Publication Date
2015
Document Type
Article
Organizational Units
Sturm College of Law
Keywords
Urban design, Discriminatory exclusion
Abstract
The built environment is characterized by man-made physical features that make it difficult for certain individuals—often poor people and people of color—to access certain places. Bridges were designed to be so low that buses could not pass under them in order to prevent people of color from accessing a public beach. Walls, fences, and highways separate historically white neighborhoods from historically black ones. Wealthy communities have declined to be served by public transit so as to make it difficult for individuals from poorer areas to access their neighborhoods.
Although the law has addressed the exclusionary impacts of racially restrictive covenants and zoning ordinances, most legal scholars, courts, and legislatures have given little attention to the use of these less obvious exclusionary urban design tactics. Street grid layouts, one-way streets, the absence of sidewalks and crosswalks, and other design elements can shape the demographics of a city and isolate a neighborhood from those surrounding it. In this way, the exclusionary built environment—the architecture of a place—functions as a form of regulation; it constrains the behavior of those who interact with it, often without their even realizing it. This Article suggests that there are two primary reasons that we fail to consider discriminatory exclusion through architecture in the same way that we consider functionally similar exclusion through law. First, potential challengers, courts, and lawmakers often fail to recognize architecture as a form of regulation at all, viewing it instead as functional, innocuous, and prepolitical. Second, even if decision makers and those who are excluded recognize architecture’s regulatory power, existing jurisprudence is insufficient to address its harms.
Rights Holder
Sarah Schindler
Provenance
Received from author
File Format
application/pdf
Language
English (eng)
Extent
91 pgs
File Size
1.1 MB
Publication Statement
Originally published by The Yale Law Journal Company, Incorporated in The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 124, pp 1934-2024 (2015).
Publication Title
The Yale Law Journal
Volume
124
First Page
1934
Last Page
2024
Recommended Citation
Sarah B. Schindler, Architectural Exclusion: Discrimination and Segregation through Physical Design of the Built Environment, 124 YALE L. J. 1934 (2015).