevelt administration (FDR himself was in one of the pro-segregatory zoning committees), encouraged zoning ordinances along these lines under rationales that were various degrees of overtly racist.

Finance was directly deployed as a tool of segregation as well. All things equal, Black-owned properties were systematically undervalued by property evaluators, and white-owned properties were overvalued. When the US government decided to subsidize mortgages and homeownership, it determined that areas with “undesirable” residents (read: non-white) would not get any assistance, and that entire projects would be banned from receiving federal money if they did not uphold segregation - a practice that continued for 20 years after it was ruled unconstitutional. Lack of access to mortgages both locked non-white (and oftentimes Jewish) people out of high-value white neighbourhoods, and also tied them to majority-minority properties with declining property values and no equity - these houses were purchased in installment plans, not under mortgages, resulting in overcrowding by renters to make payments on the deed, since ceasing to pay meant losing all equity.

Other aspects of policy were also weaponized to preserve racial segregation. Housebuilders and unions specifically lobbied against government rules that prevented them from only employing whites. Federal labor regulations, especially the minimum wage, specifically carved out occupations that overwhemlimgnly employed minorities. The Federal Housing Administration allowed and encouraged deeds that required community approval to sell property - which, even when illegal, served to dissuade property owners from selling to minorities. Infrastructure was built so that it destroyed minority neighbourhoods or excluded them from participating in urban life - Robert Moses infamously built a bridge that prevented buses from accessing the beach, which would keep “undesirables” out. Public housing, when it was built. was either confining minorities to decaying neighbourhoods, or banning them from accessing all-white ones - during World War Two, Blacks were forbidden from accessing public housing in white areas, and when this practice was made illegal, the projects were either privatized or torn down to prevent them from living in them. And even when Black homebuyers succeeded in making a purchase, local authorities allowed for lynchings and violence against them to drive them out.

Conclusion

Who builds cities is dramatically more important than previously thought - cities built by men tend to have features that heavily limit women’s participation in public life, and cities built by white supremacists preserve racial segregation and inequality.

Given the economic importance of cities, and especially how housing wealth is crucial for wealth inequality, urban policy has massive ramifications for equality and distribution of resources - there is no trade to be made between equity and efficiency in having cities with better public transport, better land use, and less segregation and stratification.