neighborhood suddenly seemed almost plastic, as if it could be remade, overnight, in whatever shape was wanted. But what shape was wanted? what would the new neighborhood look like? who would live there? what kinds of lives would they lead? how would they relate to one another? and what would happen to those who no longer fi t in

But regardless of where the interest came from—genuine concern for the city’s poor, the retreat of the federal government from its 1949 commitment to provide “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family,”49 the desire of real estate developers, city bureaucrats, and young white professionals to get their hands on valuable central city land

8City of RhetoricCompassionate Gentrifi cation?

“dispersing

omething dramatic was happening at Cabrini Green during the last years of the twentieth century. The neighborhood suddenly seemed almost plastic, as if it could be remade, overnight, in whatever shape was wanted. But what shape was wanted? what would the new neighborhood look like? who would live there? what kinds of lives would they lead? how would they relate to one another? and what would happen to those who no longer fi t in?

here are several potential explanations for this sudden interest in what had been, for years, just another poor black Chicago neighborhood. It is pos-sible that the plight of Cabrini Green had become so bad by the early 1990s that outsiders fi nally stepped in, out of genuine concern, to help. In support of this theory, many point to the Dantrell Davis shooting as a turning point in the project’s history. And it is true that the incident galvanized residents and outsiders as nothing had before.45 But other observers point to less altruistic reasons for the sudden interest in Cabrini Green at the end of the twentieth century. The 1980s witnessed a massive retreat from the New Deal/Great So-ciety social contract between rich and poor in this country; and, even with a Democrat in the White House, the 1990s saw a continuation of that trend, with more funding cuts from antipoverty initiatives, more government programs privatized, and the public adopting an increasingly stingy attitude toward the poor.46 By the late 1990s, proposing wholesale demolition, voucherization, and privatization, the federal government seemed to be trying to get out of the public housing business altogether, just as it was shedding its half-century commitment to the welfare program. The country seemed to have entered a “post-entitlement” era in terms of its social consciousness.

The neigh-borhood began to attract positive attention from outsiders—local and national media, politicians, government bureaucrats, social activists, real estate develop-ers, lawyers, architects, urban designers, and sociologists. In 1993, the CHA announced plans for a $300 million makeover of Cabrini Green, including outright demolition of three buildings and the construction of several hundred new, low-rise, mixed-income housing units in the area—the fi rst such plan for a Chicago public housing project

cit-ies—populous, dense, diverse, open, centere

antipathy

we need to design for the accumulation of different human beings who are out there by being respectful to individual needs, and creating environments in which people can have their own individuality.

universal design

gender-neutral or unisex bathrooms

The Apartheid of Sex, a manifesto that insisted on an overhaul of “dimorphic” gender categories, arguing: “There are five billion people in the world and five billion unique sexual identities.

Alexander Wang’s women’s coat from Fall 2015 has masculine tailoring with a military look, while Annemiek van der Beek’s Primal Skin makeup line has been designed to be appealing to the male buyer

Actress and UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson’s speech promoting the He for She movement went viral on the Internet last year

Designers, who should focus a critical eye on society’s issues, need to work within this discourse and help promote acceptance and change.

But today’s design landscape is still deeply rooted in Modernism, a movement shaped by a predominantly male perspective.

By preserving and suitably integrating open spaces into the green infrastructure, universities can add value and quality to the campus environment by: forging a campus identity, creating a sense of community, curbing escalating campus density, serving social and recreational needs, providing environmental benefits, and facilitating fundraising and recruitment of both faculty and students

Open space and “zones” for disciplines became far more common than closely clustered buildings previously designed to protect students from the lures of the outside world (Painter, et. al, 2013

One way to examine this potential is to consider the entire campus with its buildings, roads and natural open spaces as a well-networked landscape system that supports student learning experiences

Courts have similarly upheld residency restrictions that prevent some individuals from using public facilities such as beaches, sports courts, and playgrounds on the grounds that residents’ taxes and fees resulted in con-struction of those facilities, and so residents should be given use priorit

In some neighborhoods, people can park on the street only if they live in the neighborhood and have a residential parking permit or are given a guest permit by a resident.188 As a result, those who do not live in or have friends in the neighborhood cannot drive in and park there.

Highway 101 separates the Latino and black residents of East Palo Alto, California, from the west side of town.

ometimes transit will allow a person to get close to a given area, but not all the way there, leaving the rider in a dangerous situation.

the decision to locate a transit hub is typically made by elected local officials, those

esearch shows that the opposition to transit is often motivated by the desire to block access by certain “undesirable” people who ride transit (for example, people of color and the poor).124

he siting of bus stops and subway stations changes the built environmen

In Palo Alto, traversing Highway 101 to reach affluent West Palo Alto from low-income East Palo Alto is dangerous and involves passing throug

safer, in large part by re-ducing the risk of pedestrian and vehicle collisions.85 However, many commu-nities lack sidewalks and crosswalks

expressly serve to exclude those who are unwanted, others have that effect indirectly.

echniques have been used to keep people out, including physical barriers to access, the siting of transit and transportation infrastructure, and the organization of residential neighbor-hoods.

While these authors offer compelling explorations of spatial organization’s ability to exclude and culturally marginalize, their critiques have not yet pene-trated the mainstream of land-use or civil rights law

“exclusionary amenities,” which are features of residential developments that are generally expensive and that only appeal to certain demographic

or example, a cafeteria man-ager who places healthier food items in a more visible and accessible location than junk food in order to nudge people toward healthier choices is guiding ac-tions through architectural decisions. T

ecog-nizing that those who control and create the context in which a decision is made have influence over that decision because “there is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ design.”

he first two methods of discrimination have received sustained attention from legal scholars; the third form, which I refer to as architecture, has not

Social norms encouraged some to threaten undesirable persons with violence if they were to enter or remain in certain spaces.25

The Article also employs the term “architecture” quite broadly to encompass civil engineering, city planning, urban design, and transit routing.

Street grid design, one-way streets, the absence of sidewalks and crosswalks, the location of highways and transit stops, and even residential parking permit requirements can shape the demographics of a city and isolate a neighborhood from those surrounding it, often intentionally.

Associate Professor of Law, University of Maine School of Law. This Article has benefitted greatly from the feedback received at the Sabin Colloquium on Innovative Environ-mental Law Scholarship at Columbia Law School, the annual meeting of the Association for Law, Property, and Society, and the junior faculty works in progress workshop at American Uni-versity’s Washington College of Law. I am grateful to Dmitry Bam, Justin Steil, Dave Owen, Florence Wagman Roisman, Robin Malloy, Zach Heiden, Anna Welch, Aaron Perzanowski, and Jim Kelly for their helpful comments. Special thanks to Patrick Lyons and Anthony Aloisio for excellent research assistance

irst, potential challengers, courts, and lawmakers often fail to recognize architec-ture as a form of regulation at all, viewing it instead as functional, innocuous, and prepolitical

mean that’s an extraordinary story in itself because of course there had been legislation, a law-in-place, for a very long time that nothing would ever be built between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. The World War II veterans made the case. The law was changed that the World War II Memorial would be built there. And after the World War II Memorial was built they got the law changed back

then you can build, help to build, the archive

So, for example, in the Women in Military Service for America Memorial, there is in that museum what they call a twenty-four-hour, round-the-clock roll call. And there’s a whole room full now of computer terminals and so forth. And you can search for your family member, your relative, your friends, whatever. If you cannot find them there, then you can build, help to build, the archive. And people are just really drawn to that. And then, for example, in the lower level of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, you have the interactive digital library there with various sorts of programs where patrons to the museum memorial can go in and do genealogical searches and put in information and so forth, so it’s quite extraordinary.

oying our ability to forgive one another but is destroying our ability to remember