Article: here

Sarah Schindler’s piece on architectural exclusion highlights the ways our built environment has been used to further racial and class segregation. Schindler draws our attention to how architecture can subtly influence the environment in a way that most people don’t recognize or think about, allowing it to slip past regulation and avoid legal consequence. Sometimes, even physical barriers were set in place to keep “undesirable people” out, such as in the case of Robert Moses’s Long Island bridges that were designed to “hang low so that the twelve-foot tall buses in use at the time could not fit under them.” Section 1, Part B clarifies that “[a]lthough regulation through architecture is just as powerful as law, it is less identifiable and less visible to courts, legislators, and potential plaintiffs.”